Last month science won a victory when members of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) agreed to strip creationist, anti-science language out of biology standards.
New Texas Science Standards Will Be Debated and Voted Upon March 26-27 in Austin by the Texas State Board of Education — Public Testimony is March 25
Radical Religious-Right and Creationist members of the State Board of Education will attempt to keep the unscientific amendments in the Texas science standards that will damage science instruction and textbooks.
THE TEXAS SCIENCE STANDARDS SHOULD BE ADOPTED UNCHANGED!
In administrative hearings at the federal level, it’s a crime to knowingly present false testimony to an agency which might rely on that information to make a decision.
In Texas? The law is not so clear — but Discovery Institute’s John West celebrates false information used by the State Board of Education in considering science standards. (This is one reason, I suspect, why creationists are not more active at the federal level — their tactics are not only unethical, but also illegal.)
Sadly, shockingly but not surprisingly, the false information was presented by SBOE Chairman Don McLeroy in theform of nuggets from the creationist quote mines.
The indomitable and always informative Coturnix at Blog Around the Clock pointed to this excerpt from an interview Richard Dawkins did with Randolph Nesse. Randy Nesse is one of the most visible exponents of Darwinian medicine. Nesse argues that much of modern medicine, especially the treatments and cures, is incomprehensible except in the light of evolution theory.
In short, Nesse is saying that the ability of physicians to diagnose and treat disease depends on accurate understandings and applications of evolution theory.
Creationists are working to be sure that Nesse’s points are kept from Texas high school students in science classes. From this interview, you can see why scientists ask the State Board of Education to ask Texas educators to teach science instead. Actions of creationists are directed at preventing information such as this from getting to Texas students, to keep them in the dark.
From the video, you can get to the other four segments of Dr. Dawkins’ interview of Nesse; look at all of them, and ask yourself whether Texas children should be deprived of knowing about this stuff
“The Importance of Evolution for Medicine,” chapter by Nesse in Evolutionary Medicine, Second Edition, Edited by: W. R. Trevathan, J. J. McKenna and E. O. Smith, New York, Oxford University Press: 416-432
Testimony of Richard Neavel, PhD, to the Texas State Board of Education January 21, 2009
I oppose the inclusion of strengths and weaknesses in the TEKS and I’m going to do a show and tell about why.
At the last public hearing, Board member Gail Lowe asked me whether I was familiar with “polystrate fossils.” I had to admit that I wasn’t.
I Googled the term, and found creationist Paul Ackerman writing: “Polystrate fossils in numerous places around the world are one dramatic piece of evidence that the [young earth] creationists may be right [about earth’s history].” (Footnote [1])
Now I know why I wasn’t familiar with them. Geologists don’t refer to polystrate fossils – creationists do.
Ms. Lowe questioned me about the Lompoc whale fossil that was supposed to be “standing up” within many strata, that is layers of rock. How could this happen, she asked if the strata accumulated over millions of years. (See Figure 1 – next page and Footnote [2].)
That’s the kind of question a student might ask to demonstrate weaknesses of geologic theories.
I didn’t have an answer, so I researched it and here’s what I found.
The fossil is found in Miocene-age rocks about 10 million years old near Lompoc, California.
Creationists have cited it as an anomaly ever since it was uncovered.
Creationists explain it by saying a catastrophe, such as Noah’s flood, buried the whale very quickly.
Here’s what really happened.
Lompy, the whale, is eating plankton in a lagoon off the California coast 10 million years ago.
The ones he doesn’t eat die and their shells drift down to make a silica-rich, oozy sediment.
OH!. OH! Heart attack. Lompy dies, rolls over and sinks to the bottom of the lagoon. (Figure 2)
He rots away, and his skeleton gets covered with more sediment. (Figure 3)
The sediments harden to rock. Along comes a mountain-building force and the rocks are tilted up.
A company mines the rock, called diatomaceous earth, and uncovers Lompy’s skeleton. (Figure 4)
Creationists go wild – it’s a miracle – a whale on its tail.
I’m a PhD geologist and I didn’t have a ready answer to Ms. Lowe’s questions about polystrate fossils.
Do you think a high school science teacher would be able to answer a student’s questions about Lompy?
Members of the Board: Do you really want students to waste time discussing this kind of creationist nonsense in science class? Not weaknesses – just nonsense.
