July 2007 Archives

Jacob Bronowski used to say that the greatest discovery of scientists was science itself. The scientific method, with its resolute search for causation, its refusal to cower before tradition and authoritarianism was responsible for the great advancement of humanity over the past centuries. Obviously scientists have not always lived up to these standards, but those who have took man to places he could only have imagined before (and not even imagined very well). Central to this accomplishment is science’s refusal to be satisfied with magical explanations of phenomena. Magic, after all, is not an answer—it’s the feeling of satisfaction without answers. It’s the willingness to tolerate a big blank spot in one’s understanding of the universe.

(Read the rest at Positive Liberty…)

I came across a reference to a law review note from last year in the Chapman Law Review. The note was by Stephen Trask, then a student at William Mitchell College of Law and, unsurprisingly, a graduate of Liberty University. It was entitled, Evolution, Science, and Ideology: Why the Establishment Clause Requires Neutrality in Science Classes. Since Chapman is Sandefur’s alma mater, I emailed him to see if he’d seen it and he said no, but he found it and sent me a copy of it. He described it as a “giant, steaming pile of crap”; he was being generous. He’s going to post a full fisking of the article soon, but I wanted to focus on one particular claim Trask makes.

Continue Reading at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.

Gert Korthof reviews Behe’s latest book “The Edge of Evolution” and shows a level of internal contradiction one has grown accustomed to from ID proponents

Common Descent is based on genetic continuity in the history of life on earth. Design, according to Michael Behe, is based on genetic discontinuities in the Tree of Life. Therefore, Design and Common Descent are not compatible. Make your choice: it is either Design or Common Descent. Contrary to Behe, both cannot be true.

Korthof shows how Behe’s book does little to explain ‘Intelligent Design’, leaving it once again scientifically vacuous.

No, this post isn’t about creationist Ted Haggard and his male escort/methamphetamine scandal.

And it’s not about creationist Kent Hovind, currently serving hard time for federal tax evasion.

It’s not even about the lawsuits and charges of corporate theft that have cropped up between Creation Ministries International (formerly known as Answers in Genesis (AiG)-Australia) and its former partner, AiG-USA, under Ken Ham, nor is it about the on-line porn star who played the role of Adam in a movie made for AiG’s new Creation Supposeum.

No, this new scandal involves Kevin Jackson, whose term as Mayor of Rio Rancho, New Mexico ended prematurely when he was forced to resign over a slew of allegations of financial misconduct.

So, how is Rio Rancho’s ex-mayor involved with creationism? More below the fold.

I’ve been a busy little bear this summer, and no, I’m not talking about my duty to return Ailuropoda to its once great numbers. I’m referring to my travels around the globe these last few months. I’ve been to so many interesting places that you’d think that I can exist in multiple places at the same time. Call me the Quantum Panda ™ if you want to. My reports from Evolution 2007 will be up later in the week, but I can now give you some links to blog posts done by some of my companions.

But before I do, I want to remind you that you can join my Facebook group, or friend me on MySpace. The Facebook group also serves as the fan group for PT.

Now to the blog posts.

From Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World:

Professor Steve Steve caught experimenting with human subjects!—Don’t look at me like that. I have IRB approval from UE.

Professor Steve Steve bears all at Virginia Tech—Strike a pose. Vogue!

Meanwhile Bora of A Blog Around the Clock and I have been busy in SF:

Professor Steve Steve is helping me work—Is it working hard or hardly working?

Professor Steve Steve at PLoS—PLoS: Pandas Love Open Science

San Francisco—a running commentary—I saw a flock of seagulls in the bay.

San Francisco—a running commentary #2—And I ran so far away.

Professor Steve Steve meets Harry Potter—Not to spoil the ending, but I had no idea that it was all a dream, and Harry would wake up and find Ron in the shower.

Hi, Michelle!—I meet the most interesting people for lunch.

Framing San Francisco—Bamboo frames are my favorite.

