While admiring some ground cherries outside my front door, I noticed a number of leaves had been stripped off. Not grazed on by the deer that frequent the area, more like eaten by caterpillars. After a brief search I spotted a hornworm munching away. I didn’t bother killing the hornworm because, after all, the ground cherries are weeds growing amongst the black-eyed susans, and it’s less work for me if they take care of the weeds.
I looked again a few days later, and saw that the hornworm had sprouted numerous white appendages. These are the cocoons of pupating braconid wasps. Braconid wasps are parasitoids that inject their eggs beneath the skin of the host (hornworms are favored by the braconid wasp Contesia congregatus). After feeding on the convenient meal surrounding them, the wasp larvae emerge and spin their coccons, attached to the body of the unfortunate hornworm. In a few days, adult wasps emerge from their cocoons, leaving a dead caterpillar.
I later spotted a second hornworm, which suffered the same fate as the first.
Ewwwwwwww!
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Last week, self proclaimed “geek,” Miss California, Alyssa Campanellamade beauty pageant history…by default. When the interviewer posed a Theory of Evolution question, she was one ofonly two delegates to use the scientific definition of the word “theory” in her response.
The honey-drenched, colloquial definition that the majority of her competitors clung to was, yes, diplomatic. Miss California, now Miss USA, however, did not aim to please or to appease the 60% of Americans that a 2009 Gallup Poll concluded do not believe in Evolution. Rather than aiming to please or appease an ignorant majority, The future Miss USA delivered a response that supported an empirical evidence based definition of specified phenomena: the scientific definition of the word, “theory.”
Brains is beauty, it seems to me. We should certainly run our schools as if intelligence and learning are great virtues in themselves.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Other fronts in the War on Education may have earned more attention here in the Bathtub, lately — and in state legislatures. Threats from the dilution and elimination of good, hard science courses continue to pose problems, especially from creationists and their shyer, camouflage troops from the Chapel of Intelligent Design.
We need to stay aware of the creationist/creationism threat. At its heart, creationism requires adherents to reject the facts of science, to reject the workings of science, and to reject the functions of debate about what is real, and what is not. It is to me a rather simple discussion of the quality of evidence.
Eugenie Scott and her colleagues from the National Center for Science Education provide a great update in what is going on, with a great video, and an informative and troubling explanation of the links between creationism and the “unbelievers” in climate change.
Be sure to watch the first ten minutes, to see the video update on the fight to keep good science education in schools, especially the teaching of evolution.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Some believers expressed bewilderment or said it was a test from God of their faith, after the day passed without event.
Meanwhile, the evangelist at the centre of the claim, Harold Camping, has not been seen since before the deadline.
Maybe Camping has gone to his reward. We don’t know — but we do know one thing: This will probably our last Rapture thread for a while.
If only we could get the creationists to make some kind of spectacular, easily verifiable, utterly goofball predictions like the end-of-the-world folks do. But it wouldn’t matter; they’ll continue to be creationists. If 21 May has taught us anything, it’s that true believers never stop believing.
Evidence prevents the need to believe; we should stick to the evidence. Camping started with a calculation that the flood of Noah, which never occurred as Camping thought, occurred 7,000 years ago, some 2,000 to 3,000 years different from the calculations made from the Bible by most young Earth creationists (but not Ken Ham), and way off the smoke-ring calculations of intelligent design whimsies, who can’t be pinned down to any number at all.
But they never stop believing contrary to the evidence.
Keep them off of juries, if you wish for justice.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Jerome Corsi, that serial fictionalizer of vital issues, has a book out promoting his slimy schemes besmirch President Obama. Goddard urges people to buy it.
But they really pile on in the comments. It’s almost as if Casey Luskin had a whole family just like himself, and they got together to whine about Judge Roberts again.
Warming denialism, creationism and birthers — is it all just three minor variations on the same brain-sucking virus? Or could three different diseases produce the same sort of crazy on so many different issues?
I’m reminded of the old saw that you cannot reason a person out of a position he didn’t reach by reason. These guys will never see the light. Heaven knows, it ain’t evidence that gets ’em where they are now.
