Where I confess I may have been wrong about some Mormons

May 22, 2008

Some of my earliest and best biology professors were Mormons — Latter-day Saints, or LDS — and from them and a few others I learned that LDS beliefs not only do not cut against evolution, preaching against evolution is “false doctrine” in the faith, since there has never been a revelation against evolution to the LDS prophets.

On the board of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has long sat Duane Jeffery, a devout Mormon and long-time supporter of evolution as a professor of biology at Brigham Young University.

But as we know from the Methodist and Presbyterian and Catholic and other examples, official church doctrine doesn’t prevent members of the churches from jettisoning their reason when they discuss evolution and demonstrate a failure to understand even the basics of the simple theory. Mormons aren’t immune there, either.  Alas.

Here’s an LDS blog where the authors are trying to argue that “philosophically,” creationism should be taught alongside evolution, since it’s a “better” myth than science. Or something like that. All that high-falutin’ use of six-syllable words, e.g., epistemology, makes me think that the words don’t mean what the authors think they mean, especially when the authors then go on to make foolish claims based on something they think they’ve “proven” logically. My tolerance of six-syllable words has been reduced by dealing with actual laws, I think.

Or perhaps, as I suspect, they’re just trying to claim that pigs fly.

“Knowledge is the glory of God” is what I remember* one engraving over one entrance to the campus of Brigham Young University, except when the epistemology is found to be offensive, or something.

You might do well to check out these posts, and other resources:

* “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36)

22 Comments | Accuracy, Biology, Creationism, Education, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Strange Maps lets things drift – ducky!

May 21, 2008

Strange Maps jumped onto the duck bandwagon I mentioned some weeks ago. Nice maps of the drift of the rubber ducks that fell off the ship in the Pacific in 1992.

These ducks have been tracked for longer than some of our geography students have been alive. There’s got to be in that story somewhere a great set of lesson plans on ocean currents, oceanography, geography and science.

Pamela Bumsted gave us the goods on this story long ago:

“Wired Science” on PBS has video, and links to other materials (see the slide show), covering all sorts of flotsam tracking projects (Nike’s shoes seem to be better floaters than the ducks — doesn’t that threaten some old adages about ducks and water?). And this video introduces the serious issues of lost and discarded plastics drifting in the oceans. Floating plastic is a major polluter, not just an eyesore, but also a major hazard to marine wildlife, including especially turtles and birds. (There are projects in that topic, I’m sure.)

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.pbs.org posted with vodpod

◊

The deniers of global warming will be unhappy to see the accuracy with which the ocean currents were predicted, 15 years ago.

29,000 ducks went overboard; only about 1,000 have been found since. Lots of research to be done on beaches out there — fortunately, summer’s coming (hint, hint).

Other resources, courtesy of Wired Science’s site:

Other resources:

1 Comment | Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Natural history, oceans, Science | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Strange bed bugs

May 18, 2008

You can’t make this stuff up.

Alaska’s lone congressman cosponsored a bill last week to provide help to the states to inspect hotels and motels for bed bugs. Chief sponsor is Rep. G. K. Butterfield of North Carolina. H.R. 6068 was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The title: The Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008.

While an Alaskan newspaper noticed the bill, neither chief sponsor Butterfield nor any cosponsor submitted a statement accompanying introduction, nor have they put out a press release. The blog NY vs Bed Bugs is all over it already.

Funny title but serious business? Can’t tell. Watch that space.

Full text of the bill below the fold.

Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. Bumsted.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | DDT, History, Science, U.S. House of Representatives | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

DDT for bedbugs: Waste of mental space

May 17, 2008

Lifecycle of bed bugs, Cimex lectularius. Texas A&M

Lifecycle of bed bugs, Cimex lectularius. Texas A&M

DDT doesn’t work on bedbugs.  Here are the facts, at NY vs Bed Bugs.