Many of you may remember Danica McKellar from her role as Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What you may not know is that, following the television show, McKellar attended UCLA, where she graduated summa cum laude with a major in mathematics (and published proof to boot). Since graduation, McKellar has maintained an interest in math and science education for girls, and has been active in promoting this. She’s now also published a book on math education for middle school girls (Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail) that comes out in early August. For those interested, I have a review of the book up here at Aetiology. I also managed to snag an interview with Danica about the book and other topics, including math advocacy for girls that you can check out here.

Here’s an interesting article from Nature News (subscription may be required):

Organic compound found in the stars

Astronomers have found the largest negatively charged molecule so far seen in interstellar space. The discovery, of an organic compound, suggests that the chemical building blocks of life may be more common in the Universe than had been previously thought.

The molecule is a chain of eight carbons and a single hydrogen called the octatetraynyl anion (C8H¯). Two teams of scientists have spotted it near a dying star and in a cloud of cold gas.

The discovery, along with that of three smaller organic molecules in the past year, opens up a suite of potential chemical reactions and products. It suggests that ‘prebiotic’ molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of protein, could form all over the Universe, says Tony Remijan, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Way cool.

It’s over in Libya. Nick previously blogged about the Tripoli Six: a Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses, working in Libya, who were accused of infecting hundreds of children with HIV. The group have been imprisoned since 1999–despite the fact that an analysis of the HIV isolates from the children confirmed that the epidemic began before the medical workers arrived in the country (and continued even after they were jailed). After a long battle, mostly legal and political rather than scientific, they’ve been freed and sent back to Bulgaria. More on the story at the BBC and the New York Times.

I should note that though the science ultimately wasn’t the determining factor in their release, the science blogosphere and Nature (with journalist/blogger Declan Butler leading the charge) were important in keeping this prominent in the scientific community. And while we celebrate their freedom, there are still hundreds of HIV-infected children in Libya, and grieving parents who missed out on justice in this case.

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, William Dembski’s current employer, has something rather curious on its website. If you look at their page of upcoming conferences, here is what they have listed in the left-hand sidebar:

• The Practice of Biblical Counseling
• Certification in Biblical Counseling
• The Family: Reclaiming a Biblical View
• Intelligent Design in Business Practice

Can you spot the one that appears out of place? Me neither.

But anyway, yes, they really are having a conference called, Intelligent Design in Business Practice. The flier for the conference comes complete with an obligatory ape-typing-at-keyboard graphic. Unfortunately, it does not say which of the speakers this is intended to represent.

If you’re wondering what the heck ID could have to do with business practice, when it doesn’t even have anything to do with science, then you’re thinking what I’m thinking. All the pretense about ID being some dispassionate scientific theory – not exactly believable to begin with – is rather hard to maintain with them holding conferences that try to apply ID to things that have little or nothing to do with science. (Not to mention that even their supposedly “scientific” conferences tend to resemble tent revivals.) As the Wedge Document has promised us, ID is supposed to have “cultural implications” for “sex, gender issues, medicine, law, and religion”. Business isn’t listed there, but once you’ve declared that your theory makes sweeping dictates over all facets of human society, it’s hardly a stretch to add business practices to the list.

Nevertheless, one has to wonder, given the history of the ID movement, exactly what useful advice the ID movement could possibly have to offer business. As luck would have it, I’ve gotten my hands on a preliminary schedule – the only copy in existence as a matter of fact – which I will post below the fold.

Or …

T-urf13 redux

A few months ago I posted an essay about a remarkable example of the evolution of Irreducible Complexity from scratch, via natural, unguided mechanisms. While the reaction to this essay has been pretty muted (precious little to take note of, save for one well-hidden reference on Uncommon Descent to “No Free Lunch”, citing pages that make arguments clearly refuted in the PT essay), I had no idea that a much bigger response, or target, would emerge from the Halls of ID. This would, of course, be Mike Behe’s recently-released follow-up to “Darwin’s Black Box”, entitled “The Edge of Evolution”.

More follows beneath the fold, but here’s the short version for those of us with miniscule attention spans -the previous essay refutes (or, better said, refuted) the EoE in no uncertain terms, showing that the centerpiece of the EoE, the value Behe assigns to the “probability” of occurrence of a protein interaction or binding site, does not agree with what we can and do know about the history of a bonafide multiple simultaneous mutation.

