I don’t want to imply that every geologist should be visiting third-grade classrooms and discussing radiometric dating with the students. That wouldn’t be comfortable for most of us, or most of them. But we can support a strong geological curriculum by getting involved in state and local textbook adoption procedures and curriculum development. Those folks need good scientific advice, and we need to listen to them to see how we can best meet their needs.
I’m actually going to suggest something even easier — something that most of us who teach in colleges and universities do all the time: improve the textbooks we use.
Texas’s state school board is running in exactly the opposite direction, undertaking several initiatives to dumb down science texts, even after approving a requirement for a fourth year of science classes required for graduation.
We can hope Texas’s policy makers will listen to veteran scientist educators like Padian.
“Padian is a professor of Integrative Biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley, and president of the National Center for Science Education.”
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s specific to evolution, so biology, psychology and social studies teachers should take note (yes, social studies — the Scopes trial shows up even in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)).
But teachers under fire for other things should read it, too.
Laden also links to last year’s special edition of the McGill Journal of Education, from Canada’s McGill University. That’s the issue on teaching evolution. It’s got something for policy makers, too — see the article by Dr. Eugenie Scott on why “teaching the controversy” is academically flaccid, and not legally correct.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Attention focused on one usually-obscure race for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education helped Republican Pat Hardy turn back a malicious challenge. Hardy won her primary against secretive Barney Maddox, a urologist who spent a lot of money on specifically-targeted mailings, but who also refused to speak with reporters or anyone else asking questions.
Showing just how odd and treacherous is the situation in Texas, Hardy got assists from science bloggers across the nation, though her position on science is far from what science advocates would like. Hardy’s genial “don’t gut the textbooks” stand was preferred to Maddox’s mad-dog, teach-creationism-in-science position.
Maddox refused to comment on the election, of course.
Social conservatives failed in their attempt to take control of the State Board of Education on Tuesday when incumbent Pat Hardy of Fort Worth retained her seat against a challenge from Cleburne’s Barney Maddox.
Hardy, a career educator, has been a moderate voice on the board. The 15-member body still shows a close ideological split, but Hardy has helped keep it on a straight path.
The board’s powers come from its ability to influence the public school curriculum and the selection of textbooks. District 11covers about three-fourths of Tarrant County, plus all of Ellis, Johnson and Parker counties. There is no Democratic nominee for this seat in the November election.
Maddox’s entry in the race had set the stage for debate over the scientific theory of evolution, which he has described as “fairy tales.” Hardy took a better course: Teach kids about all theories, she said, from creation to evolution, and give them enough information to make up their own minds about what to believe.
Spoken like a teacher — and a person who should hold a seat on the State Board of Education
While the minions and poobahs at the Texas Education Agency work to frustrate the teaching of evolution in science classes, real Texas scientists practicing real Texas science dig away at the Gault Site, an archaeological dig that recently has yielded 1.5 million artifacts from ancient Texans, Clovis Man, living 13,500 years ago.
So far nothing indicates any of these ancient people were Baptist or creationist. Surprisingly, perhaps, they didn’t play football, either.
Pamela LeBlanc, a digger at the site wrote the article in first person.
The pasture, named for the Gault family who once farmed the land, made its debut into professional archaeology in 1929 when J.E. Pearce, founder of the UT archaeology department, excavated here. Over the years, visitors could pay a fee to dig at the farm, hauling off what they found and leaving behind shallow craters.
Today, it’s considered the most prolific site of its kind. Gault has generated more than half of the excavated artifacts from the Clovis people, long considered the first human culture in America. Until recently, most archaeologists believed the Clovis came from Asia across the Bering Strait land bridge at the end of the last ice age about 13,500 years ago, walked down the ice-free corridor of Western Canada and slowly spread across the Americas.
Collins and others believe people arrived in the Americas much earlier, probably by boat along the North Atlantic and North Pacific shores. And they believe this site will help prove it. “What we’re trying to do here is expand on our knowledge of the peopling of the Americas,” Collins says.