Save

2 Comments | DDT, Environmental protection, Science | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Business, no environmentalists, oppose DDT in Africa

May 16, 2008

Steve Milloy and an entire host of DDT denialists hope you never read any newspaper from Africa.  Your ignorance is their best argument.

If you don’t read African newspapers, they can continue to blame environmentalists for any case of malaria that occurs in Africa.  They’ll claim, though it’s not true, that environmentalists urged a complete ban on the use of DDT.  They’ll argue, falsely, that African governments were bullied into not using DDT by environmentalists, ignoring the fact that some African nations have just never been able to get their kit together to conduct an anti-malaria campaign, while other nations discovered DDT was ineffective — and most of the nations have no love for environmentalists anyway (Idi Amin?  Jomo Kenyatta?  Who does Milloy think he’s kidding?).

If you don’t read African newspapers, you’ll miss stories like this one, from the Daily Times in Malawi, that say it’s Milloy’s old friends in the tobacco business who stand in the way of modest use of DDT.

If you don’t read African newspapers, you’ll miss stories like this one, from New Vision in Kampala, Uganda, that say it’s the cotton farmers who stand in the way of modest use of DDT.

If Steven Milloy wanted to get DDT used against malaria in Africa, in indoor residual spraying (IRS) campaigns, all he has to do is pick up the phone and ask his friends to allow it to be done. 

Someone who will lie to you about their friends’ misdeeds, and try to pin it on a nice old lady like Rachel Carson, will go Charles Colson one better:  They’ll walk over your grandmother to do what they want to do.  In fact, they’ll go out of their way to walk over your grandmother.

The New Republic seems to have come around to get the story straight.  Truth wins in a fair fight — it’s a fight to make sure the fight is fair, though.

John Stossel?  Your company doesn’t get tobacco money any more.  What’s your excuse?  Do you really believe the Bush administration is beholden to environmentalists on this one issue?  How long have you been covering politics?

(Texts of news stories below the fold.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Africa, Business Ethics, Conservation, DDT, Environmental protection, Ethics, Health care, Hoaxes, Junk science, Malaria, Newspapers, Public health, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

DDT blast from the past: 1951

May 16, 2008

DDT denialists like Steven Milloy like to paint Rachel Carson as a lone, cranky and crackpot voice in the wilderness against DDT (never mind how that makes the DDT industry look, unable to use facts and the $500,000 public relations campaign to get their message out).

It’s not so. As Carson noted, concerns about DDT were raised early, and often.

The Dallas Public Library makes available much of the news from the Dallas Morning News of the last century. On my way to find something else, I plugged in “DDT” as a search term. Among other articles that popped up was a May 9, 1951 story of Texas scientists warning a Congressional committee of the harms of DDT.

“Hazard to health,” was the flying head, “Renner Scientist Cites DDT Harm.” The story, by the News’ Washington Bureau reporter Ruth Schumm, covered a hearing before an unnamed committee of the House, “investigating the use of chemicals in foods.”  (Where was the copy editor on that one?)

John M. Dendy of the Texas Research Foundation delivered the testimony.  Dendy worked out of the Foundation’s laboratory in Renner.  Renner was an independent community then, located south of Renner, west of Coit, and north of Campbell Roads (no, it’s not there today). 

Studies in the foundation’s laboratories at Renner, Dallas County, have proved that DDT and other chemicals are now causing mass contamination of milk, meat and other foods, Dendy said.

Dendy said that crops absorb the DDT sprayed on them — still true, and more problematic since it’s been discovered that DDT is also damaging to some plants — and animals that graze the crops get that dosage.  Dairy cows, beef cattle and sheep were the chief animals mentioned.

Even though the Texas State Health Department has ruled that no DDT should be present in milk comsumed by human beings, DDT is showing up in the Dallas milk supply even in December, long past the usual season for spraying with insecticides.  About half of the Dallas milk supply is imported from Oklahoma, Missouri and Wisconsin, he said.

