There was a mindbreakingly bad news piece by KARA FINNSTROM, working (apparently) for CNN, Los Angeles that was broadcast today by WDEF 12 of Chattanooga, Tennessee.  This news splat was vaguely about the recent Federal Court decision in favor of the University of California. The UC and several individual professors were being sued by the  ASSOCIATION OF CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS INTERNATIONAL, Calvary Chapel Christian School, and five Calvary student. Their goal was to force the University to grant credit for four courses offered by Calvary, and a biology course taught by Calvary Baptist School.

The WDEF story opened, "Can a private religious high school stress too much religion? A federal judge says yes, at least for students hoping to get into campuses like UCLA."

Score one for science!

From the SF Chronicle:

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

I hope you caught the first episode of The History Channel's "Evolve" last night.  It was wonderful.  An hour of smart, entertaining, engaging, and informative science programming.  What a concept!

Running for Office: It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner

That's not my phrase; its from Sean Tevis and he is running for State Representative in Kansas.

That could well have been the headline back in 1925.  For it was on this very date of  July 10, 1925 that the trial of a high school football coach and substitute biology teacher – John Scopes – began after he was arrested for teaching Evolution in Dayton, Tennessee.  It became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial – but many of us may be more familiar with it after being memorialized on Broadway and in film as "Inherit the Wind".

Obama's recent push toward the Christian community, especially as it comes to a White House connection to something resembling Bush's policies, has me a little edgy. The recent poll revelation that roughly 92% of Americans are believers in some form of religion (with Christians by far in the lead) puts me in a shaky 8% that misses the true separation of church and state that Jefferson enjoyed.

While riding in to work this morning and listening to public radio do a story on the Middle East, they gave up the statistic that over 80% of Arabs are convinced that the US's position in the Iraqi and Afghanistani campaigns is to replace Islam with Christianity, therefor giving Al Quaeda it's strongest recruiting message.

So many school districts in the U.S. are wanting to teach creationism, and my friends in the UK, have told me schools have considered it seriously there also. Now I’m not an atheist, I’m a believer in evolution but I think you can believe whatever you wish. However there is a vital flaw in creationism.

After diarying the rapid decline of Gov. Bobby Jindal's popularity over his refusal to veto a legislative pay raise and calling attention to the recall petition circulating against the Boy Governor, I'd have thought there was no more to say on the subject.

But the sun has risen on another bright, blessed, schadenfreudelicious day in Louisiana, the Times-Picayune has hit New Orleans porches, chock full of fresh dissing for John McCain's second-or-third-favorite running mate.

In December, 2005, proponents of Intelligent Design Creationism were dealt a crushing blow. A Republican judge appointed by none other than George W. Bush found that ID was creationism, that the tactic of teaching it even as a 'controversy' was disingenuous, and concluded in part that "citizens of the Dover area were poorly served ... that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks ..." In an utterly reprehensible act, sadly all too representative of creationist hucksters, the well-heeled Discovery Institute that helped create the whole shitty mess walked the check, leaving jilted local taxpayers to pay off a one-million dollar legal bill. They would not stay in hiding for long.

What soon emerged from a hasty PR makeover was no longer ostensibly interested in teaching creationism per se, but rather as fierce fighters for (Socially conservative) justice, a sort of brave-hearted, academic William Wallace replete with a new antiscience & martyr dog whistle cast as a proud, resounding battle-cry: "They may take our elected office, but they'll never take our Freedom!" By that odd definition, freedom is definitely on the march for residents of the Pelican State thanks to a former exorcist and faith healer turned politician:

Louisiana's Governor Bobby Jindal signed Senate Bill 733 into law, 27 years after the state passed its Balance Treatment for Evolution-Science and Creation-Science Act ... Jindal's approval of the bill was buried in a press release issued on June 25, 2008 ...Houma Today reports (June 27, 2008) that the bill "will empower educators to pull religious beliefs into topics like evolution, cloning and global warming by introducing supplemental materials."