Even better, you can volunteer to help out at the site, to dig for prehistoric information.
To volunteer at the Gault site, contact Cinda Timperley at ctimperley@austin.rr.com. Membership in the Gault School of Archaeological Research is not required to volunteer, but members have priority. Membership is $10 for students; $45 for adults; and $65 for families. The school also needs non-monetary donations of everything from equipment to electrical work. For more information, call 471-5982.
Not only does the Austin paper print news that sticks in the craw of Don McLeroy, they give details on how you can participate in making such news.
You know the syndrome: Someone is caught in a scandal relating to sex, and then they take an offer to pose nude for pornography, and end up merely as a naked embarrassment to everybody.
Same syndrome, but mercifully, without the nudism (yet): Creationists taking it just a bit too far. Two examples.
Example 1: Don McLeroy, newly appointed to the chair of the Texas State Board of Education, was embarrassed by the release of tapes of a talk he gave in a church, demonstrating for anyone who didn’t already know that he’s opposed to teaching science in biology, especially if that science involves evolution. Bad enough?
McLeroy may have posted the transcript to try to correct a statement the transcripts say he made: “”Remember keep chipping away at the objective empirical evidence.”
At McLeroy’s website, it’s listed like this: “Remember keep chipping away with the objective empirical evidence.” It’s a subtle difference, but it suggests McLeroy is ill-informed enough that he thinks there may be evidence to support creationism, rather than devious enough to urge the denial of reality. Bob, at Hot Dogs, Pretzels and Perplexing Questions, wrote:
I’m not quite sure what to make of all this. Was it a Freudian slip? Did he innocently misspeak? Or could it be that he edited the text after the fact? Either way, I don’t think it makes that much of a difference. They have no objective empirical evidence of their own to chip away with, just the objective empirical evidence they stubbornly attempt to chip away at, and to no avail. I’ll leave the discovery of any other discrepancies as an exercise for the reader, at least for now.
McLeroy shows no desire to appear neutral, as employees of TEA are now required to be toward science — or “neutered” toward science, as one might say.
Example 2: McLeroy’s Islamist partner, Adnan Oktar ( aka “Harun Yahya”), is a continuing embarrassment. This isn’t news, but I stumbled across the actual images he pirated — and they are impressive.
The book is beautifully printed and bound, with hundreds of full color plates — it must have cost a fortune to produce.
And so, Oktar had to make economies somewhere. He chose to plagiarize photos and not bother with lawyers to procure rights to print the photos. He also chose to abandon the use of fact checkers, it appears.
Jesus urged his followers to become “fishers of men.” McLeroy and Oktar have confused such imprecations, horribly, with the hoax P. T. Barnum line, that there’s a sucker born every minute.
Owen’s lures are designed to fool fish. If McLeroy and Oktar have their way, Texas school children may end up as ignorant as the fish, and as easily fooled.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
One of our Texas biology instructors, Steve Bratteng in Austin, wrote for the Austin American-Statesman about the reality of evolution-based medicine: It works.
If you are unaffected by one of these maladies, you’re very lucky. If you are affected by one of these maladies, thank Darwin that evolution helps treat these problems, or at least helps understand what’s going on.
Steve presented this list of 13 questions to the Texas State Board of Education in 2003, to several grumbles. The creationists at the Discovery Institute couldn’t answer them, either.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
“Evolution Sunday offers an opportunity to educate our congregations that science is a gift,” said the Rev. Timothy McLemore, senior pastor at Kessler Park United Methodist Church in Oak Cliff.
“If we believe God is truth, we don’t need to shrink from truth in whatever way it presents itself. We don’t have to be threatened.”
The State Board of Education is set to review and revise science curriculum standards in Texas. And Dr. McLemore said he is “deeply concerned” about attempts to inject religion-based “intelligent design” theories into science classes.
“It seems profoundly unhealthy,” he said. “Do we really want the government deciding what religious beliefs and viewpoints are taught in school? It’s our job to promote our understanding of faith, not the government’s job.”
Even in Texas. We can hope government officials in Texas are listening.