Well, at least someone is taking the recent threats against the Colorado biologists (http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives[…]logists.html ) seriously. (See also “Creato-terrorism update,” http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives[…]orism_1.html .) Today’s Boulder Daily Camera carries a signed editorial, “Fundamentalist threat not an isolated event” (http://www.dailycamera.com/news/200[…]olated-event ), by Jennifer Platte. Ms. Platte notes

The packages containing veiled threats that were slipped under the doors of labs at the department of evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado appear to be part of a larger campaign being waged by one man against the department.

Content on the blog www.pandasthumb.org suggests that e-mails that preceded the packages threatened to “take up a pen to kill the enemies of Truth,” and stated that the writer would file charges of child molestation against the professors for teaching evolution. The writer believes that these professors are “the source of every imaginable evil in our society: drugs, crime, prostitution, corruption, war, abortion, death…” He appears to have been inspired by the words of Pastor Jerry Gibson, who allegedly spoke at Doug White’s New Day Covenant Church in Boulder, saying that “every true Christian should be ready and willing to take up arms to kill the enemies of Christian society.”

Update 30 July 2007. A letter in today’s Boulder Daily Camera claims that Mr. Gibson “never said this or anything like it” and directs us to the New Day Covenant Church’s Web site.

A looong time ago, I mentioned that I spent St. Patrick’s Day weekend in Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, at a symposium I helped to plan (but neglected to blog! Oops). Along with other scientists, theologians, philosophers, and generally interested persons, we worked for a bit over a year to put this symposium together. Why?

The principal aim of the conference is to clarify the causes of the conflict between science educators and those who wish to have Intelligent Design taught in public schools. We do not claim to be neutral on this issue. We are convinced that ID is not good science and should not be presented as such. Our position is consonant with that of the National Center for Science Education and the Iowa Academy of Science. We believe that the polarization of opinion on this issue has created misunderstanding and confusion and that a clarification of terminology and concepts is essential for productive dialogue and decision making.

How did it turn out? I have the write-up over at Aetiology…

Over at the Discovery Institute’s Media Complaints Division, Casey Luskin is keeping himself busy trying to fudge assert that the notion of “junk DNA” (which ID advocates consider erroneous, despite the fact that strong, independent lines of evidence indicate that a large fraction of genomic DNA in most eukaryotic organisms is phenotypically non-functional) was the result of application of Darwinian principles.

Several people (e.g. T. Ryan Gregory, Larry Moran and Steve Reuland, as well as myself ) have already pointed out that, on the contrary, a strict application of the Darwinian paradigm, also known as “panselectionism” or “adaptationism”, led many prominent evolutionary biologists to initially resist the idea that some DNA may be non-functional, an opposition which was later mostly lifted (sometimes partially, as we will see) by the progressive acceptance of neutralist views.

It’s another day, and Casey “The Energizer Bunny” Luskin is at it again, claiming that ID successfully predicted that “junk DNA” would be found to have a function. He has yet to explain how and why he believes that “Darwinism” somehow stifled research into those areas of the genome, and ignores the fact that scientists routinely use our understanding of evolution, common descent, and natural selection to identify areas of the genome to identify non-coding regions that are likely to have function. He does, however, provide us with an explanation for why he thinks that Intelligent Design somehow “predicts” function for all of the so-called “junk” DNA:

Intelligent design begins by studying the types of complexity produced by intelligent agents. We observe that intelligent agents produce things for a purpose, that is, to fulfill some function. This leads ID proponents to an expectation—yes, a prediction—that DNA will not tend to contain meaningless junk but will contain structures that have (or once had) a function for the organism. ID does not lead us to the expectation that our cells’ DNA will be largely non-functional garbate. The hypothesis—that “junk”-DNA will have function—is obviously experimentally testable. In fact, I know pro-ID biologists studying the function of junk-DNA who were inspired to do such research due to intelligent design. One biologist in particular is not yet tenured, and so I will not disclose his/her name. Suffice it to say, for this biologist, finding function for non-coding DNA was directly inspired by intelligent design.