*  *  *  *  *

In the Texas Research Foundation tests, the degree of contamination ranged from 3.10 parts per million in lean meat to 68.55 parts per million in fat meat, Dendy testified. 

In milk, the DDT conamination ranged from less than .5 parts per million to 13.83 parts per million.

Dendy testified that so far as he knew, the exact effects of such poisoning on human beings has not yet been established.

Dendy warned in his testimony that DDT builds up over time in “human and animal fat tissue,” so the dangers to human health become greater as the exposure grows over time.

The worried Congressmen wanted to know if there is a substitute for DDT.

Dendy said he was not working on that problem, but he knew others were.

Notably absent from the hearing was the committee chairman, Rep. James J. Delaney, D-NY, according to the list offered by the DMN.  That’s right:  Delaney was the one who, in 1957, got his amendment passed to the Safe Food and Drug Act, the organic act for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) making it illegal to use anything known to be carcinogenic as a food additive (DDT doesn’t count, because it’s not a food additive, but a food contaminant, which is regulated not by the FDA, but by the Department of Agriculture).

So, in 1951, before Rachel Carson had left the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 11 years prior to the publication of her book Silent Spring, 21 years before the EPA banned use of DDT on crops, conservative scientists from Texas were alerting Congress to the dangers of DDT.

It’s in the history books.  You can look it up.

Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments | DDT, Health care, History, Junk science, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Review of Ken Ham’s book: Lying for Jesus

May 16, 2008

Well developed thoughts from an atheist on morality, especially the morality of creationism, in a review of Ken Ham’s book, The Lie: Evolution, from a blogger, In Case You’re Interested. Ham is the guy who raised nearly $30 million for the Creation Museum, a monument to denial of reality.

Coincidence? Ham’s book repeats all of the shoddy arguments that show up in Ben Stein’s mockumentary film.

2 Comments | Books, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Education, Evolution, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Oh, that explains it

May 16, 2008

Adnan Oktar ‘s conviction on charges of profiting from what amounts to a sex slave operation was a set up, he said.

Who would do such a dastardly thing?  The communists and the Freemasons!

This interview is from last September, but so far it’s perfectly in line with what his PR flacks are saying since the sentencing:  Video, selected transcripts.

I’m sure that’s what he tells his wife, Morgan Fairchild.

How can you keep from thinking this stuff is parody?  It looks and sounds like slightly amateurish “David Letterman” or “Saturday Night Live” routines.

Leave a Comment » | Adnan Oktar, Creationism, Politics, Religion, Scandals, Science, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Adnan Oktar: Creationist crash much racier in Spanish

May 15, 2008

Adnan Oktar? The Turkish creationist recently sentenced to three years in prison for using his creationist organization for personal gain?

The Reuters story in English didn’t note that part of the personal gain was a lot of sex with young girls and boys. That’s what the Spanish version says in elPeriodico.com.

The official spokesman for the many faces of Harun Yahya (Oktar’s pen name) says that the charges are unrelated to the creationism shtick. The Spanish version says Oktar was running a cult that involved recruiting young men by enticing them with young women.

How will the Discovery Institute spin this one?

With Turkey’s odd laws on press freedom and libel and slander, how can we really figure out what’s going on?

Raw Google translation of the Spanish version below the fold

Read the rest of this entry »

9 Comments | Adnan Oktar, Creationism, Education, History, Scandals, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Deserved praise for Rachel Carson

May 13, 2008

New article in Prospect praises Rachel Carson — the authors post the longer version at Crooked Timber.

It’s spring. It’s not a silent spring here in Dallas, thanks to the efforts of Ms. Carson and others more than 40 years ago.

It’s spring, and the efforts to smear Carson and all people who work for clean air and water and good wildlife habitat ramp up again. Articles accusing Carson of genocide are on the upswing. Iain Murray has a book out on the disreputable Regnery label, so desperate to smear that he names this author, and so morally vacuous he includes a chapter complaining about “endocrine disruptors” without acknowledging that one of the chief endocrine disruptors is DDT and its byproducts.

