The Austringer

Back on November 8th, Diane and I spent half the day helping Lansing Community College put on their Science and Math Elementary Exploration event. We were assigned to the biology section where we provided owl pellets for the students to pick apart and identify bones found therein. We had instruction sheets and a handy one-page bone identification guide.

We had a lot of students come through the doors during the SMEE activities. Diane had me go around to other SMEE events to get pictures as well. I’ll post some as I get a chance.

Rob Crowther, Discovery Institute spokesperson, has an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun.

Intelligent Design goes beyond biology and encompasses physics, chemistry and cosmology, as well. It is not creationism, nor was it developed to get around court rulings.

Intelligent design is the Logos theology expressed in the idiom of information theory, or so asserts Dr. William Dembski. That would be somewhat beyond biology, one has to admit. Certainly, accepting “intelligent design” as expounded by Dembski and others requires being ready to deny findings in biology, physics, chemistry, and cosmology, especially when it comes to the third rail of the IDC movement, criticism of “young-earth” creationist dogma.

The argumentative content propounded in “intelligent design” creationism is a subset of the argumentative content of “creation science”. It doesn’t provide anything other than what was seen in the creationist ensemble of religious antievolution argument, so it is hard to see why something that is comprised of the same stuff should be considered something completely different.

Crowther does not deal with the clear record that says that, yes, “intelligent design” creationism was developed expressly to get around court rulings. He’d have to deal with “cdesign proponentsists” if he were to actually examine relevant stuff, but he doesn’t do so.

Crowther uses an ambiguity to misinform. Because the phrase “intelligent design” received occasional use in descriptive language prior to 1987, Crowther casts that as putting in doubt the specific post-1987 usage of “intelligent design” to mean a field of study that denies evolutionary science. Unfortunately for Crowther, it is pretty simple to distinguish between the two, and no one used “intelligent design” as a phrase for a field of human inquiry before it popped up as a replacement for “creation science” in drafts of a textbook in 1987.

Oxford scholar F.C.S. Schiller employed the term “intelligent design” in 1897, writing that “it will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of Evolution may be guided by an intelligent design.”

Not used as indicating a field of study. Next…

In By Design, a history of the current controversy, journalist Larry Witham traces the roots of the contemporary Intelligent Design movement in biology to the 1960s and ’70s.

Maybe Witham is as confused as Crowther on being able to tell when “intelligent design” was first applied to mean a field of study.

Leading theoretical physicist Paul Davies described the fine-tuning of the universe as “the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.”

That’s not even the same phrase, and it doesn’t refer to “cosmic design” being a field of study, either.

Fred Hoyle, the eminent theoretical physicist and agnostic, followed with The Intelligent Universe (1983). He wrote: “A component has evidently been missing from cosmological studies. The origin of the Universe, like the solution of the Rubik cube, requires an intelligence.”

Again, not the same phrase, and no implication that there’s a field of study being described.

In 1984, one of the first scientific books advocating intelligent design appeared, Mystery of Life’s Origin, which was favourably received by leading scientists and scholars.

Nobody has ponied up an instance of “intelligent design” being used in the sense of denoting a field of study in this text. Nor will they.

Also that year, biologist Ray Bohlin published The Natural Limits to Biological Change, one of the first books to use the term “intelligent design” in its modern sense.

Lane P. Lester and Ray Bohlin used the phrase “intelligent design” as an alternative to “natural design” on pages 152, 153, 156, and 167 in that book. Nowhere did they suggest that “intelligent design” was a field of study as opposed to a simple descriptive phrase.

All of this was before court cases such as Edwards v. Aguillard.

All of that was irrelevant to the claim, too. What happened following Edwards v. Aguillard is well-documented in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial record. The Foundation for Thought and Ethics had a project to produce a creation science supplemental textbook, and in several preliminary drafts used the phrase “creation science” to refer to what they claimed was a field of study. After Edwards v. Aguillard, though, the drafts suddenly replaced “creation science” and similar phrases with “intelligent design”. Given that Edwards v. Aguillard proscribed religious antievolution in general and “creation science” in particular, the clear import to everyone besides lying tools (otherwise known as “cdesign proponentsists”) and the people they manage to dupe is that the search-and-replace operation was undertaken to evade court rulings. The issue is not and never was whether the phrase “intelligent design” had been used before Edwards v. Aguillard in 1987, but rather whether “intelligent design” had been used to indicate a human field of study before then. Crowther’s analysis is completely irrelevant since he never bothers to acknowledge that distinction.

McKnight’s attempt to discredit ID is as far afield as what he says about the Discovery Institute.