If that explanation looks familiar to you, it should. It’s pretty much the same one he gave last month. This leads me to my two challenges - one that’s addressed to most of you, and one just for Casey:

Read more (at The Questionable Authority, where comments may be left):

In a recent Panda’s Thumb comment thread, Pam asked (among other things) about our human species genetic Adam and Eve:

I have been reading for the last few years now, that there is a consensus among the majority, that humans have been genetically traced to a two human ancestory: A genetic “Adam and Eve”.

This is a relatively common misconception, and a very understandable one. There have been published studies that have looked at the most recent common mitochondrial DNA ancestor of all humans, and other studies that have looked at the most recent common Y-chromosome ancestor of all humans. Since mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from the mother, the most recent mitochondrial DNA ancestor is frequently referred to as “mitochondrial Eve.” Similarly, since the Y-chromosome is passed on exclusively from father to son, the most recent Y-chromosome ancestor gets called “Y-chromosome Adam” a lot. The use of those two terms is not entirely inappropriate, but it can be very misleading - particularly for those who haven’t taken a bunch of college-level biology.

Let’s start with the biggest misconception, and move on from there. When it comes to Adam and Eve, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that I can unequivocally state that they never got divorced. The bad news is that they never married. That’s understandable, of course, since Eve died more than 50,000 years before Adam was born.

Right about now, I’m guessing that we’re hitting the point when confusion sets in. After all, if every man on earth is descended from Y-chromosome Adam, and if we’re all descended from our fathers, and if Y-chromosome Adam was married, why wasn’t his wife “Eve?” We all clearly must be descended from her, too, right? (And if confusion hadn’t set in already, it almost certainly has now that I wrote that.) Let’s see what (if anything) I can do to clear things up.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority, where comments can be left):

By now, regular readers will probably be familiar with The Clergy Letter Project spearheaded by Michael Zimmerman. Formulated in part to respond to the framing of the evolution controversy as a battle between science and religion, the letter now boasts more than 10,700 signatures from clergy, and have sponsored Evolution Sunday events for the past 2 years.

Well, Zimmerman has a new project now:

Our latest initiative is to create a list of scientists around the world who are willing to answer scientific questions posed by clergy who are supportive of modern science in general and evolution in particular (Link). In just a bit over three weeks, we already have over 200 scientists signed up to help out. I hasten to add that the information these scientists will be providing will be solely of a scientific nature and thus their personal religious inclinations are absolutely irrelevant.

In addition to creating a useful resource for clergy, I am hoping for the list to make a major political statement: religious leaders and scientists can work together – despite what religious fundamentalists claim. I also would very much like to have more names on this list than the number of scientists the Discovery Institute has on a list it trumpets of scientists claiming to “question” evolution.

(Emphasis mine). If you’re interested, drop an email to Michael ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) and include your name, title, address, area(s) of expertise, and email address–and spread the word!

(Cross-posted at Aetiology).

Back in the middle of last month, I had a few things to say about Casey Luskin (DI flak) and his understanding of so-called junk DNA. It’s now the middle of the month again, and Casey is again talking a lot - and understanding very little - about “junk” DNA. Larry Moran has a post up where he tries to educate Casey about the fact that a hell of a lot of DNA is still, at least as far as we know, junk. I’m going to take a look at something a little bit different - one of the methods scientists use to identify areas of “junk” DNA that have important functions. It’s a pretty cool way of doing things, but it’s not one that Casey likes to talk about - because it’s really one of the finest examples of how our understanding of Darwinian evolution has lead to new discoveries about living things.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross have a paper titled Biochemistry by design published in TRENDS in Biochemical Sciences Vol.32 No.7 , 2007. (10 pages including 1.75 pages of references) I am not surprised why the defense in the Kitzmiller trial tried to get Forrest removed as an expert witness.