Every other creationist so-called “scientific weakness” can be explained just like this by real scientists — but not necessarily by high school teachers.
PLEASE! PLEASE! DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS EDUCATION. IT’S TOO IMPORTANT TO AMERICA’S FUTURE.
PLEASE BE PATRIOTIC. THANK YOU.
ANY QUESTIONS, CLASS?
[Pictures coming when I can get them to stick in the file! — E.D.]
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In Texas, however, evolution and science education are under assault today as the State Board of Education (SBOE) looks at revising science standards for public schools. Creationists have been sharpening their knives for months, with a stiff-necked creationist heading SBOE as a fifth columnist.
SBOE votes today (perhaps already, but I can’t find the story of a vote). At issue is the recommendations by scientists, educators and parents to teach evolution without creationist language that misleads students. SBOE Chairman Don McLeroy has vowed to insert more religion into science classes. The board is nearly evenly split between creationists and backers of science, so the vote could go either way.
Here at the Bathtub we’ll feature testimony from science supporters in a few posts, as we can snag them from witnesses.
McLeroy and his supporters at SBOE worked hard to stack the witness list, to prevent testimony from parents, teachers, scientists and educators who all favor new standards that eliminate a decade-old statement about “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution theory, hoary old creationist propaganda that has no place in a curriculum for the 21st century. Several science witnesses were bumped from testifying, and the board was quite rude to some of America’s best scientists, appearing to fear what the scientists had to say.
In fact, she calls public education itself a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” (Her kids have been home-schooled and attended private school.)
So on the slight possibility that she’s completely wrong about Barack Obama’s secret plan to overthrow America, I’d make her Texan of the Year for a second reason.
The Prophet Dunbar just might wake Texans up to the circus that is our State Board of Education.
That would be valuable, yes.
Note: I do object, with a smile, to Blow’s calling Dunbar our state Cassandra. Cassandra’s curse was that no one would listen to her, though she accurately foresaw the future. Dunbar doesn’t seem to be connected with accuracy in any discernible fashion.
More testimony from the Texas State Board of Education hearing in Austin yesterday, this time from a geologist, another member of Texas Citizens for Science:
My name is Paul Murray. I am a state-licensed geoscientist, I have BS and MS degrees in the geosciences, and I am a research scientist associate at the University of Texas at Austin. I am here today only as a private citizen and concerned scientist. I would like to speak to you about the often-misunderstood process of science.
Science begins with an idea. If you can write a coherent paragraph or two, you can submit it as an abstract to a conference. You then have the chance to present your work to other scientists. There, you will get feedback and questions from those scientists. You can use that feedback to expand your original work and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. The peer review process is brutal and impersonal; logical fallacies, bad arguments and unsupported conclusions will be threshed out; only the seed of good science will remain. When your work is published, others will analyze it again and again. Either it will grow as others build upon it, or some better idea will grow in its place.
Eventually, those ideas that become part of the accepted body of knowledge are used as the foundation upon which to build a well-rounded education. What this process does not include is an express lane for those who instead want to publish books, blogs and newspaper articles to go directly to our children’s classroom and foolishly ask them to sort out the good ideas from bad for themselves. This is like asking pilots in the second week of ground school to land a plane with an engine fire.
I am concerned by some of the “expert” feedback sought in revising the science standards. Stephen Meyer has an extensive publication record of books, reviews and newspaper articles, but has not once published a legitimate work in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. Given his well-documented anti-scientific rhetoric and lack of direct participation in the process of science, I see no experience that qualifies him to comment on either science or science education.
Doctors Garner and Seelke both have publication records that at least expose them to the process; however, neither has ever published a peer-reviewed work that is even remotely critical of Darwinian evolution, which is ironic because their criticism is their main source of notoriety.
Any legitimate scientific debate to be had over evolution would be welcomed by all scientists. Science is a strong, viable process because scientists reserve the highest honors for those who can tear down our best ideas and replace them with something better. As a famous resident of Crawford, Texas once said, “Bring it on!”
But please bring it on in the proper forum for scientific debate. I ask the State Board to adopt language that recognizes the process of educating future citizens and leaders of Texas is separate and distinct from the process of legitimate scientific debate.