Take a deep breath. If your air is clean, you’re lucky. Now let’s go to work to make sure others can safely take a deep breath, too.

Tip of the old scrub brush to reader Bernarda.

More about Rachel Carson at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

Update: Why do we need to post links to the truth about Rachel Carson?  Blogs like Tarpon’s Swamp carry on the slanderous campaign of calumny against the truth.  Astoundingly crass, don’t you think?

2 Comments | Accuracy, Biology, DDT, Environmental protection, History, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quote of the moment: Ashley Montagu, on creationists

May 11, 2008

Ashley Montagu

“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”

Ashley Montagu (full citation needed!)

Tip of the old scrub brush to Aunt Betsy.

4 Comments | Creationism, Evolution, Quotes, Religion, Science | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Schadenfreude alert: Turkish creationist gets three-year sentence

May 10, 2008

Tape up your face to keep from smiling too broadly, schadenfreude being a sin or close to it.

Turkish creationist, bully and general gluteal carbuncle Adnan Oktar got sentenced to three years in prison yesterday, for the crime of creating an illegal organization for personal gain.

Adnan Oktar in October 2007 - on his yacht?

You remember Oktar: He’s the guy who publishes all those nasty anti-evolution and anti-science books, steals photos for his high-cost, low-information “atlas” of creationism, and successfully sued to shut down this blog’s availability in Turkey (Well, this blog and two million others on WordPress).

Reuters has a story on the affair:

A spokeswoman for his Science Research Foundation (BAV) confirmed to Reuters that Oktar had been sentenced but said the judge was influenced by political and religious pressure groups.

Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.

In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.

Oktar planned to appeal the sentence, a BAV spokeswoman said. No further details were immediately available.

Oh, yeah — those political and religious pressure groups. And Oktar’s high dollar bullying of government authorities — what is that?

European, and Turkey, laws against political views may trouble one, justly. In a perfect world, there would be no need for such things, with good and true ideas having a good shot at winning in a fair fight. Oktar specializes in the sort of thuggery that makes a fight for ideas unfair. We might hope this latest action will simply help keep the playing field even, level and fair.

Resources:

The news is oddly silent about this otherwise.

Tip of the old scrub brush to The Sensuous Curmudgeon.

3 Comments | Academic freedom, Adnan Oktar, Biology, Bogus history, Books, Censorship, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Justice, Law, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The Wrong Stuff, on purpose: Weikart misquotes Darwin

May 10, 2008

Richard Weikart is an arm of the Discovery Institute’s disinformation brigade. A couple of years ago he published a book attempting to link Darwin to the Holocaust in a blame-sharing arrangement. This book and some of its arguments appear to be the foundation of the text used to write the script for the mockumentary movie “Expelled!” featuring Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein.

Which is to say, the basis for the movie is dubious. Weikart’s scholarship creating links between Darwin, science and Hitler is quite creative. It is also based on arguments created from Darwin’s writings that mislead the innocent about evolution, science and history, or which get Darwin and evolution exactly wrong.

Michael Ruse published an op-ed in a Florida paper in February — a piece which is no longer available there (anybody got a copy? Nebraska Citizens for Science preserved a copy) — and Weikart responded, restating his creative claims. Alas for the truth, Weikart’s canards are still available at the Discovery Institute website, putting an interesting twist on Twain’s old line: The truth will go to bed at night while a falsehood will travel twice around the world as the truth kicks off its slippers.

Looking for Ruse’s piece, I found Weikart’s response here and here. I composed a quick response pointing out the problems, which I would like to posit here for the record — partly because I doubt Darwiniana gets much traffic, partly because the censor-happy folks at Discovery Institute don’t allow free discussion at their site, and partly so I can control it to make sure it’s not butchered as Weikart butchers Darwin’s text.