Creationists are attempting to use biochemistry to win acceptance for their doctrine in the public mind and especially in state-funded schools. Biochemist Michael Behe is a major figure in this effort. His contention that certain cellular structures and biochemical processes – bacterial flagella, the blood-clotting cascade and the vertebrate immune system – cannot be the products of evolution has generated vigorous opposition from fellow scientists, many of whom have refuted Behe’s claims. Yet, despite these refutations and a decisive defeat in a US federal court case, Behe and his associates at the Discovery Institute continue to cultivate American supporters. They are also stepping up their efforts abroad and, worryingly, have achieved some success. Should biochemists (and other scientists) be concerned? We think they should be.

After a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis issued a “fatwa” forbidding Jews even to touch books by Rabbi Nathan Slifkin, he became kind of a celebrity. The popularity of his books jumped dramatically. A number of reviewers (and blurb writers) proceeded to extol the merits of Slifkin’s literary output, and specifically of his latest book titled The Challenge of Creation. Slifkin asserted in this book that scientific theories including evolution theory, not only are fully compatible with the tenets of Judaism, but that all science is in fact rooted in the Torah. The list of blurbs for Slifkin’s book includes those by Professor Michael Ruse, and by a number of other university professors, and prominent rabbis.

There is, though, at least one reviewer whose opinion of Slifkin’s opus is quite different from the acclaims by Slifkin’s admirers. His review, titled “When Quote Mining Becomes Quote Mania” can be read at Talk Reason..

Gordy Slack was on the radio in the Bay Area yesterday and the show is now online. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet but I’m sure it was good, since Gordy is quite a thoughtful guy. Gordy is also doing a reading at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave. SF, CA, on Monday, 7/16. 7:00 pm – I might go myself if I get the chance…

Fri, Jul 13, 2007 – 10:00 AM Author Gordy Slack Listen (RealMedia stream) Download (MP3)

(Windows: right-click and choose “Save Target As.” Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose “Save As.”)

The show welcomes author Gordy Slack for a conversation focusing on his book, “The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design and a School Board in Dover, PA.”

Host: Dave Iverson

Guests: Gordy Slack , author of “The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design and a School Board in Dover, PA.”

Today’s Denver Post and Colorado Daily have articles on the threats made to the CU Boulder faculty. The perpetrator has been identified as one Michael Korn, a former Messianic Jew who has converted to Christianity. And he’s been up to this for awhile it seems.

And they say evolution isn’t predictable. Ever since ID went down in flames in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, creationism watchers have predicted that creationism would evolve yet again, this time into something called “critical analysis of evolution” or “teach the [made-up] controversy”. For the last month or two I have been warning about the Discovery Institute’s new crypto-creationist textbook, which is sneakily entitled Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism (yes, take a good hard look at the spiffy website). The book is clearly another shot at the Of Pandas and People strategy, namely, “when a court case goes against you, change the label and try again.”

We already knew that the first official big promotional conference for Explore Evolution was going to be at an event for teachers held at Biola University. (Formerly known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, the only institute in the U.S. that has graduate courses in “intelligent design”, and pretty literally the place that put the fundamentals in fundamentalism. Oh yes, how could anyone ever think that Explore Evolution is crypto-ID/creationism?)

Now it looks like the Discovery Institute has engineered a cover story in World Magazine, a leading conservative evangelical magazine. The magazine has an interview with Behe about his new book, but more importantly has a story about a plan to insert Explore Evolution into a public school in Tacoma, Washington:

Over on UD, Paul Nelson claims that he is representing the “Darwinian tree of life” position correctly when he asserts that the tree must trace to a single cell, not just a single species:

From NOVA Upcoming Summer & Fall 2007 Programming:

NOVA shows on PBS on Tuesdays @ 8 pm ET/PT (check local listings):

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (w.t.) November 13, 2007 at 8 pm ET check local listings

One of the latest battles in the war over evolution took place in a tiny town in eastern Pennsylvania called Dover. In 2004, the local school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to their high school biology students. The statement suggested that there is an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution called intelligent design, the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore had to have been designed by an intelligent agent. The science teachers refused to comply with the order, and alarmed parents filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the separation of church and state. Suddenly, the small town of Dover was torn apart by controversy, pitting neighbor against neighbor. NOVA captures the emotional conflict in interviews with the townspeople, scientists and lawyers who participated in the historic six-week trial, Kitzmiller, et. al. v. Dover School District, et. al., which was closely watched by the world’s media. With recreations based on court transcripts, NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as “What is evolution?” and “Does intelligent design qualify as science?” For years to come, the lessons from Dover will continue to have a profound impact on how science is viewed in our society and how to teach it the classroom.