That the creationist experts have not published seemed to be a surprise and a concern to the creationists on the SBOE who (we must assume) worked to have the out-of-staters appointed to the review panel contradicting 40 years of “keep it in Texas” tradition. According to some, Murray was “grilled” on his testimony; when applause broke out in support of Murray, Board Chairman Don McLeroy flew into action. Here’s how Steve Schafersman described it at Evosphere, where he live-blogged the event to its very late end:
Gail Lowe thanked Paul for mentioning that Charles Garner of Baylor did not have any peer-reviewed “anti-Darwinian” publications, and she did not choose him because of such literature. Paul said it was true that Garner had no anti-evolution peer-reviewed publications, but his Creationism was well-know among colleagues and students at Baylor. I think Lowe knew this and picked Garner for precisely this reason. As I reported before, Garner was the only Baylor science faculty member who did not criticize William Dembski when he arrived at Baylor under a special arrangement created by its new president.
Cynthia Dunbar said she didn’t think Galileo would have been peer-reviewed well by his fellow scientists, because he was persecuted by them. Paul corrected her, saying that Galileo was esteemed by his scientific peers and was persecuted by the religious authorities of the day. With this remark, an audience member applauded and was promptly ejected by Chairman Don McLeroy, who said in a very loud voice, “Sir, you may leave!” The fellow said “Thank you” and promptly left. I felt like joining him but I need to suffer a few more hours.
Dunbar next said she only advocates academic freedom, saying that this and having students learn about any problems of explanations faced by scientists is all that she and her colleagues want.
9:20 p.m.
News reports this morning not with that air of ennui that the SBOE is again contesting evolution and other science; some of the news reports could have been recycled from four years ago.
Dave Montgomery in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:AUSTIN — Texas became the latest stage for the debate about evolution and creationism Wednesday, as more than 80 witnesses trooped before the State Board of Education to weigh in on proposed changes in the public school science curriculum.With few exceptions, the speakers — scientists, teachers, clergy and grassroots activists — took the side of evolution, saying they feared that the proposed changes will open the door to the teaching of creationism or intelligent design.Board Chairman Don McLeroy said the lopsided turnout was part of an orchestrated campaign and flatly dismissed the notion that the board is intent on sabotaging the teaching of evolution in public schools, which would defy the U.S. Supreme Court.”This is all being ginned up by the evolution side,” McLeroy, of College Station, said in an interview during a break. “I’m a creationist, but I’m not going to put creationism in the schools.”
News 8 Austin, with a video link; I was unaware the Free Market Foundation had any dog in this fight, but News 8 finds them arguing against business in this case, arguing that creationism needs to be in the curriculum regardless the damage it does to Texas business — need more evidence that this is a political-religious fight, and not science?
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Andrew Ellington, the UT Austin biochemistry professor spoke and said that he has formed two biomedical companies that use “directed evolution” (he presumably means gene sequencing techniques) to manufactures and delivers drugs for humans. He started these in Boston, MA, and Durham, NC, not Austin, because he needed to be sure there were plenty of workers properly trained in evolutionary biology that could understand the modern recombinant DNA techniques that are needed to produce and deliver the drugs. He spoke harshly about the “retrograde” Texas SBOE and its interference in accurate and reliable science education.
Most of the members of SBOE were there in 2003 when they tried to trap Ellington into admitting that evolution couldn’t occur because of the “handedness” issue. Ellington’s lab was where the handedness issue was put to bed, and he instead delivered a 15-minute tour-de-force lecture on how handedness is not a problem for evolution at all.
Dr. Andrew Ellington, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Texas, spoke to reporters at a Texas Freedom Network press conference following his testimony to the Texas State Board of Education, November 19, 2008
I guess they didn’t listen then. Will they listen now?
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Many scientists and researchers call Texas home, working at the Johnson Space Center, Texas A&M University, the University of Texas, University of Texas at Dallas, Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University, Baylor University, Rice University, the University of Houston, Texas Tech, the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center . . . well, you get the idea.
These are people who work in science every day. Many of them dedicate their lives to research in biological sciences, where evolution theory is the foundation and framework that hold all the biological sciences together.
2. Texas science faculty (95 percent) want only evolution taught in science classrooms.
3. Scientists reject teaching the so-called “weaknesses” of evolution, with 94 percent saying that those arguments are not valid scientific objections to evolution.
