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Chris Comer, the former director of science curriculum for the state of Texas, has sued the Texas Education Agency for firing her. Her offence? Forwarding an e-mail that discussed the use of Intelligent Design as a stalking horse for creationism. Chris Comer sues Texas Education Agency. Hat tip: Darwin Central.
If you’re reading this, you’re missing GECCO: The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference for 2008, Saturday to Wednesday, July 12 - 16. It’s in Atlanta, Georgia. If I weren’t on a contract right now… I’ll bet it will be a lot of fun, even if I couldn’t understand the most rarefied and technical papers.
GECCO conference
The Evolution 2008 conference is sponsored by the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education. There are still two more days so if you’re in the neighborhood, drop in! It’s of particular interest to teachers.
This one gets filed under wild, wacky world. Larry Moran at Sandwalk has written about a biology an English professor (with a specialty in science studies) steeped in post-modernist thinking. She explains that scientific facts describe social constructs rather than reality. Then, when some students disagree with her wilder statements, she quits her job and sues them for disagreeing and thus creating a hostile atmosphere. It’s odd that she wouldn’t recognize they are merely working out a new social construct! In fact, they attempted to insert some objective facts into her feminist paranoia. Read all about it at “Professor sues students.”
I’m in Chicago with LotStreetWiz. We are both taking a time management course called the GTD Roa
dMap, given by David Allen, who wrote the books Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything.
The flagship of the GTD (Getting Things Done) seminar series, The RoadMap defines the game and helps you jump into it at a new and expanded level. This lively one-day workshop features David Allen live and in-person as he examines the core principles of productivity improvement, then provides you with a unique opportunity to develop your own specific and immediate action steps to implement them.
GTD l The RoadMap provides black-belt techniques for gaining control of the day-to-day, tools for achieving alignment and balance by viewing your world from the appropriate horizon of your commitments and the master key to getting motivated to overcome resistance and move forward. Essentially the Roadmap will provide you with your own internal GPS reading, so at any time you can identify where you are and what you need to do to get on your game and get going.
For those who are new to GTD, The RoadMap provides high-level overview and introduction to a lifelong set of best practices for staying clear, focused, and in control. For those who have already had experience with GTD in some fashion, it will take you for a spin around the block with the basics and inspire you to a new level of implementation (there are no “beginner” moves in the martial arts).
You’ll benefit from:
…decades of in-the-trenches research on achieving relaxed productivity, plus a wealth of up-to-the-minute tips, tricks, and best practices compiled from the whole David Allen Company team (applying GTD material currently with leading-edge individuals and organizations). Collaborate with David in designing your own action plan to keep you winning at the game of work and business of life.
You’ll learn:
You’ll have an opportunity to:
Contents include :
Participants can expect to leave the seminar with enhanced freedom and energy, knowing that their busy lives are indeed manageable, inspired to enjoy life and work at a new level of effectiveness.
Hours: 9 to 5
From Kitzmiller vs. Dover….
Judge Jones continues:
But they undermine their argument with the admission that “a definition of ‘creation’ from a pre-publication draft of Pandas… was also used as one definition of ID in the final published textbook.” However, the DI authors only quote the definition that ID means that “various forms of life … began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features intact—fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.” The DI authors omit the definition in the pre-publication draft of Pandas that read: “various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent creator with their distinctive features already intact—fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.”
What difference does it make that “intelligent creator” was changed to “intelligent agency”? The obvious point, which Judge Jones noted, was that the words “creation” and its cognates were removed from Pandas in some 150 places directly after the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that public schools could not require “equal time” for “creation-science” in biology classes. Although quite revealing of the quick-change strategy adopted by the Pandas authors to avoid the Edwards decision—which would have precluded the book’s adoption by any public-school district—the DI authors miss (or ignore) a more significant point that did not escape Judge Jones. Both the original “creationist” and revised “intelligent agency” definitions include the identical words that “the various forms of life that began abruptly . . . with their distinctive features already intact . . . .” These common definitions of the origin of species, Jones noted, were conceded by defense expert witnesses to mean the “ ‘special creation’ of kinds of animals, an inherently religious and creationist concept.” The notion of “special creation” not only implies, but requires the intervention of a supernatural (read “God”) creator of all life forms. Whether labeled as an “intelligent creator” or an “intelligent agency” makes no difference. It is the supposed “intelligence” of the creator or agency that removes both old-fashioned creationism and newfangled ID from the realm of science, since no “intelligent” force can be observed or measured by any scientific process.
