Brett Younger is pastor at Fort Worth’s Broadway Baptist Church. In the Baptist Standard he tells a story of a near-disaster in his high school chemistry class, on the way to urging Christians to use common sense on the issues of evolution in public school science classes. One more voice of reason, for sanity.
A Baptist with more sense for history than lab science
August 21, 2006
2 Comments | 
Creationism, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
. . . in which I defend the judiciary against barbaric assault
August 14, 2006I’ll make this quick (back to the grindstone, you know).
In my immediately previous post I make a minor case that advocacy of intelligent design is the less preferable alternative to understanding evolution, for moral reasons. Advocacy of intelligent design has so farproven incapable of making a case in a straightforward and honest fashion. All cases for intelligent design rest in large part, or completely, in distortions of science and history. What originall caught my eye and my ire was the mischaracterization of the recent decision in the Pennsylvania intelligent design case. Read the rest of this entry »
8 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Current History, Curricula, Education, Evolution, First Amendment, Intelligent Design, Law, Public education, Religious Freedom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The moral imperative against intelligent design
August 14, 2006I’m straying only a bit off topic, and only by certain legalistic interpretations. History folks, bear with me.
My complaint about what is called “intelligent design” in biology is the same complaint I have against people who wish to crown Millard Fillmore as a great light for bringing plumbing to the White House over the complaints of health officials — that is, my complaint against those who push H. L. Mencken’s hoax over the facts.
Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost listed at great lengths his list of reasons that arguing for science actually promotes intelligent design instead (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). This blog’s response was in two parts, one and two. Other people offered other rebuttals, including notably, P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula, a very good blog that features the hard science of biology and especially evolution.
Joe provided a first affirmative rebuttal here. This post is my reply, on the single point of whether it’s fair to say creationists, IDists, or others who twist the facts and research, are “dishonest.”
The text is below the fold; I left it in remarks at Evangelical Outpost. I have one other observation I’ll make quickly in the next post.
Enjoy, and chime in with your own remarks (I’m headed back to the grindstone). Read the rest of this entry »
23 Comments | Creationism, Current History, Curricula, Education, Evolution, First Amendment, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, Science | Tagged: Creationism, Current History, Curricula, Darwin, Education, Evolution, First Amendment, Intelligent Design, Joe Carter, Religious Freedom, Science, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Twisting recent history (creationism), 2
August 11, 2006RECAP: 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?
You can go read the entire thing at Evangelical Outpost if you want. I’ll post the list of ten, with corrections. History revisionism is an ugly thing, especially when the court decision is still fresh, available and an easy and educational read, and especially on things scientific, where one’s errors may be easier to spot. In keeping with the ethical standards ofthisblog, to expose hoaxes about bathtubs wherever they may appear, here goes;
Part 2: Joe Carter posted his list of ten things scientists do wrong; Part 1 covered the first five, here are numbers 6 through 10:
#6 By invoking design in non-design explanations. Anyone who wonders why so many people find intelligent design explanations plausible need only to listen to scientific community discuss the evolutionary process. Scientists have a complete inability to talk about and explain processes like natural selection without using the terms, analogies, and metaphors of design and teleology.
Take, for instance, the recent finding that leads researchers to believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code. On The New York Times science page we find an explanation by Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute in Israel:
“A curious feature of the code is that it is redundant, meaning that a given amino acid can be defined by any of several different triplets. Biologists have long speculated that the redundancy may have been designed so as to coexist with some other kind of code, and this, Dr. Segal said, could be the nucleosome code.” [emphasis added]
No! No! No! Scientists note the appearance of design, but scientists go the extra mile; they go on to look for natural explanations for such appearances. Most often they have found a perfectly natural explanation that involves fitness for survival, sexual selection, or chemical and physical necessity, and they have found no intervention outside the critters’ struggle for survival. Read the rest of this entry »
6 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Current History, Education, Evolution, History Revisionism, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Twisting recent history (creationism), 1
August 10, 2006It’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 »
3 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Creationism, Current History, Ethics, Evolution, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Religious Freedom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Vouchering to Gomorrah
August 5, 2006Libertarian-bent lawyer Tim Sandefur posts this note at Panda’s Thumb:
Neal McCulskey of the Cato Institute and Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect have a debate going over whether school choice programs would help resolve the evolution/creationism controversy. Here’s McCulskey’s first post, Yglesias’ reply, and McCulskey’s rebuttal.
Vouchers. Parental choice is an issue across the curriculum, but it is especially poignant in sex education, biology, and history. In those three areas there are national movements to direct curricula, some of the movements in each area based on a great deal of misinformation and disinformation.
14 Comments | Creationism, Curricula, Education, Geography - Political, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom, School vouchers, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bad quotes, Coulter, etc. 2
July 28, 2006I noted a few of the academic offenses of Ann Coulter earlier. James Downard at Talk Reason has a three-part series fisking Coulter’s recent rants against science, especially Darwinian theories. Here is the third installment, worth a read if you’re interested in what the facts are, and just how far off the rails Coulter’s account goes.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Creationism, Intelligent Design | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Fact-free letters on intelligent design, against evolution and science
July 25, 2006History is not the sole discipline which faces trouble from screeds in which the facts are wrong. In fact, the history of the idea of biological evolution is rather rife with scientific and history hoaxes, and only a few of them are old. New hoaxes about evolution have formed a cottage industry since the science push of 1957 and 1958.
Recent news told of the research of Dr. Peter R. Grant of Princeton University. Grant and his wife, Dr. B. Rosemary Grant, have conducted groundbreaking studies on a few species of birds in the Galapagos Archipelago — long-term longitudinal studies in which they literally track every member of a species for several dozens of generations so far (the research continues). The Grants and their graduate students published more than a dozen papers on speciation, beginning in the middle 1970s.
Below the fold I reproduce an anti-evolution letter published in the Pasadena, California, Star-News on July 23. Below that I list my response, how I would respond were I a local reader of the paper with a chance of getting a letter published.
Dr. Peter R. Grant, left, and Dr. B. Rosemary Grant, right. Photos from Princeton University.
(Continued below the fold.) Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 