If you are a teacher or a parent you may find some of these books especially useful to: a) prepare yourself; b) give to your child’s teacher or a colleague; or c) give to a school administrator. Seriously.
Each link is to a review of the book to help you decide if you are interested.
The following may serve well in a home study environment, or for the parent to keep up with what the school kid is doing or for the overachieving youngster to get ahead of the teacher!
Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of falsehoods.
Continue reading The Falsehoods
The following are links to selected posts on this blog that are related to science education or the evolution-creationism ‘debate.’
Chris Comer was the Director of Science with the Texas Educaiton Agency until she was forced to resign in November of 2007. That happened because she disseminated information about an upcoming talk that would likely be critical of creationism. She was fired because the TEA (hee hee he said …. “tea”) claimed a “neutrality” policy and claimed that Chris had broken the policy. Her reference, via email, to the upcoming talk was an endorsement of … OMG! Evolution! Evolution over Creationism!!!
Yes folks, you read that right. Chis Comer was effectively fired from her job as director of Science of the TEA because she gave the vaguest hint that she supported evolution over creationism. I’m sure you already know that story.
Anyway, she sued, and the court in which she sued ruled against her because that court did not feel that her claim … that the TEA had violated the establishment clause … was valid.
Truthfully, this is a tricky one. The court ruling against her in this case did not mean much regarding church and state or evolution vs. creationism.
Well, Chris Comer has filed an appeal in the US Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit. The appeal was filed on August 6th and asks for …
…review the record de novo and reverse and vacate the district court’s decision. Specifically, it should grant Comer’s motion for summary judgment, and vacate the grant of summary judgment for defendants, as well as the dismissal of plaintiff’s complaint. At a minimum, this Court should vacate the grant of summary judgment to defendants, plus the order dismissing the complaint, and remand for further proceedings.
Here is the original ruling.
Here is the appeal.
You can see a summary of this story here. As soon as I hear more I’ll let you know .
…. Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it’s early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about “carbon dating.” This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you’ve gotten to the “evolution module”…
The student is talking about C14 dating and how it “has problems.” But you are a life science teacher and can’t think of a single point in your class that you really touch on C14. Dating in the evolution section does not involve C14. This is for later time periods, more in the area of archaeology, and you know nothing about it. So you brush off the question but are left with an uneasy feeling.
Next class, probably just after class, the same student, again at a moment that gives you zero warning and usually no time to think of how to respond, mentions something about the Laws of Thermodynamics. This question you find more interesting and possibly even useful as the starting point of a “teachable moment…” The nature of life itself includes the fact that life works upstream against entropy. That one utterly mind-blowing aspect of life is really all you need to define life itself. If that was the only thing you used to define life, you would have very few non-life entities or events accidentally included. If you can truly understand … I mean really, really truly at a detailed level understand …. how the heck life works against the gradient of entropy, then you will understand a LOT (like, at the MA level, at least) of what is going on. To get a believable and reasonable level of understanding of this, you must get more than just basic cell function … it is not good enough to just say “The mitochondria are the tiny little powerhouses of the cell” because you have not explained how that works. You need to know about ATP and stuff. Really, you even need to know why cells use ATP as energy but none of the other obvious forms of energy that they could use … the phylogenetic effect at a very
Continue reading What to do with Bible thumping students
Hot off the presses from the NCSE:
Continue reading State science standards under attack
I wish I coulda been there … by all accounts it sounds like the Creozerg visit to the Creation Museum went well. A couple of kids were thrown out because they said things or whatever, which is good because it shows that the whole point of the creation museum is to express, secure, and protect a particular point of view and to supress others. For your entertainment, I’ve collected a handful of links from the event. Please visit these links, and if you are a social neworking kinda person, digg-em-up or stumbleuponthem or whatever. It would be very nice, would it not, if over the next few months anyone who sought information on the creation museum found lots of these stories on the top of the google food chain?
If you have a blog, you know what to do. and in case you don’t, just open this page (the one you are reading now) with Firefox, and hit ctrl U. Then, find the code for the list of links, copy, paste, blog.
..that even when you try diligently to separate the politics of religion vs. creationism and to say again and again that religion can go along its merry way as long as it stays out of the science classroom, people like Casey Luskin will still find the words in your rhetoric to accuse you of attacking religion.
Back in May, Genie Scott appeared with me and Lynn Fellman on Atheist Talk Radio, where we discussed science education. Genie is the director of the National Center for Science Education.
