December 21, 2006
In a post I missed back then, science writer Chet Raymo sets a standard for how science can leave the “bogus” category: He says intelligent design can start to be called “science” when the first paper is published retracting another, previous paper, that was since found to be in error. Raymo wrote:
Here is my litmus test for science.
In the October 7 issue of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Robin Allshire, of the prestigious Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, offers a retraction for a paper previously published in the journal, titled “Hairpin RNAs and retrotransponson LTRs effect RNAi and chromatin-based gene silencing.” He admits that his laboratory and others have been unable to reproduce the results reported in the paper.
When we see the first peer-reviewed experimental data supporting intelligent design or astrology that is reproducible in other laboratories by skeptics and believers alike, then these hypotheses can make a legitimate claim to being sciences.
When we see the first published retraction, we will know that intelligent design or astrology has reached maturity as a science.
Of course, the same is true for bogus history. Corrections made when error is found suggest that there is care for accuracy, and that the author has no great stake in the story other than getting the facts right to get the correct understanding.
I’ll have to revise the list, here, and here.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Catholic Sensibility.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
November 28, 2006
Some people were relieved when voodoo history maven Davin Barton’s term as vice chair of the Texas Republican Party expired.
Dallas Morning News editorial writer and occasional columnist William McKenzie warns that we have not seen the last of Barton’s involvement in politics — and textbooks are in Barton’s gunsights.
McKenzie wrote about Barton in the November 28 paper:
Pay attention to his work, because, as Newsweek reported after the election, the religious right is at a crossroads. With big-name leaders declining, lesser-knowns like Mr. Barton will fill the gap. And they will come with their own approach.
The most interesting thing I learned from him was that the next wave will revolve around networks of activists, not the big names who lobby Washington. Look for e-mail blasts that start with a small group upset about a comment or decision about abortion, homosexuality or textbooks. In the decentralized technological world, a David Barton doesn’t need the podium of a Jerry Falwell or a Ralph Reed to trigger a prairie fire.
In other words, watch him.
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2 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Education, Freedom - Political, History, History Revisionism, Politics, Textbook Selection, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
November 24, 2006
Yes, it’s called “Carnival of Bad History,” but it’s really dedicated to smoking out, and smoking, bad history. It’s rather in the spirit in which this blog got started, to straighten out the bent and crooked stories of history that lead away from the truth (which is almost always much, much more interesting).
So go see the latest, Carnival of Bad History No. 11, over at Philobiblon — a blog by a journalist named Natalie Bennett.
There is an interesting skew to non-U.S. material in this version. U.S.-ophiles will be left pondering this post on “unknown” Islam in America prior to the current era, however. World history and world geography teachers will find sources on Stonehenge in this post, lamenting a Goose & Grimm cartoon.
Go check it out.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
November 22, 2006
It is the day before Thanksgiving, a holiday generally associated with the English colonists of New England. What better time to re-run a piece on the Mayflower Compact and its religious implications? Originally, this desultory ran here, on July 26, 2006.
Dispatches from the Culture Wars features a set of comments on an interview right-right-wing pundit John Lofton did with Roy Moore, the former chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court who lost his job when he illegally tried to force his religion on the court and on Alabama. This year Moore ran for governor of Alabama, losing in the primary election.
One of the grandest canards in current thought about U.S. history is that the Mayflower Compact set up a theocracy in Massachusetts. Lofton and Moore banter about it as if it were well established fact — or as if, as I suspect, neither of them has looked at the thing in a long time, and that neither of them has ever diagrammed the operative sentence in the thing.
The Mayflower Compact was an agreement between the people in two religiously disparate groups, that among them they would fairly establish a governing body to fairly make laws, and that they would abide by those laws. Quite the opposite of a theocracy, this was the first time Europeans set up in the New World a government by consent of the governed.
That is something quite different from a theocracy. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
November 20, 2006
From the History Matters site at George Mason University, a quiz about quotes attributed to presidents — formatted, ready for classroom use. Only three out of the seven are accurate? There are some surprises.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
September 16, 2006
If you’re interested only in history and education, and if you think there is no overlap between the people who try to censor biology textbooks and those who try to “reform” history books, you may go to the next post and skip this one.
Quote accuracy is a big deal to me. When creationists can’t look you square in the eye and tell the truth about what another human being said, they lose my confidence, and their arguments lose credence. I think all scholars and policy discussants have an obligation to readers, policy makers, and the future, to try to get right quotations of famous people. I think this responsbility is particularly important in health and science issues. It was in the vein of checking out the accuracy and veracity of quotes from creationist publications some (okay — many) years ago for a minor issue Congress was dealing with that I discovered the depths of depravity to which creationists stoop to try to make their case that creationism is science and should be taught in public school science classes — or that evolution is evil, and shouldn’t be taught at all. Famous writings of great men like Charles Darwin regularly undergo a savage editor’s knife to make it appear he wrote things quite contrary to what he wrote with regard to science and evolution, or to make it appear that Darwin was a cruel or evil man — of which he was quite the opposite.