I don’t get the idea that Ham is sad about it, though, do you?
Destroying a child’s natural curiosity about science and the world around them damages them for life. In the U.S., we are fighting trends that show kids in 4th grade are as scientifically adept as the other best students in the world; by 8th grade their affinity for science has begun to fade, and by 12th grade, U.S. students rank far below many other industrialized nations in science achievement. Ken Ham’s story is one reason why that happens.
Isn’t crushing a child’s intelligence a form of child abuse?
Update and correction (December 1, 2010): The case is apparently not officially settled after all. What was approved was not the overall proposed settlement, but the terms of the settlement as it concerns Zachary Dennis (a minor) — the “James Doe” of the suit — and it was approved not by the judge presiding over the case, Gregory L. Frost of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, but by Licking County Probate Judge Robert Hoover, acting in his role as Juvenile Court Judge for the county. The settlement still needs to be approved by Judge Frost.
John Freshwater’s side finally agreed to a settlement in the suit against him and the local school district prompted by his using an electrical device, a small Tesla coil testing device, to burn crosses on the arms of students. Thus mostly ends one of the more bizarre stories of creationism and misguided religion in a public school classroom.
NEWARK — Licking County Probate Judge Robert Hoover on Nov. 23 approved a settlement agreement with regard to the civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Zachary Dennis against suspended Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater.
The lawsuit was originally filed in the U.S District Court on June 13, 2008, and included as defendants the Mount Vernon City Schools Board of Education and various school employees. The suit alleged that Freshwater violated the constitutional rights of Zachary Dennis and those of his parents, Stephen and Jennifer Dennis, by, among other things, displaying religious items in his classroom, by teaching intelligent design and by expressing his own religious beliefs to students in the classroom.
The board’s portion of the lawsuit was resolved on or about Aug. 26, 2009, and Freshwater was the sole remaining defendant.
With Judge Hoover’s ruling last Tuesday, the suit against Freshwater was officially settled. The settlement of $475,000 to the Dennis family includes $25,000 for attorney fees, $150,000 each to Stephen and Jennifer, and $150,000 to be used for an annuity for Zachary.
At length, then, officially, it’s a bad idea for a creationist science teacher to burn crosses on the arms of supposedly-willing students using a Tesla coil, in any configuration. Yet to be determined: May a school board fire a teacher who does that anyway?
Somebody linked over to Red State. What a creepy site.
First, it looks like those old ’50s school films about the creeping “Red Menace,” the way they paint every state Commie Red (no, I know they’re not conscious commies, but let’s call the color what it is). It’s as if they have no knowledge of history over there, and they’ve never noticed. It’s pretty clear that they have no desire nor need for white and blue, even to make “red, white and blue.”
If you have it on vinyl, you know what we mean.
Second, they brook no dissent at all. Their terms of use (no open discussion) show the Red Staters get to decide whether you’re with the Red State Big Brother program — and if for any reason they decide you’re not toeing the party line, you’re vanquished. No appeals. “It’s not really an echo chamber, it’s unison singing.”
Third, there is the astonishing sucking sound where brains of skeptics should be. Pick the stupid side of almost any issue, and it’s represented in spades there. On the sciency front, for example, Red Staters have no use nor knowledge of Darwin, they think the warming temperatures of the climate are faked, probably by unholy, non-Red Stater weathermen, and they are convinced that the UN and others are using malaria for “population control” — so they favor massive amounts of DDT.
Remember Mr. Urquhart, the Delaware Tea Partier who, by the grace of God, lost the race for the state’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and his claim that “separation of church and state” was Hitler’s idea? Urquhart appears to drift in the mainstream at Red State.
Alice and the Red Queen – illustration by Sir John Tenniel
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland, 1866
[Yes, the illustration is from Through the Looking Glass, 1871]
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Steve Schafersman, now president of Texas Citizens for Science, played the yeoman then:
Description of the program:
Did humans coexist with dinosaurs? The tracks tell the tale. Dr. John R. Cole, Dr. Steven Schafersman, Dr. Laurie Godfrey, Dr. Ronnie Hastings, Lee Mansfield, and other scientists examine the claims and the evidence. Air date: 1983.