At Darwiniana I said:

Weikart’s strip quoting of Darwin is most disappointing. [Weikart wrote:]

Darwin claimed in chapter two of The Descent of Man that there were great differences in moral disposition and intellect between the “highest races” and the “lowest savages.” Later in Descent he declared, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Racial inegalitarianism was built into Darwin’s analysis from the start.

Darwin argued the differences in intellect and manners between the “highest” of men and the “lowest” of men did NOT change the fact that we are are all related — legally, Darwin’s argument would evidence a claim absolutely the opposite of what Weikart claims. Here are Darwin’s words from Chapter II of Descent of Man, as Darwin wrote them, without Weikart’s creative editing:

Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and be developed into each other. [emphasis added]

That’s not inegalitarianism at all — Darwin’s saying they are the same species, related closer than the poets allow. If we stick to the evidence, and [do] not wander off into poetic philosophy, we must acknowledge that Darwin’s own egalitarian spirit shows here in the science, too. It would be an odd kettle of fish indeed that a crabby guy like Hitler, who shared the antiscience bias of Weikart’s organization, would suddenly accept the science of a hated Englishman that ran contrary to his other philosophies. Who makes the error here, Hitler or Weikart? If they both think Darwin endorsed racism, they both do — but there is not an iota of evidence that Hitler based his patent racism on science, let alone the science of an Englishman.

As to the second quote, Weikart leaves the context out, and the context is everything. Darwin is not arguing that “savages” (the 19th century word for “aboriginals”) were less human, nor that they are a different species. He was arguing that in some future time there would appear creationists like Dr. Weikart’s colleagues at the Discovery Institute who will deny evolution because, once Europeans and others with guns conduct an unholy genocide (which Darwin writes against in the next chapter), and once humans wipe out chimpanzees, orangs and gorillas, the other great apes, the creationists can [then] dishonestly look around, blink their eyes and say, “Where are the links? There cannot be evolution between (Animal X) and humans!”

Darwin wrote:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. ‘Anthropological Review,’ April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, [emphasis added] and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

In the end, Darwin wrote against genocide, against racism, and in favor of the higher thinking abilities of all dark-skinned people. He wrote in favor of Christian morality. Darwin himself remained a faithful, tithing Christian to the end of his life.

Such a man, and such amazing science, deserve accurate history, not the fantastic, cowardly and scurrilous inventions Dr. Weikart has given them. We should rise to be “man in a more civilized state” as Darwin had hoped.

Update, July 24, 2008, nota bene:  To anyone venturing here from the Blogcatalog discussion on intelligent design: Get over to the site of Donald Johanson’s Institute for Human Origins, and especially look at the presentation “On Becoming Human.”  Also check out the Evolution Gateway site at Berkeley, especially this page which explains what evolution is, and this page which offers some introduction for what the evidence for evolution really is.  One quick answer to a question someone asked there:  Between H. erectus and modern humans, H. sapiens, in the time sequence we have fossils of H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis.  It’s pretty clear that Neandertal is not ancestral to modern humans, but instead lived alongside modern humans for 50,000 years or so from the Middle East through Southern Europe.  To the question of actual transitional fossils, you’d need to hit the paleontology journals — there are a lot.  You may also benefit from taking a look at the articles at this special Nature site.

10 Comments | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Darwin, Education, Ethics, Evolution, Famous quotes, Genocide, History, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Junk science, Lessons of history, Natural history, Quotes, Racism, Rampant stupidity, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, World War II | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Two million minute challenge

May 9, 2008

Just over two weeks to graduation, son James is concerned about global competitiveness.  He’s off to study physics at Lawrence University in the fall; he is insistent I note the news in the paper this week.  I still have an active  stake in public schools, after all — good call, James.  Here’s his concern, below.

Each child has two million minutes of life over the four years of high school. Whether the U.S. can remain competitive in the global economy depends more than ever on how each child allocates those two million minutes.

