November 12, 2006
Stu Hasic argues that a photo from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) “killed God,” or at least the notion that God played a role in creation.
Where do bloggers get such fantastic, erroneous ideas? My educated guess is that most preachers looking at this photograph of hundreds of galaxies (no, not individual stars), deep in space and therefore deep back in time, would be awestruck — and were they to preach about it, they’d call this evidence of God’s hand in creation, making a leap in logic and faith about equal to that of Hasic, but in the opposite direction. Hasic’s post nicely encapsulates some of the knowledge we get from the photo, but then he leaps to an unwarranted conclusion.
Hasic argues that since the photo is a brilliant refutation of some of the less scientific claims of creationism, it disproves God.
If Man is the purpose of creation, why did it take so long to create Man? And what’s with all the over-the-top elaborate sky decorations? Surely some painted white dots on a big canvas hung around the Earth would have sufficed?
Thanks should go to Hubble for opening our eyes. If only some men would open theirs. Being a Christian or being a Muslim means being different. Being a Human means being the same.
I can’t speak for all Christians, of course, but I’d wager most Christians would agree with Hasic’s last sentence there: Being a human means being the same as other humans. That’s rather the point of much of scripture (see Ecclesiastes, for many examples). I would also note that most Christians like the Hubble photos as much as anyone else. Photos of “star incubators” (see end of the post for an example) are among the more popular images in religious publications in the last decade. Contrary to Hasic’s assertion, the photo offers no challenge at all to any belief of most Christians. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
October 26, 2006
Owl, by Chrys Rodrigue
You should read this post. It demonstrates why P. Z. Myers is one of the most-read bloggers in the world — he writes so well, on topics that are so dramatically interesting.
Myers tells an interesting vignette of a professor of gross anatomy who was a wizard of illustration in colored chalk.
Visuals, especially spectacular visuals in color, contribute to the ability of students to learn the material illustrated. Drawing is rapidly becoming a lost art, a victim of too-easy-to-use clipart and Bush’s dour view of education that excludes music, dancing, painting and drawing, anything that might distinguish us from lower animals or otherwise bring delight and insight into human existence (and other factors). How could PowerPoint seriously compare to live art in a classroom?
Presentations are always made better with specific, relevant illustrations. Most people are at least partly visual learners, with about four times as much information going through eyes on illustrations than going through ears hearing a lecture, or eyes reading text. I use a simple tree to illustrate the Constitution, its roots in the consent of the people, its three branches of government, and fruits of liberty and freedom. Students — whether budding lawyers, eager Boy Scouts, or complacent high school kids — get the point, and do well on the exams.
Myers’ tribute to Professor Snider is touching, informative, and inspiring. Where is Professor Snider today?
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Posted by Ed Darrell
October 22, 2006
Santayana’s line at the top of this blog is a key justification for what historians do. Avoiding bad results by studying history is not only an exercise in diplomacy and economics, however. Knowing what happened in the past often offers windows into what is happening today, in economics, diplomacy, education, agriculture, transportation, health care, a hundred other fields, and in wildlife management — and what we should do about it
Ralph Maughn’s Yellowstone region-specific blog is one of my late favorites, Yellowstone National Park being part of my childhood in so many way. My wife and I honeymooned in Yellowstone (in January — have you ever had Old Faithful in the moonlight, with only you and a dozen bison as witnesses, no other humans?). My oldest brother is interred there, after a career that saw him finally achieve recognition in the desert southwest — he still preferred the Yellowstone.
Human observation of the area is too recent to make a lot of long-term predictions. We simply do not know how the enormous ecosystems in that relatively small area behaved in response to natural and artificial changes in the past. So we read these articles talking about change with trepidation. Do they show trends? Is this the future that must be, as Scrooge asked the third angel?
Articles in the Jackson Star-Tribune probably will not be picked up by the news syndicators and published in a dozen newspapers nationally, let alone a hundred or more. News of our National Parks, our national treasures, often is limited to the regions where they are. But they affect all of us. The Yellowstone area strides two river drainage systems, the Missouri to the Atlantic, and the Columbia to the Pacific. It is a centacosm (too big for a microcosm) of what is happening worldwide.
To Yellowstone, we are Scrooge. If only the path we need to pursue to be the new Scrooge were clear, decisions would be easier. And so we study history, seeking sources for history of natural things that can tell us what happened 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, and longer ago.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
October 6, 2006
U.S. scientists swept the Nobel prizes in science this year — in Medicine or Physiology, in Chemistry, and in Physics. I noted earlier that I suspected most Nobel winners this year would, again, be products of public schools. (I have not yet got biographies of each winner to confirm that.)
Beneath the successes at the top simmers a lot of pending gloom, however. P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula points to concerns among science educators about a huge gap between our top achievers and the rest of us. He cites an Associated Press story, and it in turn calls up the 2002 survey by the National Science Foundation that found woeful ignorance of basic science stuff among U.S. kids and adults.
Basic research and practical applications of science drove U.S. economic achievement through the end of the 19th century and through most of the 20th century. China and India far outpace the U.S. in producing new engineers today, however, and European research centers simply have greater scientific capacity in many areas, especially since the end of the plans for a U.S. superconducting supercollider particle accelerator, more than a decade ago.
