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Ohio, which borders our fair Commonwealth, has come to its senses and rejected the attempts by Intelligent Design advocates to weasel ID into the public school science curriculum. The Ohio Board of Education voted, 11-4, to remove a pro-ID lesson plan and pro-ID science standards from the state curriculum.
The board had a month earlier voted, 9-8, to retain the material, which essentially gave ID proponents a way to introduce discussion of ID as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
Reactions, as they say, were mixed. From The New York Times:
Darwin’s defenders celebrated the reversal as a sign of a backlash against the inroads made last year by critics of evolution. But leaders of the Discovery Institute, the intellectual home of intelligent design, warned that Ohio’s move would create a backlash of its own.
“It’s an outrageous slap in the face to the citizens of Ohio,” said John G. West, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the institute, referring to several polls that show public support for criticism of evolution in science classes.
“The effort to try to suppress ideas that you dislike, to use the government to suppress ideas you dislike, has a failed history,” Mr. West said. “Do they really want to be on the side of the people who didn’t want to let John Scopes talk or who tried to censor Galileo?”
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Stan Deyo is one of those self-promoting “psychics” who claims, in his case, to be able to predict earthquakes days in advance. Deyo says his system of monitoring global ocean temperatures permits him to forecast when and where earthquakes are likely to hit about 75% of the time. Me, I’m doubtful, since geologists are lucky if they get an inkling just hours in advance.
Deyo made this prediction on his site last week:
February 3, 2006
By Stan Deyo
Home http://standeyo.com
WARNING: USA
San Francisco is the hot spot of today’s forecast. There is a STRONG signal between Mendocino and San Francisco along the San Andreas Fault. The signal shows the stress is from the Pioneer Fault Zone just below the Mendocino Fault Zone. People in the immediate area of this location should prepare to leave their homes should a major quake strike SF in the next 5 days…. possibly even tonight.
Well, it’s been six days and, unless I’ve missed the news, the Bay Area seems OK. In fact, I wonder if anyone has independently verified his success rate. There are a lot of people who seem to think he’s the shiznit when it comes to earthquake forecasting.
To be fair, Deyo does not claim infallibility. He includes this disclaimer after his forecasts:
Disclaimer: Some of the forecast stress areas can be in error up to 30% due to cloud cover variations and false signals from buoys.
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At the end of each year (on the Gregorian calendar, anyway), there are a bunch of self-styled psychic experts who prognosticate events for the coming year. Usually, they are wrong far more times than they are right, yet they manage to sucker the public into believing in the psychics’ supernatural accuracy. The experts play up their infrequent successes, and just fail to mention the times they are wrong.
There is a great website here that keeps score. The author has not yet updated it for 2006, but the results for 2005 are convincing enough.
And by the way, Happy (Chinese) New Year. Kung hei fat choi!
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From the BBC comes this disheartening news. According to a recent survey, just under half of the Brits surveyed accept evolution as the best explanation for the development of life.
And in case you thought the British public was more sophisticated than the folks in Kansas and Dover, Pa., more than 40% of those surveyed believe intelligent design or creationism should be taught in school science classes.
Ironically, the BBC’s Horizons program commissioned the survey for a program about the ID controversy in the States.
According to the BBC report,
Over 2,000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:
* 22% chose creationism
* 17% opted for intelligent design
* 48% selected evolution theory
* and the rest did not know.
Asked what explanation of the development of life should be taught, the respondents replied
* 44% said creationism should be included
* 41% intelligent design
* 69% wanted evolution as part of the science curriculum.
Let’s hope that the IDists in the States don’t use this survey as more ammunition for including ID in high school science classes.
Let’s also hope that educators, both here and in the UK, take the results to heart. We are apparently not doing a very effective job convincing the public that evolution has merit or validity.
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During an assembly this morning at school, the speaker, Harry Pickens, asked students what gave them hope and what worried them. One response in particular stunned me: The pole shift — the wandering of the magnetic pole toward Russia! I mean, what?
On my personal list of “things to worry about,” the drift of the magnetic pole from its present location in northern Canada toward Siberia is pretty low, somewhere near getting struck by heat lightning and being trampled to death by a wooly mammoth. But the remark did concern me as a symptom of poor critical thinking. The student in question (one of my former physics students — sigh!) had apparently picked up on the near-hysteria among the fringe-science crowd about the pole shift foretold by any number of psychics, channelers and “science experts.” [See an earlier blog about a radio caller's fear of the earth flipping over around solstice time.]
Do a Google search on “pole shift” and there will be countless sites warning of an imminent reversal of the earth’s poles. Many seem a little hazy about the difference between magnetic pole drift and reversal, which is geologically evident, and the alteration of the earth’s actual axis of rotation. One site I visited completely muddled the concept of magnetic deviation, implying it was somehow a portent of catastrophe. Some sites are doomsday oriented, encouraging readers to prepare for sudden changes in climate, the relocation of the equator from its present location, tidal waves, floods, earthquakes, etc. Others predict the pole shift will bring on a new age, a new beginning for humankind. Books are advertised, Edgar Cayce’s predictions rehashed and reviewed, connections to Planet X, Nibiru, wandering asteroids made — the mind boggles.
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Einstein once said that God does not play dice with the universe. He was critical, at the time, of the emerging quantum theory, which states that we cannot know everything about the motion, position and energy states of subatomic particles.
So I wonder if God may be a poker player. The creationists/intelligent design folks discount the role chance might have played in the evolution of life. Now the main problem is, “how much time did the designer/universe have available to try all these different combinations of CHONP?” The theory of evolution suggests that life took about 1 billion years to form from simple organic molecules. Creationists and ID folks use a much shorter time span, since they tend to believe the earth is much, much younger than the accepted 4.6 billion years.
As a crude analogy, suppose God had an honest deck of 52 and dealt out five cards every second. According to Mathworld, the odds of dealing a royal flush (KQJ10A) is 1 in 649,739 deals. In other words, roughly speaking within every 649,739-second time block one hand has to be a royal flush. Now 649,739 seconds is about 7.5 days (hmmm, God got lucky on that 6th day!). So, if He continued to deal once a second for a year, He would deal about 48 royal flushes a year, or 48 billion in 1 billion years.
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While the statement doesn’t come directly from the Pope, the official Vatican newspaper this week denounced “intelligent design” as unscientific, proving that not all religious believers are complete ninnies.
Intelligent design (ID) is the model favored primarily by U.S. Christians of a more conservative stripe over the predominant theories of evolution and the Big Bang. Proponents of ID hold that living organisms and the universe in general are too complex to have developed by mere chance. Rather, they insist that a designer of some sort arranged the universe to favor such complexity.
“If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,” Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, writes in L’Osservatore Romano.
“But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science,” he continues. “It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”
Or in other words, if you do not like or accept a scientific theory, don’t go around inventing new explanations from whole cloth, and calling them “scientific” when there is no scientific evidence to support them.
ID proponents clearly base their arguments from their faith in a divine Creator. Since they already presume there is a Creator, their insistence that the complexity of the universe supports the concept of a Creator is a circular argument. In addition, no one, including Catholics, has ever been able to find scientific evidence for a Creator. That’s a matter of faith.
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