In a recent posting on the Discovery Institute web site, Casey Luskin makes the contrast between the National Center for Science Education’s stance, and thus of Genie Scott’s philosophy (she’s the director of the NCSE) on one hand vs. what she said in this radio interview.
Luskin specifically contrasts Genie’s statement that the NCSE’s goals are “not to promote disbelief” but rather to “help people understand evolution and hopefully accept it.” Hey, folks, that is is indeed what Genie pushes, and what the NCSE promotes, and it is classic middle-ground nice-guy science education. This is as good as it gets from the point of view of “appeasement” because it says let the religion go its own way, as long at it does not go into the classroom (see this: Accommodationists and New Atheists Sail in the Same Boat)
Luskin then contrasts that position with this quote from the same interview:
“Evolution is the scientific explanation that has the most repercussions, shall we say, for people’s worldview and religious perspective. Evolution tells you that humans share kinship with all other creatures. For some, that’s a very liberating and exciting idea, and it makes them feel one with nature and it’s empowering and so forth. For others, it’s threatening. If your view is a human exceptionalism kind of view, that humans are separate from nature and special — especially if they are special to God as in some Christian traditions, then evolution is going to be threatening to you.”
This quote was Genie’s answer to Lynn Fellman‘s question: “[A caller has asked] Why is it always evolution that seems to be under siege?”
Genie’s answer is correctly quoted above but with the last part of the quote bolded to emphasize the “threat” language, and Luskin further emphasizes the part about evolution being threatening:
Did you catch that? She just stated that evolution is “threatening to you” if you believe that humans “are special to God as in some Christian traditions.”
And, I should mention, the title of Luskin’s essay is: Eugenie Scott Claims Evolution Is Threatening to Certain Christian Traditions
OK folks, listen. There is no significant national organization involved in the evolution-creation debate that bends over backwards more to be “nice” to religion than the National Center for Science Education. But here, in Luskin’s critique, we see two important things:
1) It is not good enough. In order for Genie’s philosophy or the position of the NCSE to be considered “ok” by the Discovery Institute, the contrast that Genie talks about in her quote would have to go away. Human exceptionalism would have to be incorporated into the science or the science teaching. Evolution would have to be taught along side creationism in the classroom.
2) Luskin practices out of context interpretation and quote mining here. Strangely, he is providing the fuller context and the quote mined in the same place, so we see Genie’s de facto statement of the relationship between religion and science being converted before our very eyes as “Religious people, Evolution is threatening to you!!!”
It is hard to say that one can win under these circumstances. It is hard to support a be nice to the creationists philosophy under these circumstances. Genie Scott must be some kind of saint.
From the NCSE:
Three historians of science are unhappy about their treatment in a creationist movie about Darwin, as they explain in a note in the July 2009 Newsletter of the History of Science Society. Peter Bowler, Janet Browne, and Sandra Herbert write, “We have recently been featured in a documentary film, ‘The Voyage that Shook the World,’ produced by Fathom Media of Australia and directed by Stephen Murray of Synergy Films, New Zealand. We were led to believe that the movie was being made to be shown as an educational film on Australian broadcast television and possibly elsewhere. Fathom Media was revealed to be a subsidiary of Creation Ministries International when publicity for the movie began to appear on the internet.
Continue reading Expelled redux? Creationists Misrepresent Historians
There has been some recent discussion on the blogs and on Facebook about the tension an adviser might experience between paying attention to graduate students and doing the other stuff you are supposed to do, or from the student perspective, how to deal with getting that quality time from your adviser.
Continue reading The Futility of … life, learning, and graduate advising
This week we celebrate the anniversary of the first time human beings walked around on the moon, and as part of that celebration we find NASA releasing improved versions of the original scratchy black and white low resolution images of the first steps taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong. I’m worried that the youngsters out there do not understand the momentous nature of this event. So stand still for a minute while I force some wisdom on you.
I was sick Sunday, and I’m a bit off today, so everything is 36 to 48 hours off. So, my review of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future
1) An interesting post by David Dobbs places the current discussion regarding religion and science in an historical context: PZ Myers, Chris Mooney, Asa Gray, and the religion-science divide
2) Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds discusses the Mooney/Kirshenbaum strategy.
3) Stephanie also addresses this issue a bit more circumspectly in a post on “Mere Factual Accuracy” at Quiche Moraine.
… In which I narrow the gulf between two allied factions enough that with a running start you can jump across … maybe.
Continue reading Accommodationists and New Atheists Sail in the Same Boat