Rhodes Scholar, former U.S. Senator, NBA and NCAA basketball all-star Bill Bradley once said that it’s easier to get to the number 1 position than it is to stay there. The ascendancy of the U.S. in science and engineering achievement occurred decades ago. Without serious, planned work to stay there, some other nation will take over the lead in each area of science, probably within the next 20 years — perhaps within the next decade.
I’ll try to find links, but my memory brings up a couple of studies that show that in 4th grade, U.S. kids are at the head of the pack in science achievement. By 8th grade, they start to fall behind the leaders. By 12th grade, U.S. kids are far behind almost all kids in other industrialized nations. Something we do wrong between 4th grade and 12th grade is sapping the competitive ability of the nation. We need to fix it.
Dr. Myers has some suggestions well worth considering.
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1 Comment | Education, Public education, Science, State school boards, TEKS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
September 15, 2006
I’d always thought the Republicans would love to roll back history to the Middle Ages, but who’d have thought they’d set their sights on returning to the Carboniferous?
— P.Z. Myers
Myers is, as Murphy was, an optimist.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
September 10, 2006
My undergraduate alma mater, the University of Utah, had an interesting fellow in the English department who collected stories that people swore were true, but were not. He invented a term for them: “Urban legends.” Jan Brunvand paid due academic attention to the folklore aspects of the stories, especially in his books, such as The Choking Doberman and The Vanishing Hitchhiker. (Alas, no, I never took a class with him.) I hope he copyrighted and trademarked the phrase, though I doubt he did. Brunvand was the first in what is now a minor industry in debunking bad information — see Snopes.com, for example.
Were I a young graduate student in folklore, I’d be collecting internet hoaxes the same way, and seeking a term to describe them that would be the label for the next round. Or, perhaps, Dr. Brunvand is still collecting them on his ski or fly-fishing trips.
In a post I just found from August 6, Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomer debunked, for the third time, an internet hoax about Mars. No kidding. “Mars will look as big as the Moon!” the e-mail exclaims.
No, it won’t.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
September 2, 2006
Scientists sometimes say that the more we know, the more questions there are to answer. Not only do advances in sciences produce new questions, such as working and workable theories in quantum mechanics in physics — there is also a vast trove of stuff to know in other areas.
For example, as humans more carefully explore Earth, we keep finding species previously unknown. We call them “new” species, but of course, they are not new. They are living populations which have simply escaped the notice of humans, or of humans who publish in science magazines.
I found this account of new monkey species at . . .free your imagination, a blog dedicated to such esoteric and up-to-date knowledge. (Found it through WordPress’s “tag surfing” feature.)
38 primate species have been described since 1990, and there are at least 20 more, known, but not yet described. This should excite kids who want to be scientific explorers.
And, true to form, anti-conservationists will point to this fact of “new” species, and argue that we have no need for the Endangered Species Act. Just watch.
What else do we not know?
Drawings and caption from National Geographic: Two new primates, Callicebus stephennashi (above) and C. bernhardi (below), were recently discovered in the Amazon.
Sketches courtesy of Stephen Nash/Conservation International
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 27, 2006
This might be a better topic for another blog I have in early creation stages — except that the difficulties with the anti-science program broadcast this weekend by D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries are exactly the same difficulties the same group has with history, and the concerns about revising history textbooks and history classes — to make them inaccurate and militantly polemic — also come from the same groups. The history errors alone in Kennedy’s program justify discussing it here. Read the rest of this entry »
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2 Comments | Bogus history, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Education, Evolution, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Intelligent Design, Science, Science and faith, Voodoo history | Tagged: Bogus history, Charles Darwin, Creationism, D. James Kennedy, Educaiton, Evolution, History Revisionism, Hoaxes, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Intelligent Design, Science, Science and Faith, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 25, 2006
Public broadcasting’s unpopularity among certain members of the conservative punditry may be squarely laid at the foot of public broadcasting’s tendency to smash inaccurate myths and unworthy icons. While certain pay-for-pray televangelists like to fill their coffers by bashing Darwin, public radio programs look deeper, and find different answers to some questions.
American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith has an archived program on Darwin and his journals, in which one may see a gentle, religious man struggling with the knowledge that nature rarely shows what the pulpit pounders claim.
For example, here is an excerpt from Darwin’s journals in which he wonders about the power of ecological niches to pull evolutionary advance from “lower species” — if humans ceased to exist, Darwin wonders, would monkeys evolve to fill the niche? If angels did not exist, would humans evolve?
Darwin as a religious man, a man concerned with morals and a concern for the donwtrodden of societies, is a picture often hidden by those who attack science. The picture tends to rebut, refute and make silly so many of the claims of the enemies of evolution.
Here is another excerpt, in which he notes that humans are one species, not separate species as the creationists of his day claimed. This is exactly contrary to the views argued by the Coral Ridge Ministries’ anti-Darwin diatribe scheduled for this weekend. The website for Speaking of Faith has several excerpts from Darwin’s diaries and notebooks in which he explicitly ponders issues of faith and evolution, well worth the read and MP3 listen.