Must government agencies be “neutral” between science and non-science, between evolution and intelligent design?
The Texas Education Agency lost it’s long-time science curriculum expert Chris Comer last year in a sad incident in which Comer was criticized for siding with Texas education standards on evolution rather than remaining neutral between evolution and intelligent design.
Comes now Timothy Sandefur of the very conservative Pacific Legal Foundation with an article in the Chapman Law Review which argues that science is solid, a good way of determining good from bad, dross from gold. Plus, Sandefur refutes claims that evolution is religion, and so illegal in public schools. TEA’s position in the Comer affair is shown to be not defensible legally; Sandefur’s article also points out that the post-modern relativism of the TEA’s argument is damaging to the search for knowledge and freedom, too.
In short, Sandefur’s article demonstrates that the position of the Texas Education Agency is untenable in liberty and U.S. law.
Moreover, science is an essential part of the training for a free citizen because the values of scientific discourse — respect, freedom to dissent, and a demand for logical, reasoned arguments supported by evidence — create a common ground for people of diverse ethnicities and cultures. In a nation made up of people as different as we are, a commitment to tolerance and the search for empirically verifiable, logically established, objective truth suggests a path to peace and freedom. Our founding fathers understood this. Professor Sherry has said it well: “it is difficult to envision a civic republican polity — at least a polity with any diversity of viewpoints — without an emphasis on reason. . . . In a diverse society, no [definition of ‘the common good’] can develop without reasoned discourse.”
Science’s focus on empirical evidence and demonstrable theories is part of an Enlightenment legacy that made possible a peaceful and free society among diverse equals. Teaching that habit of mind is of the essence for keeping our civilization alive. To reject the existence of positive truth is to deny the possibility of common ground, to undermine the very purpose of scholarly, intellectual discourse, and to strike at the root of all that makes our values valuable and our society worthwhile. It goes Plato one better — it is the ignoble lie. At a time when Americans are threatened by an enemy that rejects science and reason, and demands respect for dog-mas entailing violence, persecution, and tyranny, nothing more deserves our attention than nourishing respect for reason.
III. CONCLUSION
The debate over evolution and creationism has raged for a long time, and will continue to do so. The science behind evolution is overwhelming and only continues to grow, but those who insist that evolution is false will continue to resist its promulgation in schools. The appeal to Postmo-dernism represents the most recent — and so far, the most desperate — attempt on the part of creationists to support their claim that the teaching of valid, empirically-tested, experimentally-confirmed science in government schools is somehow a violation of the Constitution. When shorn of its sophisticated-sounding language, however, this argument is beneath serious consideration. It essentially holds that truth is meaningless; that all ways of knowing — whether it be the scientist’s empirically tested, experimentally confirmed, well-documented theory, or the mumbo-jumbo of mystics, psychics, and shamans — are equally valid myths; and that government has no right to base its policies on solid evidence rather than supernatural conjurations. This argument has no support in epistemology, history, law, or common sense. It should simply not be heard again.
He claimed in a thread here to have posted his “final answer” to my frequent urgings that he get the stuff accurate. We can hope it’s his last post on the topic since he won’t fix the errors. We’ll ignore the eerie homage to “final solution” that one could find in his phrasing.
Statue of Charles Darwin as a distinguished scientist. This statue stands (sits?) outside Castle Gates Library in Shrewsbury, Darwin’s boyhood home. The library resides in the 16th-century building which housed Shrewsbury School when Darwin was a pupil. Photo: Pete’s Favorite Things
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Dog and cat breeders, pigeon fanciers, racehorse breeders, and others whose livelihoods depend on their trying to do better than nature at the Darwinian game often offer anecdotes about breeding failures. They thought they might get a faster horse, but they got a skittish one instead; they thought they were getting a good bird dog, but the dog would panic at the shot of a gun.
Breeders know genetics carry a lot of traits, and trying to select for one is difficult. One may amplify a bad trait in addition to the desired trait.
In one classic paper that more critics of Darwin should read, researchers discovered that instead of getting better egg production, they got mean chickens that damaged production of the entire flock.
