Wesley R. Elsberry Archives

Oxford University’s previous Charles Simonyi Professor for Public Understanding of Science, Richard Dawkins, visited Michigan State University in East Lansing on March 2^nd and 3^rd. Prof. Dawkins gave a lecture on “The Purpose of Purpose” to a sold-out crowd at the Wharton Center on the evening of the 2^nd, and held an hour-and-a-half question and answer session at the Fairchild Theater on campus in the morning of the 3^rd.

(Original post at the Austringer)

State senator Stephen Wise plans to introduce a bill requiring balanced treatment for “intelligent design” whenever evolutionary science is taught in Florida’s science classrooms.

Of course, “balanced treatment” and “equal time” bills for “creation science” led to the 1987 SCOTUS decision in Edwards v. Aguillard that ruled “creation science” as unconstitutional. Wise’s bill, if worded as stated in the article, is likely to provide a complementary court case for “intelligent design”.

(See the Florida Citizens for Science post on this, and the original post at the Austringer)

I’ve been saying that there were problems in William Dembski’s “explanatory filter” for a long, long time. Dembski has finally admitted that was the case.

(Original post at the Austringer.)

There is a certain sequence that is common to flare-ups involving religious antievolution advocacy. First, there is some starting event, where people raise some form of antievolution as appropriate to insert into a science curriculum in some manner. Second, there is some notice of this. Third, other parties bring those involved up to speed on the state of religious antievolution. Fourth, the initially enthusiastic advocates of religious antievolution desist or are overruled.

Note that I said common. Most of the cases of religious antievolution intersecting with public K-12 education resolve fairly shortly. If they do follow this common pathway, one usually has no more notice of it than that initially given to the problem. It is when a case goes pathological that it may become well-known, as in the cyclical antievolution of the Kansas state school board, the long-term antievolution advocacy of the Tangipahoa Parish school board, or the spectacular self-destruction of the Dover Area School District. Even intermediate cases demonstrate how readily our attention passes on to extreme cases, as shown by the flirtation the Darby, Montana school board had with “intelligent design” creationism a few years back. Darby was set to provide that first lawsuit over “intelligent design” creationism that it seemed the Discovery Institute was spoiling for, but the community had its elections for the school board before a policy was implemented, and the voters elected people who were not amenable to the IDC program.

In North Carolina, the Brunswick County School Board recently demonstrated steps 1 through 3 of the common sequence of religious antievolution advocacy. A speaker before a school board meeting suggested that creationism should be taught in the public school science classes. The members of the school board showed a certain initial enthusiasm for the suggestion. A reporter filed an article laying out how those events happened, plus the useful information that all the school board members favored including creationism in the science curriculum, and that even their legal counsel initially thought that they might do so legally if creationism supplemented but did not displace evolutionary science there. Shortly thereafter, another article reported on the response to those events at the state level, where it was noted that various legal precedents said that the course of action contemplated by the Brunswick County School Board was plainly unconstitutional.

What we don’t know yet is whether the Brunswick County School Board case will follow the common sequence and give up the idea of explicit inclusion of religious antievolution in the public schools, or whether this case will progress in a pathological way toward giving certain religious doctrines privilege by government authority.

I go into some of the possible outcomes at the Austringer.

The Institute for Creation Research has a project called RATE, whose intent was to overturn radiometric absolute dating methods as evidence for an old age of the earth. One of the arguments that they made was that diamonds contain significant levels of the radioactive carbon 14 (14C) isotope, indicating that they cannot be older than about 50,000 years old, and thus point to a young age of the earth. This sort of technical wrangle is something beloved of young-earth creationists (YECs), and indeed one such person going by the handle “tripa” has commented here (n.b., on Austringer, where the original essay was posted) on another thread about the RATE diamond study.

Physicist Kirk Bertsche has responded to the RATE diamond and coal studies with an essay hosted on the American Scientific Affiliation website. Dr. Bertsche notes a number of inconvenient facts that undercut the arguments made by ICR’s advocates, including standard procedures within radiocarbon AMS work that were ignored or not followed properly, and indications from the RATE measurement results themselves whose obvious interpretation points to sample contamination. It is an elegant take-down of yet another antievolution argument whose pseudo-technical gloss is intended to impress rather than to inform.

The ASA also hosts several other essays concerning the RATE project.

(Original article at the Austringer)

You’ll be hearing that a lot on science blogs over the next year-and-a-half in the run-up to November 24, 2009, the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species”. But we should start with another 150^th anniversary that is marked today, July 1, 2008…

One hundred fifty years ago, this date fell on a Thursday. On that Thursday, the meeting of the Linnean Society in London had a reading of an essay by Alfred Russel Wallace and a manuscript chapter extract and a letter from Charles R. Darwin on the topic of tranformism, or the evolution of new species from existing species. This collage of material was presented under a single title, On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection.

The reading itself produced hardly a ripple in the currents of scientific discourse; the Linnean Society president Thomas Bell noted in his journal that nothing of importance took place in that year. The real story lay in how it came to be that there was a joint presentation of material from Wallace and Darwin, rather than Wallace alone, and in the course of history that followed on.