The Louisiana legislature should be more wary than most of the Dover trap: It was there, way back in 1987, that the Supreme Court decided an earlier version of creationism was indeed a sham. But that didn’t keep Governor Bobby Jindal from signing SB 733, the mis-named Louisiana Science Education Act, last week. While the bill purports to encourage critical thinking and open discussion of various scientific topics, it perpetuates the same sham by singling out evolution (along with global warming and cloning) as topics deserving special criticism.

This, in and of itself, undermines the claim to secular purpose. Evolution is no more scientifically controversial than gravity, and Governor Jindal surely knows that -- he graduated from Brown University with honors in biology. His own biology professor reminded him recently that "Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn't make sense. In order for today's students in Louisiana to succeed in college and beyond, ... they need a solid grounding in genetics and evolution."

Another sham is the claim of bill supporters that this bill isn't about creationism was put to the lie early on, when supporter David Tate, a member of the Livingston Parish school board, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune "I believe that both sides -- the creationism side and the evolution side -- should be presented and let students decide what they believe." He added that the bill was necessary because "teachers are scared to talk about" creationism, but didn't mention whether they were similarly scared about discussing astrology or the belief that babies come from storks, not sex. An anti-abortion news site crowed that, thanks to Jindal's signature "Louisiana public school teachers can now educate their students about the theory of intelligent design," a practice ruled unconstitutional in both 1987 and again in 2005.

But it isn't a partisan issue. Conservative blogger AllahPundit was unsurprised by Jindal's decision to sign the bill, declaring it "depressing yet predictable." Prominent right-wing blogger Charles Johnson declared that, with Jindal's signature on the bill, "American educational standards take a huge step backward... The creationist front group called the Discovery Institute is quietly crowing, and maintaining the fiction that the bill is not religiously-based." That many prominent conservatives would agree with progressives -- not to mention, heaven forbid, a New York Times editorial -- shows just how far into the fringes Jindal's decision was.

In Dover, a school board overrode the advice of parents, teachers, and scientists, forcing intelligent design into biology classes. Parents and teachers sued, and in the federal trial that followed, Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and co-author with Paul R. Gross of Creationism's Trojan Horse, showed that the concept of "intelligent design" entered drafts of the textbook at issue in 1987, just after the Supreme Court ruled that claims that "creation-science" has any secular basis were just a sham. The judge in Dover also saw through that sham, but Louisiana is on the verge of being drawn back into that legal maelstrom.

What can you do? Interested Louisiana teachers, parents and students should follow the excellent advice of the Louisiana Coalition for Science.  Those of us not blessed to live in the Pelican State can join the National Center for Science Education. Bills like the one Jindal signed were proposed in 6 states this year, and while most were mercifully put out of their misery, they’ll rise again quicker than a B movie zombie. NCSE and local Citizens for Science groups would be happy to give you advice about how to defend and improve science education near you.  

Remember, these bills have nothing to do with academic freedom or furthering science education – Imagine for example if health instructors tried to use them to ‘teach the weaknesses’ in abstinence only sex-ed! The goal is to manufacture doubt at the wholesale level on carefully selected subjects to serve a small segment of lobbyists and activists, while weakening the public school system in hope of, some might speculate, eventually drowning both it and the taxes that support it in a bathtub. Antiscience forces are well funded – in some cases by full blown Reconstruction Dominionist zillionaires -- and relentless in moving forward with their stated theocratic goals to preserve and expand their twisted version[s] of freedom, even, and perhaps especially, if it comes at the expense of your own.

All that now stands in the way of legislation, passed with the help of Democrats, that would allow the teaching of creationism in the Lousiana public schools is an unlikely veto by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal  

While we mull that over, Barbara Forrest, one of the nation's leading experts on the knavery that is "intelligent design," has posted at Talk to Action a discussion of the role of the Religious Right's Discovery Institute and Focus on the Family's state political affiliate in the passage of the bill, and how these organizations have apparently cowed or owned political leaders of both parties.

