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Michele Bachmann, science ignoramus (CNN photo)
JISHOU, HUNAN — CNN reports the not-very-surprising news that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) favors teaching Intelligent Design (religion made science-y) in schools, right alongside evolution (actual science).
It’s not surprising, because Bachmann (and most of the other candidates for the GOP presidential nomination), are stubbornly in the Science (and History) Ignoramus class. Global warming? Liberal nonsense! Evolution? Atheist nonsense! Separation of Church and State? It was never there!
Intelligent Design is religious belief, Creationism with a different label, and the federal courts — most recently in 2005 — have ruled it cannot be taught in public schools, especially in science class. Period.
Yet, Bachmann and others stubbornly insist ID must be taught in public schools. Don’t they read the newspapers?
Here’s what she told CNN.
“I support intelligent design,” Bachmann told reporters in New Orleans following her speech to the Republican Leadership Conference. “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.”
WRONG!!
There is no “reasonable doubt” about evolution, at least among sensible people and especially not among scientists. There are no two sides about evolution, any more than there are two sides about Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the atomic theory, or continental drift. They are all accepted scientific theories, supported by piles of evidence.
She’s repeating the worn-out “teach the controversy” ploy of the ID community. It goes like this:
Assume that evolution is a belief system, not an empirical theory.
Pretend that there is lack of consensus about this belief system.
Couch objections to teaching evolution in school in “Big Brother” or “atheistic government” terms.
Appeal to the
Continue reading Bachmann wants schools to teach religion in science class
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Want to buy a propaganda film really cheap? Now’s your chance. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is now available to the highest bidder.
Expelled was the 2008 embarrassment that tried to prove once and for all there was a vast conspiracy to teach evolution while suppressing Intelligent Design and other “explanations” of life on Earth, and putting Hitler in power. Or something like that. The New York Times called it “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time.”
Narrated and hosted by the riveting Ben Stein, it tanked at the box office, so badly it seems, that its production company, Premise Media, is in bankruptcy court.
According to a document (PDF) filed in the United States Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, on May 31, 2011, the trustee of the bankruptcy estate is seeking to auction “[t]hat certain feature-length motion picture (‘Picture’) ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ and all collateral, allied, ancillary, subsidiary and merchandising rights therein and thereto, and all properties and things of value pertaining thereto.” The auction is scheduled to take place on-line from June 23 to June 28, 2011.
As awful as the movie was, I reckon somebody will probably bid on it. I hope the winner is a film collector, who will stash it in a vault somewhere, and not some Intelligent Design fanboy, who will try to inflict it on us again.
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POSTSCRIPT: Back in 2008, I did a critique of the Expelled teacher’s guide. The National Center for Science Education also has a more elaborate debunking of
Continue reading Get Ben Stein’s movie
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Texas is a big state, with about 6 million schoolchildren. When the Texas State Board of Education speaks, textbook publishers listen. After all, if the publishers can sell their texts to Texas, it’s a big deal. It means money.
So, when the Texas BOE met in March to discuss controversial changes to the state’s proposed science standards, science educators all over the USA were worried. Would the BOE, chaired by an unapologetic creationist, introduce language into the standards to allow the teaching of creationism and and its clone, Intelligent Design, in the Texas schools?
To do so would be seriously damage science education in the Texas public schools. It would also likely influence textbook publishers’ treatment of evolution in biology texts, thereby affecting schools all over the USA.
The Texas BOE is nearly evenly composed of creationists and more sensible members, so the results were by no means predictable. In the end, the original changes, as proposed by the openly anti-evolution chairman and board members, were rejected. Instead, the BOE passed more coyly worded standards that still could be used to introduce pseudo-science and religion into Texas classrooms, but did not exactly trample science teaching.
Whether the new standards will induce textbook publishers to edit their books to make them more palatable to Texas remains to be seen.
A lot of bloggers have capably covered the Texas fracas already, so I will not go into the details here. Rather, I’d rather provide some background as an interested observer.
Textbooks
Right off, I want to reveal some personal bias. I hate most school textbooks. Invariably, they are written by committees of authors, who have to write to specific age-appropriate reading levels, include spiffy graphics and photos, chop the material into tiny, easily digestible chunks, and satisfy the requirements of 50 different state boards or departments
Continue reading Deep in the heart of Texas …
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Yet another attempt to weasel creationism/Intelligent Design into public schools has died after an “academic freedom” bill failed to leave a subcommittee in the Iowa legislature yesterday.