(Original posting at the Austringer.)

The Devil in Dover
Lauri Lebo
The New Press
(http://laurilebo.com)

I had been steadily working on analysis of an experiment that I will be presenting later this month, but Sunday afternoon a line of thunderstorms blew through here, and somewhere in there the power went out. My work laptop runs out of juice quickly when running Avida, so that’s closed up. There’s only so much playing with the puppy that I can handle at a time, and somehow I feel a need to do something.

Several of my fellow bloggers at the Panda’s Thumb have been talking about journalist Lauri Lebo’s new book, “The Devil in Dover”. There’s about five who say that they are in various stages of writing reviews to be blogged here, there, or published in the mainstream media. And they all, to a man (yes, all of them are male), love it. About ten days ago, Lauri Lebo even gave me a personally inscribed copy (I contributed a photo for the front of the dust cover design and set up her personal website for the book). I hadn’t gotten around to actually reading the book, though, until the lights and power went out, reducing my options. But I have to say that the book is good enough to wish for a power outage. I have remedied that piece of ignorance with the help of a flashlight and a couple of changes of battery and can now speak to the content in the about two hours that my personal laptop has available in its battery charge.

The first thing to say is that Lauri’s book (and I do hope that I am not unjustly taking liberties in our acquaintance to say “Lauri”) is not just a journalist’s compilation of data, but rather an intensely personal book. There are several threads of personal involvement that Lauri takes up here. Perhaps the most touching is her relationship and estrangement from her father, who converted to fundamentalist Christianity several years ago and persistently searched for signs that Lauri would also be “born again” as he had been. But also there is the personal struggle with those in her profession who misconstrue journalistic “objectivity” perversely as a charge not to speak the truth when a situation indicates that a “side” is plainly in the wrong.

(Originally posted at the Austringer)

“Intelligent design” creationist Paul Nelson was bragging recently on “Uncommon Descent” about getting a presentation accepted at a conference in the UK, the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion at Oxford’s “God, Nature and Design: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives”. Apparently, the fix is in for IDC advocates, and several openly pro-IDC abstracts have been accepted.

There seem to be about five that have been spotted so far, Paul Nelson’s included. Nelson’s presentation is titled, “The Logic of Dysteleology”. Having attended the 1997 “Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise” conference and heard Nelson’s talk there, if I were attending the Ian Ramsey conference now I could go visit a snack bar during Nelson’s talk and not miss much. It looks to be the same topic, just with a few more recent references tossed in.

Now, as to the rigor of this conference, let’s look at another abstract that was deemed worthy by the reviewers, submitted by one Don Booker of Pace University.

The Florida legislature failed to pass either of two forms of the Discovery Institute’s draft “academic freedom” bills, and adjourned Friday evening. We have until the legislative session next year to make sure that those in the legislature know exactly what the history and intent of bills like that are. But it doesn’t feel like a “win”; those of us who invested our time in advocating for good science education in Florida essentially got lucky this time.

The “academic freedom” and “critical analysis” bills currently being considered by the Florida legislature are old stratagems borrowed from antievolution efforts in other states. Ronda Storms and Alan Hays have been asked whether “intelligent design” could be taught in science classrooms. Storms and Hays steadfastly refuse to answer the question posed. You have to look at what has been done in the name of narrow religious antievolution and not what is said.

(Originally at the Austringer.)

On Monday, April 14^th, Florida Citizens for Science, the Florida ACLU, and many other groups sponsored a press conference and panel discussion criticizing the “academic freedom” and “critical analysis” bills currently filed in the state Senate and House, respectively. The bill in the senate, the one still misusing the “academic freedom” phrase, is scheduled to go to the floor on the 17^th. That will be today very shortly. I am not terribly optimistic about the outcome, since it seems that the legislators didn’t bother to turn out for the events on Monday, and the mainstream media invented some stuff out of whole cloth, but mostly failed to report on the full range of reasons why the bills under consideration are bad for Florida’s schools, students, parents, and business.

I’ll summarize what was actually said at the press conference. The segments may incorporate both paraphrased and verbatim passages.

The FoxNews review by Roger Friedman is in, and it reads like one of those Muppets in the theater balcony wrote it. Skip past the top-of-the-page stuff about Mariah Carey. Down. Further down. Next to “Buy a Link Here”, there it is: “Ben Stein: Win His Career”.

After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.

Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely “character” for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is released.

Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, “Expelled” is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) “expose” of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.

To wit: Stein, Frankowski and pals say in “Expelled” that perfectly good scientists and educators are being stigmatized for wanting to teach their students creationism and “intelligent design” — in other words, junk science — in addition to or instead of conventionally accepted Darwinism. You see, Stein, like some other celebrities, finally has shown his true colors and they aren’t so pretty.

There’s more good stuff. Go read.

Hat tip: Ross Myers.

(Originally posted at the Austringer)

Congratulations go out to PBS and Nova for winning the Peabody Award for “Judgment Day”, the episode documenting the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial NOVA/WGBH Educational Foundation, Vulcan Productions Inc., The Big Table Film Company

The centerpiece of this thoughtful, topical edition of NOVA was the recreation, verbatim, of key testimony and argument from a six-week trial in Pennsylvania that served as a crash course in modern evolutionary theory, the evidence for evolution and the nature of science.