With the great benefit of having the Library of Congress across the street, I would occasionally track down obscure sources of “quotes” from scientists, only to discover in almost every case where creationists claimed science was evil, or wrong, that the creationist tracts had grotesquely distorted the text they cited. It was as if the creationist authors had been infected with a virus that made them utterly incapable of telling the truth on certain things.
Over the years I have observed that dedicated creationists tend to lose the ability to tell when they have stepped over the line in editing a quotation, and have instead changed the meaning of a quotation to fit their own ends. This the inherent dishonesty of creationism. It affects — it infects — almost all creationists to one degree or another. Many creationists seem to be under the influence of a virus that renders them incapable of telling a straight story about science, or Darwin.
I ran into a raging case recently. It would be amusing if not for the fact that the creationist seems to be an otherwise rational person.
Read the rest of this entry »
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13 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Ethics, Evolution, First Amendment, Hoaxes, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, Science and faith | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
September 2, 2006
“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.” – Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, from an address to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy, June 19, 1879, known as his “War is hell” speech (Wikipedia entry on Sherman).
(Query: Does anyone have an electronic link to the full text of Sherman’s address that day? Or, do you know where it might be found, even in hard copy?)
Jeff Danziger’s cartoons in The Christian Science Monitor kept me buying that paper for a while. I don’t know who carries his work now, but it’s still good, vital cartooning. I saw the caption to one of his cartoons as a signature line in an e-mail post, and just the caption caused me to pause and pray for an end to war. The whole cartoon is below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
September 1, 2006
One of the more interesting rebuttals to the remarks of President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was made by Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. It may be an internet flash-in-the-pan, but you should read it, here. And read about it here.
Tip o’ the old scrub brush to Dr. David Raskin and Marga Raskin.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 26, 2006
Carpus at Aspirations of a Post Doc fisks a quote making the rounds that has Abraham Lincoln claiming dissent is close to treason. Go read his post. Turns out the quote was manufactured, partly in error, in 2003. Carpus points to the FactCheck.org report for a source.
Lincoln never said it. Lincoln did little to stifle dissent.
In fact, Lincoln’s management style as president was based on bringing people with dissenting views into his cabinet. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, Team of Rivals, strongly suggests that forging good policies from great dissent was a particular genius of Lincoln.
George W. could learn a lot from Abe, Carpus concludes — with astounding understatement.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 10, 2006
It’s only nine months since Judge John Jones’ extremely well-reasoned and carefully-written decision in Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District, which declared unconstitutional the efforts by the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, to sneak creationism into their schools’ biology curriculum. But the revisionists are out in force. On August 8, Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost posted “10 ways Darwinists help intelligent design,” in extreme length.
Other people were bothered by the post, too. I see that Matt over at Pooflingers fisked the thing, too. I haven’t read his post yet — his is no doubt more incisive than what I’ve written below. But can there be too much taking to task those who would sacrifice our children’s education on a cross of hooey? Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 2, 2006
In comments to the first post on flag folding, Chris noted that the American Legion’s website has the ceremony I fisked, verbatim. So I wrote to the American Legion and suggested they explain that the ceremony isn’t official, and perhaps fix some of the errors in it.
I have heard back. They’re sticking by it, even to the wrong words of the hero of the War of 1812, Stephen Decatur. The misquote of Decatur is really no big deal, but the real quote suggests Decatur will stand up for his nation, “. . . our country, right or wrong!”; the erroneous version suggests a ‘well, whatever’ attitude towards defending the nation, “. . . it is still our country.”
I looked: There is nothing at the American Legion site about Millard Fillmore and the White House bathtubs.
I also found the newer Air Force ceremony, posted at USHistory.org, at the “Betsy Ross” site.
Update February 26, 2007: Go here for another list of the new Air Force ceremony.
Image of folded flag from CNN
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 1, 2006
Robert Park provides a short e-mail newsletter every Friday, covering news in the world of physics. It’s called “What’s New.” Park makes an art of smoking out bogus science and frauds people try to perpetrate in the name of science, or for money. He wrote an opinion column for the Chronicle of Higher Education published January 31, 2003, in which he listed the “7 warning signs of bogus science.”
Please go read Park’s entire essay, it’s good.