4. Science faculty believe that emphasizing “weaknesses” of evolution would substantially harm students’ college readiness (79.6 percent) and ability to compete for 21st-century jobs (72 percent).
5. Scientists (91 percent) strongly believe that support for evolution is compatible with religious faith.
The survey results show that politicians who argue that there is a scientific controversy over evolution are not supported by scientists even in a state as conservative as Texas, [TFN President Kathy] Miller said.
Texas scientists report that their students from Texas too often are unprepared for college science curricula in biology because evolution wasn’t taught to them. This increases costs at the college level where remedial work must be done, and it discourages many capable students from pursuing careers in science. The report urges SBOE to listen to Texas scientists:
It is no exaggeration to say that Texas colleges and universities have a world-class science faculty and boast some of the most respected science educators found anywhere. These scientists should be an invaluable resource in crafting curriculum standards that prepare Texas schoolchildren for college and for the jobs of tomorrow. But is anyone listening? The State Board of Education would do well to heed the advice from these professors. The science education of a generation of students hangs in the balance. [page 9]
Update: Teachers may sign up to get CEU credits for this event. Check in at the sign-in desk before the event — certificates will be mailed from SMU later.
It will be one more meeting of scientists that Texas State Board of Education Chairman Dr. Don McLeroy will miss, though he should be there, were he diligent about his public duties.
Dr. Barbara Forrest,one of the world’s foremost experts on “intelligent design” and other creationist attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution, will speak in the Faith and Freedom Speaker Series at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. Her evening presentation will serve as a warning to Texas: “Why Texans Shouldn’t Let Creationists Mess with Science Education.”
Dr. Forrest’s presentation is at 6:00 p.m., in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center in the Hughes-Trigg Theatre, at SMU’s Campus. The Faith and Freedom Speaker Series is sponsored by the Texas Freedom Network’s (TFN) education fund. Joining TFN are SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, Center for Teaching Excellence, Department of Anthropology, Department of Biological Sciences, and Department of Philosophy.
Dr. Barbara Forrest
is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. She is the co-author with Paul R. Gross of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (2004; 2007), which details the political and religious aims of the intelligent design creationist movement. She served as an expert witness in the first legal case involving intelligent design, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the National Center for Science Education and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Widely recognized as a leading expert on intelligent design, she has appeared on Larry King Live, ABC’s Nightline, and numerous other television and radio programs.
Would your local paper have the guts to report on this issue, for your local schools? (The Times went to Florida; heaven knows few Florida papers could cover the issue in Florida so well.)
What is your local school board doing to support science education, especially for evolution, in your town? Or is your local school board making it harder for teachers to do their jobs?
What is your state education authority doing to support science education, especially in evolution, in your state? Or is your state school board working to make it harder for teachers to do their jobs, and working to dumb down America’s kids?
Do your school authorities know that they bet against your students when they short evolution, because knowledge about evolution is required for 25% of the AP biology test, and is useful for boosting scores on the SAT and ACT?
Does your state science test test evolution?
Do your school authorities understand they are throwing away taxpayer dollars when they encourage the teaching of voodoo science, like intelligent design?
It takes a good paper like the Times to lay it on the line:
The Dover decision in December of that year [2005] dealt a blow to “intelligent design,” which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, and has been widely promoted by religious advocates since the Supreme Court’s 1987 ban on creationism in public schools. The federal judge in the case called the doctrine “creationism re-labeled,” and found the Dover school board had violated the constitutional separation of church and state by requiring teachers to mention it. The school district paid $1 million in legal costs.
That hasn’t slowed the Texas State Board of Education’s rush to get the state entangled in litigation over putting religious dogma in place of science. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is already embroiled in one suit, brought by the science-promoting science curriculum expert they fired for noting in an e-mail that science historian Barbara Forrest was speaking in a public event in Austin. TEA may well lose this case, and their side is not helped when State Board Chairman Don McLeroy cavorts with creationists in a session teaching illegal classroom tactics to teachers. Clearly Texas education officials are not reading the newspapers, the court decisions, or the science books.
Here’s one of the charts accompanied the article. While you read it, consider these items: The top 10% of science students in China outnumber all the science students in the U.S.; the U.S. last year graduated more engineers from foreign countries than from the U.S.; the largest portion were from China. China graduated several times the number of engineers the U.S. did, and almost all of them were from China.