We had most of the plaintiffs’ side of the case on hand to view the broadcast last November. We gathered together at Lauri Lebo and Jeff Pepper’s beer can museum near York, Pennsylvania. We were companionably squeezed in there for the broadcast. (Note Prof. Steve Steve near center…)

(Original and two more pics at the Austringer.)

During the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case in 2004 to 2005, Lauri Lebo covered the story for the York Daily Record. Lebo was one of the most consistent journalists writing on the topic anywhere; she certainly demonstrated a facility with the facts of the case and was not afraid to write about what they implied. She has a book to be released shortly, “The Devil in Dover”.

(Originally posted at the Austringer)

Today, the Florida Board of Education met. One of the items on the agenda: the proposed new science standards. These were politically controversial because they included “evolution” and benchmarks concerning concepts in evolutionary biology.

The Board decided last week to allow a limited amount of public comment at this meeting. I have a brief description of how that went down, modulo the poor webcast availability, at my weblog.

The consideration is ongoing now. I’ll update this later today.

OK, it’s over. Florida adopted amended standards. We know from prior experience that when one agrees to language from the anti-science advocates, they have some angle for exploitation of that language. While Florida standards now do mandate the teaching of evolutionary science, they also have the antievolution back-door installed. There will be further years of dealing with antievolution efforts in Florida because of this action.

There was a meeting held in Orlando, Florida today to allow public comment on the proposed new Florida science standards. The new standards incorporate evolution, both word and concept, into the benchmarks. That sort of thing might cause a Bill Buckingham to exclaim, “It’s laced… with Darwinism!” And it pretty much did.

I spent a fair amount of time between 10 AM and 2:30 PM today listening to the webcast of the event, when it was working. (The remainder I used tending Diane, who has the flu.) The event ran from 10 to 3:30, so I heard most of it.

I have a retrospective overview at my weblog:

Barring any media bombshells, the public commentary phase of responses to the proposed Florida science standards is now over and done with. I have not yet seen every minute of the meeting today in Orlando, but I did sample several hours of it.

There are several things to be said. The first is that I am very proud of the leadership role that the Florida Citizens for Science group played in bringing things to this point. While the pro-science side was numerically under-represented among the commenters, I recognized many of them as members of Florida Citizens for Science. Among those, FL CfS President Joe Wolf presented the petition supporting the standards that so many of you have signed, noting the total number collected in less than two weeks as over 1,500 signatures, and that somewhat more than 1,000 of those were Florida citizens. FL CfS Treasurer Pete Dunkelberg made excellent use of his three minutes at the podium, reminding the Florida Board of Education that they have the opportunity to change Florida’s standards score from “F” to “A” – if only they don’t mess up at the last minute by capitulating to the anti-science crowd.

Read here for more.

I also have a series of posts from summarizing various speakers while the webcast ran:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

Comment either here, there, or at After the Bar Closes.

I entered a comment when I signed the Florida Citizens for Science online petition in support of the proposed new science standards there.

I was born in Florida, and I care about the state of science education there. There are two main things that I want to say about antievolution and science education.

First, antievolution is not based in science, does not represent an alternative scientific understanding of the evidence, and it specifically conveys a narrowly sectarian religious doctrine. It is disruptive of the tolerance towards diverse religious faiths, or the lack of them, that help maintain amity and civility in our country. We are fortunate here to have avoided the deadly struggles over doctrinal positions that are common elsewhere and that have left their stamp on history. Antievolution efforts include attempts to rewrite the operating principles of science by fiat, and this alone should be sufficient to demonstrate that its promoters are not working for the common weal, but are bent upon achieving their own aims without regard for anything but their own satisfaction.

Second, science education needs to incorporate those concepts that have accountability, that have been proposed, argued, tested, revised, and that have by the record of empirical investigation and substantial engagement of criticism convinced the scientific community of the worth of the concept in question. Evolutionary science has met that high standard, and antievolutionary attacks upon it have no such claim to legitimacy. Science education should not be weakened by spending precious class time on material whose inclusion only serves the purposes of evading those stringent standards of accountability, undermining the principle of science’s ability to wholly reject hypotheses that predict false consequences, and gainsaying well-tested theories without substantiating a basis for such attacks.

It can do no one harm to come to an accurate understanding of what science is, and what has been discovered and supported through the scientific method. Please adopt the new science standards as written by your domain experts and experts in science education, and avoid the error of capitulating to the demands of the antievolution movement that evolutionary science be “balanced” with material that sows broad distrust of scientists and findings in biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology.

This thread is for comments sent to the online petition only. Let’s keep things tidy; I’ll remove comments that have extraneous remarks to the Bathroom Wall.

The Colorado Daily reports that Michael Korn, the person who emailed death threats to biology faculty at Colorado University - Boulder was sent a restraining order in email on December 6^th, and agreed to its terms in minutes. They apparently used email because no one seems to know just where Michael Korn might reside.

The article relies in part upon material quoted here on Panda’s Thumb.