The bill purportedly would have protected instructors from punishment or job loss if they presented “scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding chemical and biological evolution.” In fact, it was a ploy to enable suitably minded instructors to teach creationism or ID alongside evolutionary theory. Wording that is almost identical appears on a web page sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a pro-ID “thinktank.”
Full details are at The Panda’s Thumb.
Lest you think the bill might have had merit, allow me to provide a brief introduction to “creation science.” ID is just a variation of creationism, accepting an older age of the universe.
Creationism holds that:
The account in Genesis is literal and true.
God created everything in six days, about 6,000 years ago.
Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, all animals were vegetarians, death was non-existent, and predation/parasitism were unnecessary.
God got pissed at Adam and Eve, and that wily serpent in the Tree, and cursed them with unending toil, mortality, and slithering on the ground. With the Fall, God also rebooted Creation 1.0 to introduce carnivorism, predation, parasitism and all the unhappy biological problems all His creatures now face.
At this time, dinosaurs and other now-extinct organisms co-existed with humans. (The Fred Flintstone Hypothesis). They were wiped out, and the fossil record created, with the Great Flood that chased Noah, et al., into a big boat. Instead of rebooting Earth, God just wiped the hard drive and reinstalled Creation 2.0
The organisms now living have always existed in their current forms since Creation 2.0. Evolution does not exist, and Earth’s organisms do not have a common
Continue reading Iowa ‘academic freedom’ bill dies a quiet death
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Someone has made a list of “50 Reasons I Reject Evolution.” If you are offended by four-letter words, don’t go there.
And yeah, it’s not written by a creationist or a believer in Intelligent Design. They never use four-letter words. Really. Just
Continue reading While I am bashing creationists and IDiots …
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Since a member of my immediate family will soon be moving to Iowa, I have the perfect excuse to blog about a proposal in that fine state to ensure “academic freedom.”
On the face of it, “academic freedom” would sound like a good thing, but in today’s world of newspeak, this kind of “academic freedom” is shorthand for “let’s allow the public schools to teach creationism or Intelligent Design ideas alongside the scientific theories of the Big Bang and evolution.” Similar bills have been proposed in several other — mostly Bible Belt — states, and all have the same chance of success. None — except of course in Louisiana, where one actually passed.
These bills are merely a veiled attempt by Christian kooks to subvert the US Constitution (and proper science education) by suggesting that creationism and ID are really scientific theories, not religious ideas, and therefore should be taught as valid alternatives to evolution. Trouble is, the Supreme Court ruled decades ago that creationism was religious in nature, and cannot be taught in public schools, and in 2005, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that ID was also religious in nature, meaning the Dover, Pennsylvania, school system had violated the Constitution by permitting it to be taught in science classes.
Yet, the kooks persist, in a quixotic attempt to find some state stupid enough to pass so-called “academic freedom” legislation, so like-minded instructors can slip in so-called scientific alternatives to evolution.
Here is the wording of the Iowa bill:
EXPLANATION
4 5 This bill establishes the “Evolution Academic Freedom Act”.
4 6 The bill includes the general assembly’s findings and
4 7 declarations related to its intent to protect the right and
4 8 freedom of public school
Continue reading Finally, a science-related post — Iowa’s anti-evolution bill
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Like a lot of other science bloggers, I spent a lot of time dissecting the anti-evolution movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, after its release last spring. Since I did not want to contribute any money to the people who made that anti-intellectual POS, I only critiqued the freely available background information.
And I am proud to say I still haven’t seen the movie. I figured I’d wait until either it was dirt cheap in the DVD remainder bin, at the Goodwill, or available in the torrent channels.
Famed film critic Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times, must have had the same idea. He waited until now to publish a review of Expelled in his blog.
Briefly speaking, he doesn’t like it, not one bit. Two thumbs down. I don’t think he much cares for Ben Stein, the narrator and promoter of the film, either. He concludes his scathing analysis of the film, its promoters and Stein’s opportunism thusly:
Ben Stein is only getting warmed up. He takes a field trip to visit one “result” of Darwinism: Nazi concentration camps. “As a Jew,” he says, “I wanted to see for myself.” We see footage of gaunt, skeletal prisoners. Pathetic children. A mound of naked Jewish corpses. “It’s difficult to describe how it felt to walk through such a haunting place,” he says. Oh, go ahead, Ben Stein. Describe. It filled you with hatred for Charles Darwin and his followers, who represent the overwhelming majority of educated people in every nation on earth. It is not difficult for me to describe how you made me feel by exploiting the deaths of millions of Jews in support of your argument for a peripheral Christian belief. It fills me with contempt.
Read the entire entry. It’s
Continue reading Remember Expelled? Roger Ebert doesn’t like it, either.
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