Copyright 2008 by the New York Times
Can we afford to dumb down any part of our science curriculum, for any reason? Is it unfair to consider creationism advocates, including intelligent design advocates, as “surrender monkeys in the trade and education wars with China?”
Update: 10:00 p.m. Central, this story is the most e-mailed from the New York Times site today; list below the fold.
Last week, AiG speaker Mike Riddle did a series of talks in Brenham, Texas. On the first day, Mike did four different sessions for 1st–6th graders. He usually speaks to young people on topics like “The Riddle of the Dinosaurs,” AiG’s well-known “7C’s of History,” and fossils.
On the next day, Mike did four special sessions for teachers. Each presentation was geared to help instructors be better prepared to teach origins in the public schools. In addition to speaking on what creationists believe, he spoke on understanding presuppositions and assumptions in the origins debate–and using critical thinking skills. Mike also had the opportunity to meet with the Chairman of the Texas State School Board, Don McLeroy (a biblical creationist), and gave presentations to an open audience at the Brenham High School auditorium.
Mike and Don McLeroy (Chairman, Texas State School Board)
“Special sessions for teachers?” Oy vey.
1. I’ll wager, if those were real, public school teachers, they were given continuing education credits for attending. That would be illegal, especially if Riddle did not preface his presentations with a legal disclaimer that what he urges is contrary to Texas science standards and contrary to the Constitution. Want to wager whether he did?
2. What’s McLeroy doing there? Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to maintain antiseptic separation from such controversial stuff? They fire people from the TEA for attending sessions that are legal and support the Texas standards. What sort of Quisling action is this on McLeroy’s part?
3. Is Rick Perry watching? The state’s legal fees will rise dramatically as a result of this kind of bad judgment at the SBOE. Can Texas taxpayers afford this?
4. Why does Don McLeroy hate Texas’s smarter, college-bound children so?
It takes a particular form of chutzpah to stand idly by while qualified science teachers are fired from the state’s education agency for promoting science, and then go cavort with creationists. It may not be cowardice exactly, but courage is its antonym.
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Creationists in Texas claim to have found a stone with footprints of a human and a dinosaur.
No, I’m not kidding.
Hoax “dinosaur and human footprints” claimed to be found in the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas.
Could you make this stuff up? Well, yeah, I guess some people think you could. Somebody did make this stuff up.
According to a report in the too-gullible Mineral Wells Index, long-time hoaxster and faux doctorate Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum announced the rock was found just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park. The area has been the site of more than one creationist hoax since 1960, and was an area rife with hoax dinosaur prints dating back to the 1930s. (See these notes on the warning signs of science hoaxes and history hoaxes.)
The estimated 140-pound stone was recovered in July 2000 from the bank of a creek that feeds the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, located about 53 miles south of Fort Worth. The find was made just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park, a popular destination for tourists known for its well-preserved dinosaur tracks and other fossils.
The limestone contains two distinct prints – one of a human footprint and one belonging to a dinosaur. The significance of the cement-hard fossil is that it shows the dinosaur print partially over and intersecting the human print.
In other words, the stone’s impressions indicate that the human stepped first, the dinosaur second. If proven genuine, the artifact would provide evidence that man and dinosaur roamed the Earth at the same time, according to those associated with the find and with its safekeeping. It could potentially toss out the window many commonly held scientific theories on evolution and the history of the world.
Except, as you can see, Dear Reader and Viewer, it’s a hoax. No dinosaur has a footprint exactly resembling the print of Fred Flintstone’s pet Dino, as the rock shows; nor do human footprints left in mud look like the print shown.
Dear God, save us from such tom-foolery, please.
To the newspaper’s credit, they consulted with an expert who knows better. The expert gave a conservative, scientific answer, however, when the rock deserved a chorus of derisive hoots:
However, Dr. Phillip Murry, a vertebrate paleontology instructor in the Geoscience department of Tarleton State University at Stephenville, Texas, stated in his response to an interview request: “There has never been a proven association of dinosaur (prints) with human footprints.”
The longtime amateur archeologist who found the fossil thinks that statement is now proven untrue.
“It is unbelievable, that’s what it is,” Alvis Delk, 72, said of what could be not only the find of a lifetime, but of mankind.