One of my favorite papers in evolutionary biology, which I have mentioned here before, is this:
Muir, W.M., and D.L. Liggett, 1995a. Group selection for adaptation to multiple-hen cages: selection program and responses. Poultry Sci. 74: s1:101
It outlines the group selection effects observed when trying to breed chickens for increased egg production in multiple-hen cage environments. In short, selecting individual chickens for increased productivity in a group environment didn’t select for increased productivity. Instead, it selected for mean chickens. The result was an overall reduction in productivity. Only by selecting at the group level was productivity increased.
The topic is a worthy one for discussion in economics courses, especially with regard to incentives for certain behaviors.
There is this caution: Adam notes that Enron annually fired the “bottom 10%” as a matter of policy, trying to encourage everyone else to work harder, trying to reward productive people, trying to prune deadwood from the corporate vine. At one point, some divisions of GE Corp. would purge the bottom 25%. That’s even more intensive selective pressures, for evil as well as good.
And when legislators try to purge education of bad teachers? Can they possibly hope to get anything but mean chickens? Economists indict our reliance on standardized tests of students.
Tony Campolo is an evangelical Christian, a sociology professor and preacher who for the past 15 years or so has been a thorn in the side of political conservatives and other evangelicals, for taking generally more liberal stands, against poverty, for tolerance in culture and politics, and so on. His trademark sermon is an upbeat call to action and one of the more plagiarized works in Christendom, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming” (listen to it here).
Rev. Tony Campolo; photo from Berean Research.
Since he’s so close to the mainstream of American political thought, Campolo is marginalized by many of the more conservative evangelists in the U.S. Campolo is not a frequent guest on the Trinity Broadcast Network, on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” nor on the white, nominally-Christian, low-budget knock-off of “Sabado Gigante!,” “Praise the Lord” (with purple hair and everything).
Campolo came closest to real national fame when he counseled President Bill Clinton on moral and spiritual issues during the Lewinsky scandal.
His opposite-editorial piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, “The real danger in Darwin is not evolution, but racism,” is out of character for Campolo as a non-conservative evangelistic thinker — far from what most Christians expect from Campolo either from the pulpit or in the college classroom. The piece looks as though it was lifted wholesale from Jerry Falwell or D. James Kennedy, showing little familiarity with the science or history of evolution, and repeating canards that careful Christians shouldn’t repeat.
Campolo’s piece is inaccurate in several places, and grossly misleading where it’s not just wrong. He pulls out several old creationist hoaxes, cites junk science as if it were golden, and generally gets the issue exactly wrong.
Evolution science is a block to racism. It has always stood against racism, in the science that undergirds the theory and in its applications by those scientists and policy makers who were not racists prior to their discovery of evolution theory. Darwin himself was anti-racist. One of the chief reasons the theory has been so despised throughout the American south is its scientific basis for saying whites and blacks are so closely related. This history should not be ignored, or distorted.
Creationism is a doctrine to which I, like most Christians, do not subscribe. It springs from a wrong understanding of the Word of God. And anybody who thinks he or she is going to impose his own personal narrow, vain, idolatrous doctrine on the children of this state as they sit helpless in their tenth grade Biology classrooms will have a fight on his hands. Again.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Tangled Up in Blue Guy hosts the current Carnival of the Godless. I don’t usually note this carnival, partly because evangelizing atheism is not my goal; but that’s not the goal of the carnival, either. TUIB Guy is an occasional reader and commenter here; his hosting job takes an interesting view of carnival hosting. Carnival of the Godless frequently features informative and useful posts. In this one, especially if you are involved in science education, or you know a Ron Paul supporter, you should read this post, from the Atheist Ethicist.
Great material for the classroom:
Four Stone Hearth constantly provides material that I wish I had used the last time I taught that particular topic. Four Stone Hearth #32 at Testimony of the Spade features several posts on neolithic children. This material probably would resonate well with elementary and middle school student. This is a roadmap to how you can make the section on Native Americans and early migration to America come alive for younger students.
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 
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