And it got me thinking about whether there are similar warning signs for bogus history? Are there clues that a biography of Howard Hughes is false that should pop out at any disinterested observer? Are there clues that the claimed quote from James Madison saying the U.S. government is founded on the Ten Commandments is pure buncombe? Should Oliver Stone have been able to to more readily separate fact from fantasy about the Kennedy assassination (assuming he wasn’t just going for the dramatic elements)? Can we generalize for such hoaxes, to inoculate ourselves and our history texts against error?
Perhaps some of the detection methods Park suggests would work for history. He wrote his opinion piece after the Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in which the Court laid out some rules lower courts should use to smoke out and eliminate false science. As Park described it, “The case involved Bendectin, the only morning-sickness medication ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It had been used by millions of women, and more than 30 published studies had found no evidence that it caused birth defects. Yet eight so-called experts were willing to testify, in exchange for a fee from the Daubert family, that Bendectin might indeed cause birth defects.” The Court said lower courts must act as gatekeepers against science buncombe — a difficult task for some judges who, in their training as attorneys, often spent little time studying science.
Some of the Daubert reasoning surfaced in another case recently, the opinion in Pennsylvania district federal court in which Federal District Judge John Jones struck down a school board’s order that intelligent design be introduced to high school biology students, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
Can we generalize to history, too? I’m going to try, below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 1, 2006
In a blog post which I assume was designed to provoke comment, “The theory of “Intelligent Design” is neither intelligent nor a design,” The Opinionator at CapeCodToday takes on Florida’s new law dictating that only the “facts” of history be taught — I noted the law earlier, here. It’s an entertaining post.
He closes his post:
Some law makers are saying that their history is the best history. They fail to understand that history, like the law, changes and evolves over the decades. If they loved history more, they would understand this. Perhaps they don’t love or even understand history. Perhaps they agree with the American cultural giant Henry Ford, whose 143rd birthday we celebrate today. He once said, “History is bunk.”
Oops. Ford said something like that, but not quite that. According to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations Sixteenth Edition, Ford gave an interview to Charles N. Wheeler, published in the Chicago Tribune on May 25, 1916. In that interview, Ford said, “History is more or less bunk.”
Nit-picky, yes. Let’s strive for accuracy.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
July 30, 2006
Dictionaries of the future will feature “bartonizing,” after Texas mathematics teacher David Barton, with a reference to “bowdlerization.” Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars details a recent flurry of correcting a Barton misapprehension of history about one of Thomas Jefferson’s studies of the gospels, which resulted in a book called The Jefferson Bible.
The issue is a strange claim by Barton, repeated by Dr. D. James Kennedy at Coral Gables Ministries, that Jefferson wrote the thing in an attempt to convert Indians to Christianity. Students of Jefferson immediately recognize that claim as contrary to Jefferson’s character on several fronts.
The discussion is enlightened and enlightening; I noted the similar claim that Jefferson built a church and hired a priest for the Kaskaskias (in Illinois), with federal funds, is similarly in error. The fight against revisionist history — revising history to add errors — continues.
(One current edition of the Jefferson Bible on sale at Monticello features a forward by Rev. F. Forrester Church, minister at senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City; that must frost Kennedy and Barton.)
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Posted by Ed Darrell
July 29, 2006
Navy caption: SAN DIEGO (April 2, 2007) – Aviation Support Equipment Technician 3rd Class Danny Ly, Storekeeper Seaman Joe Jackson and Electronics Technician Timothy Swartz fold the American flag on the flight deck aboard nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68). Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSG), embarked Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 11 and Destroyer Squadron Group (DESRON) 23 are deploying to support operations in U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jeremiah Sholtis (RELEASED) – Wikimedia image
Earlier I wrote about a flag-folding ceremony that is making the internet rounds. I noted that much of the claimed mythology is, um, ahistoric.
There is no particular meaning attached to folding the flag. Comments noted that the ceremony making the internet rounds is posted at the website of the American Legion. I wrote to the Legion’s public relations department, but have heard nothing back. Generally, the information on flag etiquette at that site is solid. Only the flag-folding ceremony material is not top-notch. I would be happy were the Legion to add a note that the ceremony is a sample ceremony. Several sites mention that the ceremony comes “from the U.S. Air Force Academy.” One site even had a link, but the link was dead. I did find a few sources that explained further. The Air Force Academy web site may have featured a flag-folding ceremony at one point, perhaps even the one being passed around. One of the more popular ceremonies featured had been written by one of the chaplains at USAFA. As happens in the military, someone got concerned about the accuracy of the claims, and the ceremony was pulled. However, Air Force color guards had used the ceremony, and there was demand for something to say during the folding of the U.S. flag, at some ceremonies.
Below the fold, at some length, I reprint the “official” story.
Read the rest of this entry »
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19 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Flag etiquette, History, Patriotism | Tagged: Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Flag etiquette, History, Patriotism, USS Nimitz | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 