A new film raises concerns that U.S. children are losing out against students from India and China.

Dallas Morning News business reporter Jim Landers wrote about the movie, “Two Million Minutes,” in an article May 6. It’s an indication of something that this is front page in the business section — an indication of genuine concern, one may hope.

Science and mathematics education gets the major attention in the film. One wishes this film could compete with the anti-science film “Expelled!” which still lingers malodrously in a few theatres across the nation.

Landers wrote:

2 Million Minutes argues that “the battle for America’s economic future isn’t being fought by our government. It’s being fought by our kids.”

And in a series of international comparisons, the U.S. kids are not doing so well. The one area where they score better than the rest is self-confidence.

Once they leave the eighth grade, students have a little more than 2 million minutes to get ready for work or college and the transition to being an adult. This documentary, made by high-tech entrepreneur Robert Compton, follows two high school seniors in Carmel, Ind., two in Bangalore, India, and two in Shanghai, China, to see how they use their time.

All six are bright, accomplished, college-bound individuals.

Our students spend a lot of time watching TV, working part-time jobs, playing sports and video games, but not so much on homework. The Chinese kids spend an extra month in school each year, more hours at school each day and more hours doing homework. By the time they graduate, Chinese students have spent more than twice as much time studying as their U.S. counterparts.

While one may hope kids will pay attention, one may be unhappy to recall the topic, and many of the same or similar numbers, were published nationally in the 1980s by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) at the U.S. Department of Education. I remember it well, since I was publisher for some of the work.

The website for the movie offers more details, including a calendar of screenings. DVDs are available, but at very high prices — $25 for home use, $100 for school or non-profit use. I’d love to show it to students; I can get a couple of much-needed PBS videos for that same price. I hope producers will work to arrange distribution competitive with opposition movies like Stein’s. I’ll wager “Expelled!” will hit the DVD market at about $10.00, with thousands of DVDs available for free to churches and anti-science organizations.

Landers chalks up some of the stakes, and we should all pay attention:

Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia.

The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.

In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the United States, 13 percent study calculus.

For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.

The average American youth now spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.

SOURCE: “Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?” by Norman R. Augustine, chairman, National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” committee

3 Comments | Business, Capitalism, Economics, Education, Education quality, Education success, foreign affairs, Geography - Economic, Globalization, Higher education, History, Politics, Public education, Science, Teaching, Travel, Video and film, Voodoo science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Archaeology marches on! Carnivals to catch up

May 7, 2008

Testing, grading, trying to correct errors, and meanwhile progress continues.

Four Stone Hearth’s 40th edition is out today at the redoubtable Remote Central — but I missed #39 at Hominin Dental Anthro.

Real science is almost so much more interesting than faux science. #39 features the discussions about the claims that the Hobbits had dental fillings. While such a claim is damaging either to the claims of the age of Homo floresiensis or to the claims about the age of the specimens and, perhaps, human evolution, no creationist has yet showed his head in the discussion. When real science needs doing, creationists prefer to go to the movies. There is even a serious discussion of culture, and what it means to leadership of certain human tribes, with nary a creationist in sight.

While you’re there, take a careful look at the header and general design of Hominin Dental Anthro. Very pretty layout, don’t you think?

#40 at Remote Central is every bit as good. World history and European history teachers will want to pay attention to the posts on extinctions on the islands of the Mediterranean. Any one of the posts probably has more science in it in ten minutes’ reading than all of Ben Stein’s mockumentary movie, “Expelled!” That’s true especially when science is used to skewer the claims of the movie, or when discussion turns to the real problems the mockumentary ignores.

Enjoy the cotton candy.

1 Comment | Academic freedom, Accuracy, Ancient history, Anthropology, Archaeology, Education, Evolution, History, Native Americans, Natural history, Paleontology, Prehistory, Religion, Research, Science, Travel, World history | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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