Delk is a current Stephenville and former Mineral Wells resident (1950-69) who said he found the rock eight years ago while on a hunt with a friend, James Bishop, also of Stephenville, and friend and current fiancee Elizabeth Harris.
Yes, it’s unbelievable.
For comparison, real hominid footprints look much different — the print below was left in a thin-layer of volcanic ash about 4 million years ago, 61 million years after dinosaurs went extinct, according to timelines corroborated by geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, nuclear physicists and biologists:
Print of a hominid, found at Laetoli, Tanzania, Africa; image from Stanford University. Photo: J. Reader/SPL
With luck, serious scientists will get a chance to analyze the prints soon, and note that they are hoaxes. If history is any guide, however, Baugh and his comrades will keep the rock from scientific analysis, claiming that scientists refuse to analyze it.
The rock is approximately 30 inches by 24 inches. The human footprint, with a deep big toe impression, measures 11 inches in length. Baugh said the theropod track was made by an Acrocanthosaurus. Baugh said this particular track was likely made by a juvenile Acrocanthosaurus, one he said was probably about 20 feet long, stood about 8 feet tall and walked stooped over, weighing a few tons.
Its tracks common in the Glen Rose area, the Acrocanthosaurus is a dinosaur that many experts believe existed primarily in North America during the mid-Cretaceous Period, approximately 125 million to 100 million years ago.
Baugh said Delk’s discovery casts doubts on that theory. Baugh said he believes both sets of prints were made “within minutes, or no more than hours of each other” about 4,500 years ago, around the time of Noah’s Flood. He said the clay-like material that the human and dinosaur stepped in soon hardened, becoming thick, dense limestone common in North Texas.
He said the human print matches seven others found in the same area, stating the museum has performed excavations since 1982 in the area Baugh has dubbed the “Alvis Delk Cretaceous Footprint” discovery.
Delk’s own daughter, Kristi Delk, is a geology major at Tarleton State University in Stephenville and holds different beliefs from her dad about the creation of Earth and the origins of man.
She said she wants to see data from more tests before jumping to any conclusions.
“I haven’t come to terms with it,” she said. “I am skeptical, actually.”
Dinosaur Valley State Park website. Dinosaur Valley is not the “best” park in Texas’s outstanding system of more than 100 outstanding parks, but it’s a jewel. It operates on a shoestring, but it operates with some of the most dedicated government employees anywhere, in one of the most dedicated government agencies anywhere. You should go see the park. Camp there. Spend a lot of time in the river and elsewhere looking at tracks. Talk to the rangers. This is the real stuff, folks, in the wild. You can touch prehistory. God left it there for you, and to irritate creationists to the brink of screaming insanity. Go see it.
For comparison, Leakey’s and Hay’s 1979 paper in Nature on the Laetoli footprints; “When a volcanic eruption sent a rain of ash over what is now Tanzania, an adult and child, probably both Australopithecus afarensis, set out to watch the show — leaving, as a poignant souvenir, perfect and very modern-looking footprints, preserved in the ashfall.”
Here is how to fake a patina that will look like this fake fossil: Brush the surface with vinegar, and then sprinkle with baking powder followed by baking soda, and let dry. Repeat until you are happy with the results. This is not the only way, or even the best way. But it is simple, and will fool the average fool. Especially easy if they want to be fooled.
So, having spent a little bit more time on the photo of this fake, I feel that I understand a bit more about how it was produced. A legitimate dinosaur track was found and removed. Incompetent, unprofessional “Cleaning” damaged it. An parital overprint, or simple erosion depression was “improved” by adding “toes.” The faked surfaces were smothed over with a simple kitchen concoction to make a “patina.” Artifact fabricators next bury the fake for a year or two, or they smear it with fertilizer and leave it exposed. This helps weather the object and obscure tool marks.
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I don’t vouch for the book — yet, at least. I’ve not read it. I find the study of science, and especially of evolution, offers no barrier to my faith, nor does my faith offer any barrier to my study of science. My faith, which requires an ethical life, offers barriers to creationism — a subject of other posts. But thank God for Charles Darwin? Sure.
“Thank God for Charles Darwin.” T-shirt design from Redbubble
We also need to thank the federal courts, where the First Amendment is enforced, keeping unreasonable fables from diluting science education in public schools.
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
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