Busted!
This is an older post, so I apologize if I’m quoting someone whom I don’t acknowledge.
One creek at a time, Ontario is re-seeding salmon habitats with Atlantic salmon fry that have been raised in fish hatcheries. Grade 6 students (eleven-year-old children) took part by releasing a small batch of salmon that they had raised into Duffin’s Creek. The creek is north of Pickering, which is on the north shore of Lake Ontario, east of Toronto.
David Love, Executive Director of the Conservation Federation of Greater Toronto, says that there were once salmon in the creek, but that they were extirpated. I think that agricultural pollution and overfishing are the likely culprits.
The students and teachers regard the creek.
Podcasts are seen as a platform for reviews, opinions, and polemic. But they can do much more. This presentation helps you discover how valuable podcasts can be.
Podcasts are the next step beyond blogging. But they are also a powerful platform for training and user assistance. They are useful whether you’re a technical writer explaining how an application works or a marketer expounding on product benefits.
Aaron Davis and Scott Nesbitt will examine how you can tap into the power of podcasts. First, they’ll explain what podcasts are and how to create one.
You’ll learn how podcasts
Aaron and Scott will
About the presenters: Aaron Davis and Scott Nesbitt are partners in DMN Communications, a technical communications consultancy in Toronto. Since 2006, their podcast, Communications from DMN, has been entertaining, informing, and occasionally annoying a diverse global audience.
The meeting will be held in the Burgundy Room at the North York Memorial Hall, 5110 Yonge Street, concourse level, at 7:00 p.m. General Admission is $5; STC Members attend for free.
For directions, visit STC Toronto and click on “Meetings.”
You can go to the Web site of the Te Papa Museum for recordings of their lectures and webcasts about the recently dissected squids. The colossal squid is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni and the giant squid is Architeuthis.
Lectures recordings
The audio recording of Science Express is available:
http://www.tepapa.govt.nz
/ScienceExpress/ScienceExpress.May.2008.Colossal.Squid.mp3The other lectures have been filmed. The videos will be available later. Some copyright issues need to be sorted too, so this might take a little longer than expected.
Webcast retransmission
A retransmission of the last hours of the webcast are available here:
http://www.R2.co.nz/20080427/squid-1.asx
Canada is following the example of South Africa and will strike a Truth and Reconciliation commission to bring light and air to the terrible treatment of Native Canadian children in residential schools, which were mostly run by churches. They were meant to bring British culture and education, not to mention salvation, to the children but they ended up oppressing and abusing them.
Judge LaForme has been selected to lead the commission.
As noted before, the schools did not even take precautions to prevent tuberculosis from spreading between the children.
Here’s a New York Times article about the high cost of textbooks. Like car dealers loading their merchandise with unwanted extras such as pinstriping or restaurants piling more mashed potatoes on every plate, textbook publishers add CDs or new revisions to create costlier goods with planned obsolescence.
Meanwhile,
Schools are beginning to balk at outrageous pricing. Rice University offers textbooks for some classes free online and charges a nominal fee for the printed version. A new company called Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, N.Y., plans to offer online textbooks free and hopes to make its profit by selling supplemental materials like study guides and hard copies printed on demand.
A study being carried out by the geographer Ronald Dorn at Arizona State University suggests that students who use free online textbooks perform as well academically as students who buy expensive copies from traditional publishers. Colleges and universities should take advantage of these new developments.
So
William Dembski never ceases to appall.
And he rests his case on the flagellum because it’s a little machine. Here, strictly for your review, is a low-resolution sample of Dembski’s blog header:
It’s almost shiny and the flagellum appears to be inserted into a pair of metal plates.
Now, here is an electron micrograph of a real flagellum:
[Shahid Khan, Imran Humayun Khan, and Thomas S. Reese, 1991. New Structural Features of the Flagellar Base in Salmonella typhimurium Revealed by Rapid-Freeze Electron Microscopy. Journal of Bacteriology 173:2888-09]
Not quite so shiny, is it?
The closest I can come to Dembski’s machine image is a computer-generated image meant to artificially enhance the symmetry of the flagellum for educational purposes.
[A version of this image can be seen here in the Annual Review of Biochemistry 2003, with a note: "This reconstruction is derived from rotationally averaged images of about 100 hook–basal body complexes.... The radial densities have been projected from front to back along the line of view, so this is what would be seen if one were able to look through the spinning structure. Connections between the C-ring and the rest of the structure appear relatively tenuous.Digital image courtesty of D.J. DeRosier."]