Lightism is just a theory — an atheistic belief based on arbitrary presuppositions. No one has ever seen a so-called “electron,” and no one really knows what causes light bulbs to function as they do.
In an incredible, Sisyphean effort, he pushes it uphill from there. Seriously. Go read.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Still from “We Are Science Probes.” Full clip of movie below.
In animation, a parable about the dangers of being intentionally ignorant of science. In the not-distant-enough future, a probe from another planet arrives on Earth after the demise of human civilization. Unfortunately, the probes land in Kansas, the land of creationism and woo. The plot thickens.
[My apologies — the version I found did not come with a “pause” button. It will play automatically when you open this post. Fortunately, it’s almost perfectly safe-for-work. If you don’t like the music, turn it off. There is no spoken dialogue in the cartoon. If you wish to pause the playing of the cartoon, right click to get to the Adobe Flash Player controls. To pause the playing click the checkmark next to “play.”]
[Update August 18 — Okay, I give up — 100% of comments I’ve been getting ran against the video without the “start” or “pause” buttons. You’ll have to go see it at another site — here, for example.]
Sure would love this group to turn their creative faculties to hard history — say, the Progressive Movement and Gilded Age. (Probably less chance of commercialization there, and perhaps less chance of awe-striking art, too.)
The French Ministry of Science and Technology has surprised many by announcing that it is to commit €50 million to a campaign to encourage anti-science teaching in American schools. A spokesman told us: ” This is a wonderful opportunity for France and Europe. We would like to help American conservatives turn a whole generation of American schoolchildren against science, and instead obsess about stuff in a 2,000 year old book. Today, it’s evolution, but we are confident that within five years we can have them teaching that gravity is a communist idea, and that bio-technology is something to do with the Devil and homosexuality. We have one schoolboard in Alabama voting tomorrow to teach that the Sun revolves around the United States. NASA aren’t happy, but the director of commercial satellite launching of the European Space Agency actually weed himself, he was laughing so much. Sent us a lovely hamper. It had cake.”
The ministry ruled out extending the policy to France. “Absolutely not. we’re building a modern economy here. We need kids who can write software and develop new medicines, not wonder if God designed Zebras to look like they’re wearing pyjamas.”
Appearing to be aware they are losing the battle of the classroom to real science, creationists have taken a sneakier way to undermine science education. P. Z. Myers explains:
A lot of people have been writing to me about this free webgame, CellCraft. In it, you control a cell and build up all these complex organelles in order to gather resources and fight off viruses; it’s cute, it does throw in a lot of useful jargon, but the few minutes I spent trying it were also a bit odd — there was something off about it all.
Where do you get these organelles? A species of intelligent platypus just poofs them into existence for you when you need them. What is the goal? The cells have a lot of room in their genomes, so the platypuses are going to put platypus DNA in there, so they can launch them off to planet E4R1H to colonize it with more platypuses. Uh-oh. These are Intelligent Design creationist superstitions: that organelles didn’t evolve, but were created for a purpose; that ancient cells were ‘front-loaded’ with the information to produced more complex species; and that there must be a purpose to all that excess DNA other than that it is junk.
Suspicions confirmed. Look in the credits.
Also thanks to Dr. Jed Macosko at Wake Forest University and Dr. David Dewitt at Liberty University for providing lots of support and biological guidance.
Those two are notorious creationists and advocates for intelligent design creationism. Yep. It’s a creationist game. It was intelligently designed, and it’s not bad as a game, but as a tool for teaching anyone about biology, it sucks. It is not an educational game, it is a miseducational game. I hope no one is planning on using it in their classroom. (Dang. Too late. I see in their forums that some teachers are enthusiastic about it — they shouldn’t be).
No such thing as a free lunch. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Free software for use in educating kids about biology, sounds too good to be true.
_____________
In comments, Lars Doucet disavows creationist intent. So the creationist/intelligent design factors were added just to make the game more playable, and not as an attempt to introduce or endorse creationism or intelligent design.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