The program’s host, Krista Tippett, has several essays (not necessarily on Darwin, but on other religious people who ponder the meaning of science knowledge) which also provide rebuttal to the distorted views of Darwin popularly held. She writes about Darwin’s journals, for example, “There is much in Darwin’s thought that would ennoble as well as ground a religious view of life and of God.”
That’s a view D. James Kennedy at Coral Ridge Ministries does not admit. He is much the poorer for the log that blinds him.
Nota bene: Also see the link to The Darwin Digital Library. It is a useful source of original documents and solid commentary.
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6 Comments | Accuracy, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Ethics, Evolution, History, Intelligent Design, Science, Science and faith | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 24, 2006
Controversy still simmers over the pending broadcast from Coral Ridge Ministries (CRM) of a program that claims links from evolution theory to the Holocaust. Apart from being incredibly simplistic historically, the claims raise the ire of scientists and biologists who say CRM gets most of the science and the history of the science wrong.
Rev. D. James Kennedy’s program is titled “Fatal Fruit.” Alas, it appears to contain many fatal flaws of history.
Several bloggers raised issues of accuracy in the past week, and especially after Dr. Francis Collins complained about the use of an interview he granted on such a cause (which he claims to be specious), Coral Ridge Ministries changed its promotional material, deleting references to Collins and to Ann Coulter, whose recent book deals in anti-Darwin disinformation. In response, CRM trotted out historian Richard Weikart, a fellow at the anti-Darwin Discovery Institute in Seattle, whose recent book was titled From Darwin to Hitler.
Ed Brayton notes difficulties with Weikart’s thesis, and the fact that most historians disagree with Weikart and CRM, in a post at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
I am struck by the irony of CRM’s demonization of science and Darwin, in a program complaining about the effects of Hitler’s rise to power and his use of such demonization tactics against Jews, Gypsies, Africans, Arabs and others.
You may wish to look at my earlier post, with links to other stories.
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4 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Creationism, History Revisionism, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Intelligent Design, Science, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 23, 2006
No, not “dark matters,” nor even “a dark matter.” Dark matter. The stuff that we can’t see that may make up three quarters of the matter in the universe.
And with news this big, it still took a couple of days to get to me, courtesy of P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula. Why wasn’t this on the front page of every newspaper on the planet?
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced they have direct evidence of dark matter. Here’s the photograph:
Caption: This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the “bullet cluster.” This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang.
Hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the “normal,” or baryonic, matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters. The concentration of mass is determined using the effect of so-called gravitational lensing, where light from the distant objects is distorted by intervening matter. Most of the matter in the clusters (blue) is clearly separate from the normal matter (pink), giving direct evidence that nearly all of the matter in the clusters is dark.
I am old enough to be able to recall that the news of Wilson and Penzias’ confirmation of the Big Bang, and consequent disproof of Steady State, also was not front page news.
All of which suggests newspapers have their priorities wrong.
NASA’s press release was headlined simply, but importantly: NASA Finds Direct Proof of Dark Matter. Go to the NASA site and look at the great animations.
Scientists usually have a few beers after such news. It may be a good time to purchase stock in breweries.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
August 14, 2006
I’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 »
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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
August 7, 2006
This week marks the 61st anniversaries of the U.S. dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).
This is the only event that occasionally causes me to wish for school in early August. Marking the anniversaries in a U.S. history class could be a useful exercise. Texas’ TEKS require students to know a bit about President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, and especially his reasoning behind the decision. To get there in an orderly fashion, and to keep kids captivated by this most interesting part of recent history, I think a class needs to lay the background with the end of the war in Europe (especially D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge) with troops hoping to go home to the U.S. and being diverted to the Pacific, the background of the U.S.’s “island-hopping” strategy, especially the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the carnage that was required to take the islands, and the background of the Manhattan Project, from Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt through the secret cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Trinity Project at White Sands, the training of the bombers at Wells Wendover, Nevada, and the World War I service of Harry Truman himself. It’s a fascinating history that, the Texas tests show and my classroom experience confirms, students know very little about.
As with the misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which I reported earlier today, this history of atom bombs informs us of policy choices available and necessary in our current dealings with North Korea, Iran, Ukraine and Russia, among other nations.
Japanese foundations sponsor trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for U.S. reporters, and there used to be one for high school teachers, too. It’s a history I lived with for a decade trying to get a compensation bill for downwind victims of fallout from our atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada. I wish more people knew the stories.
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5 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Curricula, Harry Truman, History, Nuclear weapons, Science, TAKS, Technology, TEKS, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
August 7, 2006
Utah’s State Board of Education voted late last week to toughern the graduation requirements, with 18 state-mandated topics — requiring another year of science, another year of math, and another year of “language arts.” Here’s the story from the August 5 Deseret News.
Michigan recently strengthened graduation requirements, too, as noted in this story from the Macomb Daily.
Missouri joined a number of states (Texas and Utah) that require financial literacy, reported in this story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
[Please send me a note if your state is considering or has recently adopted new graduation standards, to edarrell AT sbcglobal DOT net.]
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Posted by Ed Darrell
July 25, 2006
History 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 »
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 