There are two very artificial maniplations in this image. First, about 100 images were averaged. That would tend to smooth out any irregularities. Second, a rotation of the image was computed, which would make anything look like an object that has been turned on a lathe.
So Dembski claims that the flagellum is a tiny, designed machine. His claim is supported by computer-generated images which bear little resemblance to reality.
This image showing actual placement of molecules is at least as accurate:
But, of course, you couldn’t mistake it for a machine.
And yet, Dembski believes that Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of developing embryos were fraudulent. Haeckel’s drawings were made in the 1870s. That’s 130 years ago! It’s likely that Haeckel simply wanted to make his drawings clear. Or perhaps he was fooled by trying to see details at the limits of his vision, like the astronomers who were sure they saw canals on Mars. Fairly quickly, people realized that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was not strictly true. Scientists, not creationists, pointed out the errors. The drawings have been relegated to curiosities of history, along with the notions that albumin is the genetic material, continents don’t move, and dinosaurs dragged their tails. They are still studied to see where Haeckel went wrong. Here’s what scientists who recently analyzed Haeckel’s drawings have to say:
A recent study coauthored by several of us and discussed by Elizabeth Pennisi (Science, 5 Sept. 1997, p. 1435) examined inaccuracies in embryo drawings published last century by Ernst Haeckel. Our work has been used in a nationally televised debate to attack evolutionary theory and to suggest that evolution cannot explain embryology . We strongly disagree with this viewpoint. Data from embryology are fully consistent with Darwinian evolution…. the mixture of similarities and differences among vertebrate embryos reflects evolutionary change in developmental mechanisms inherited from a common ancestor… Haeckel’s inaccuracies damage his credibility, but they do not invalidate the mass of published evidence for Darwinian evolution. Ironically, had Haeckel drawn the embryos accurately, his first two valid points in favor of evolution would have been better demonstrated.
[Michael K. Richardson, et al., "Haeckel, Embryos, and Evolution," Science (Letters), Vol. 280 (May 15, 1998), pp. 983-985. (quoted from http://www.nmsr.org/jonwells.htm)]
Yet creationism and its outgrowth, Intelligent Design, carry on as if one set of discredited drawings somehow invalidates evolution. If that’s so, why don’t Dembski’s doctored images of flagella invalidate his theory?
And why focus on a few mistakes in a huge body of work? Have historians and economists and politicians never been wrong? The strength of science is that it is the best tool for correcting mistakes in knowledge—throwing out what’s wrong and keeping what evidence confirms.
It’s as if Dembski had wandered into a busy airport and declared, “Look! There’s a piece of litter in the wastebasket! Therefore, airplanes are impossible! (God never meant us to understand flight.)”
Take a balanced look at the whole body of real-world evidence. And demand an equal standard of behavior and morality for all people, with no free pass for the religious.
If he wishes to have any credibility at all, Dembski must demonstrate the same standard of conduct that he demands in other people. Until he does, he fails miserably as a human being and especially as a scientist, where, driven by his religion, he continues to commit intellectual atrocities.
See also: “The Dembski Dodge.”
This half-day workshop ran on Wednesday morning atl Front Runner Training for STC members.
Content
About Ed Marshall,
Ed Marshall is an independent consulting writer, with over 20 years’ experience writing and producing documentation for highly technical products including Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Java-based products, Software Developer Kits (SDKs), Web Services, and other tools for developers. He has presented talks at local chapters of the STC, STC Conferences, the WritersUA Conference, and the Pubsnet Conference. Ed lives in Boston, where he operates Marshall Documentation Consulting.
When it comes to expertly witnessing, Michael Behe is the science community’s friend. He confidently declares that science textbooks explicitly contaminated with religious “overrides” are good science. On the way to his own goal line, he explains that it’s bad to force students to come to a pre-determined conclusion. Score!
One of the books that he approves, Biology for Christian Schools, starts with:
Riiiight.
Ed Brayton has the story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars:
And Mike Dunford has a very nice summary at The Questionable Authority
In a surprise move today, Florida’s state education committee adopted a new standard for chemistry science classes. “Why should biology get all the attention? We have to have balanced educational standards in chemistry as well,” said committee member Denise O’Liarty-Ratsarse. The periodic table is only a theory. Those Medeleevists are trying to suppress scientific debate. We want to see a fair treatment of all theories. Besides, the Bible doesn’t mention hydrogen, so how do we know it even exists?”