Produced by NOVA WGBH Science Unit and Vulcan Productions, Inc. Additional production by The Big Table Film Company.

I apologize to James Hall for using his phrase in describing what Robert Crowther, and other Intelligent Design proponents, seem to be involved in when they are objecting to the simple fact that Intelligent Design is a straightforward argument from ignorance.

The problem is that ID proponents have used equivocating language which has led to much confusion amongst its followers. I cannot blame Crowther for taking serious the claims of his DI fellows, but merely claiming that ID is not an argument from ignorance is merely begging the question.

While it is relatively straightforward to reach the conclusion that ID is an argument from ignorance, it does require some careful analysis of how various terminologies are being used by ID proponents.

My colleague, Michael Grant of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, was one of the victims of the recent harassment, reported by Steve Reuland here. Professor Grant tells me that he has “been receiving these histrionic emails and books and packages for a year; he even comes into my office when I’m not here. He started with me and Jeff Mitton [chair of EEB] but expanded to the rest of the department and may have crossed a legal line with the rest. I have a huge stack of emails and packages and even a big fat paperback book from him.” I think that, by legal line, he means the threatening tone of the last e-mail below.

“Among other things,” writes Professor Grant, “he identifies me as a ‘child molester’ for teaching evolution and threatens to get me fired plus he threatens legal action on that front. In the most recent communications, he writes words many of my colleagues consider death threats.”

Update, 13 July 2007, 3.55 MDT. The Colorado Daily has released the name of the alleged perpetrator here .

His full name is Michael Philip Korn. He sometimes goes by his Hebrew name, Menachem (not Menacher). He lives in Nederland, a small mountain community west of Boulder. His Web site is http://www.jesusoverisrael.blogspot.com/, but it has not been updated in months. He says about himself,

I was born in America, moved to Israel after graduating from Harvard, enlisted in the Ba’al Teshuva movement, and joined a Messianic Chassidic cult (Breslov) from 1990-1999. Through the help of South African missionaries, I came to see that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and Saviour of the World. I was baptized in a natural spring in the Israeli Galilee outside of the famous mystical city of Safed on 20 June 2000, and now I seek to introduce Jewish people to Jesus Christ, their Messiah whom they don’t yet know.

Michael Philip Korn is also cited at Southern Exposure here.

Further, as Steve Reuland notes, the story has been reported in the Denver Post as well as the Colorado Daily. The Associated Press has also picked up the story, as has Salon. You may find an earlier Panda’s Thumb report with comments here.

The affair is cited at Red State Rabble here.

It looks like somebody either never heard of Dover, or refused to learn from their lesson. It seems the local ID supporters of Chesterfield County aren’t happy:

So far, the official actions of the CCSB have been limited to issuing a rather vague and confusing statement. ID proponents had hoped to influence the selection of science textbooks, but they started their campaign too late, and the CCSB approved the selection of standard biology texts. But there is still much concern about the situation in Chesterfield. ID supporters, backed by a local conservative group called the Family Foundation, are energetic and well-organized, as evidenced by their ability to deliver a petition with more than 1,100 people who questioned the use of “evolution-only” science texts.

Energetic and well-organized supporters of pseudoscience… sounds like a one-way ticket to another budget-busting, unwinnable multimillion dollar lawsuit. Virginia, you can do better than these guys.

The Alliance for Science has the full story. If you are a Virginia resident and want to get involved, please contact them. Also, visit the link to learn much more about the story, and also about Shawn Smith’s blog that tracks the Intelligent Design Creationism movement in Chesterfield County. Let’s keep sound science in Virginia science classes and get the jump on things before they can stir up trouble.

Crossposted at Neurotopia