I had fun today.  I gave a talk at the Math Science Innovation Center in Mechanicsville Virginia.    It was part of a conference on

Fractals: A New Lens on the Natural World
A Conference for 6-12 Science Teachers

 My talk was not on fractals but was entitled: TEACHING  SCIENCE THAT MATTERS: REFRAMING THE QUESTION IN SCIENCE, and can be viewed from my webpage.
 I was dealing with  issues that may reflect back on the way science is being taught.  The three examples I was using for them were

Global warming and climate change
Evolution vs. creation ("Intelligent" Design)
Determining when something is "alive"

 I thought some of you might be interested in what Complexity Science has to say about these issues and their relationship to "standard" science.  Look below the break if this is of interest to you.  I'll suggest that there is relevance to this election in what I had to say

That would be Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. He's also the proud speaker at a prayer breakfest sponsored last Wednesday by the Pentagon Chaplain's Office. PZ points out the alarming implications:

Pharyngula -- Just let that sink in. There are people at the Pentagon who are in charge of planning where your sons and daughter and nephews and nieces and other beloved family members and friends will be sent to put their lives at risk. ... There are people there who control nuclear weapons.

It's not merely that Ham is a fundamentalist, he's a complete fraud or a dangerous crack pot, take your pick. Ham makes his living as a Young Earth Creationist by fostering and exploiting the worst kind of willful, pseudo scientific ignorance. YEC hucksters are shams through and through who literally preach the complete dismissal of biology, geology, physics, astronomy and virtually every other field of hard science.

This is not someone we want to lionize or have any influence over people who make life and death decisions based on -- one would hope anyway -- facts, reasonable inferences, and sound analysis. Especially at a time when our military and intel agencies are trying to recover some measure of credibility after being hung out to dry by the Bush gang for ignoring facts, reasonable inferences, and sound analysis in favor of blindly ignorant and we now know fatally flawed neocon ideology. I'm not sure which is more disturbing, that the Chaplain's Office was unaware of Ham's reputation or just doesn't give a damn about their own.

The LA legislature has passed an anti-evolution law that is poised to be signed into law by Gov. Jindal. Please read the email posted below the fold for what you can do to try to stop it.  It's a small chance, to be sure, but this law is a definite wedge that will resonate nationally (or at least in places that would have us return to an 18th century understanding of the world).

Updated:  More info and links to bill text here http://www.ncseweb.org/...

Today I thought I was actually going to have a day where something wouldn't piss me off. Well the FISA thing ended that notion, but also something else I read in the news.

Disclaimer: I believe in the evolution of species. Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no attempt to explain the Origin of Life, only it's development from simple to complex.

I propose a meme for the pro/anti evolution discussion that may resolve some issues for our educational system.

UPDATE: I understand the difference between the scientific meaning of theory and the common English term. Please, don't explain it to me again, save us all some time. A theory (scientific and common) has predictive value, THAT is the point.

Darwin Defeated in the Bayou: Louisiana Encourages 'Critical Thinking' About Evolution

The Louisiana House voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill on Wednesday that would promote "critical thinking" by students on topics such as evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning. The Louisiana Senate already passed a similar bill.

Similar bills have been introduced in several states over the past year and have been supported by opponents of evolution. The Discovery Institute, which promotes a brand of creationism known as intelligent design, hailed the 94-to-3 vote on the bill.

Also, in case you haven't yet read it, read this New York Times piece from 6/4 on the strategy the creationists are using these days, using the language "discussing the strengths and weaknesses of evolution theory" to slip their religious opinions into the science curriculums (curriculi?) curricula across the nation.

If you have any nervous creationist types in the vicinity, you might want to make a scene so they see this on your computer screen.

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

More about this observation at the Michigan State University in East Lansing below the fold...

Lincoln's store of anecdotes was legendary. He used them to illustrate points of argument, first, but also to ease tension in conversation and gain the sympathy of his listeners.

Not many of us have the advantage of Lincoln's lifelong storehouse of jokes and parables. Here is a collection for the rest of us: Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. (This bestseller is now out in paperback.) The ostensible purpose of the book is to introduce philosophy and logic through jokes, tales which are jokes precisely because they violate some principle of reasoning.

In other words, this book is wonderful bag of ammo, to use against the unreasonable and ill-informed. For an example, read on...