Anybody got a link to the McKnight article that set Crowther off? Given Crowther’s defensiveness, it sounds like a good read.

It is a secular think-tank, and our research into intelligent design and evolutionary theory is rooted in science, not religion.

Robert Crowther

Seattle

Wow.

Hey, Rob, what research is that? How come Howard Ahmanson, Jr. was the sugar daddy behind the “Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture” if there was only secular stuff going on? And will you ever acknowledge that usage of “intelligent design” to refer to a field of study makes a difference in analysis?

The Institute for Creation Research is continuing to press to get their pseudoscience degree-granting operation set up for business in Texas. They’ve run into a stumbling-block: the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board wants degrees granted with their approval to actually be based on science. This message went out from the ICR today:

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Dear Friends:

As we indicated to you on Tuesday, ICR’s special counsel, Jim Johnson, and I
met with representatives from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
(THECB) in a pre-hearing mediation meeting on Wednesday. The mediation was
conducted by an administrative law judge at the State Office of Administrative
Hearings in Austin.

ICR met with the THECB prior to an official administrative hearing, in hopes
that our graduate school’s application for authority to grant Master of
Science degrees in Texas might be settled prior to any further legal
proceedings. ICR Graduate School (ICRGS) has been offering M.S. degrees from
its California campus for 27 years and last year sought to move the school to
Texas, where our research and communications work now reside.

However, this controversy was not resolved at the mediation meeting on
Wednesday.

The primary dispute turns on the regulatory interpretation of the word
“science,” with the THECB insisting that any science degree or science program
must be evolution-based-without any mixture of “religion” in the program. The
THECB went further to say that their board held ultimate responsibility to
regulate any program that issued a “standard” degree (M.S., M.A., M.Ed.,
etc.). Thus it would not be possible for ICRGS to keep its current program
even if we were to change the degree title to Master of Education, for
example.

The five THECB representatives did concur, however, that a degree program in
Christian education or apologetics was not within their jurisdiction, as long
as the degree title was not “standard” nomenclature, such as an M.C.Ed.
(Masters in Christian Education).

I want to thank you for praying for us during the meeting. The meeting was
cordial and both sides were able to clarify certain misunderstandings
regarding each other’s positions and reasons for the debate.

ICRGS will now continue the Texas administrative appeal process in order to
secure the right to offer its Master of Science degree program in Texas, as it
has been doing for 27 years in California.

Dr. Henry Morris III
Chief Executive Officer

Glenn Branch, Deputy Director of the National Center for Science Education, has a blog post in the Beacon Broadside, “Zombie Jamboree in Texas“.

When the distinguished philosopher Philip Kitcher recently addressed the creationist movement in his Living With Darwin, he judiciously assessed creationism in its latest incarnation as historically respectable but currently bankrupt, and proposed to describe it as “dead” science. “In light of its shambling tenacity,” I replied, “‘zombie science’ is perhaps a preferable label.” (I was writing in a scholarly journal, so I resisted the temptation to add a reference to “Romero 1968″ or “Wright 2004″.)

I told Glenn that he was missing a trick there by not noting, “And they really do want to eat your brains, or at least your children’s brains.”

Re-arrange the title a little to “Texas Zombie Jamboree” and I think we’d have a concept worthy to pull Roger Corman out of retirement. “Today, the State Board of Education. Tomorrow, Dick and Jane. There’s nowhere to run from the Texas Zombie Jamboree.” Still a bit long for the poster, but I think we can work with that.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interview online with Lauri Lebo, journalist and author of The Devil in Dover.

One small town school board’s attempt to introduce religion and cast doubt on evolution is the subject of a new book by Lauri Lebo, who joins Chronicle education reporter Nanette Asimov in this podcast interview.

Yes, there’s another post at the Discovery Institute blog. This one is by Rob Crowther, and it seeks to reassure everyone that they aren’t pushing “intelligent design” anymore.

As for claims that we try to get intelligent design into the curriculum, that’s just not the case. Our science education policy is very clear. In November of 2003 Discovery Institute issued a Q&A that stated:

Does Discovery Institute advocate requiring intelligent design theory in textbooks as an alternative? Absolutely not. We are NOT seeking to have intelligent design included in textbooks or in classroom instruction. We only want factual errors corrected and legitimate scientific weaknesses of neo-Darwinism presented.

Darwinists are fond of trying to change the subject from teaching the case for and against Darwinian evolution, and make this a debate over whether or not to include intelligent design in the curriculum. That isn’t the issue.

News flash, Rob… this didn’t work in Ohio. Remember Ohio? In 2002, DI Fellows Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells, on the spot to tell the Ohio State Board of Education exactly what they proposed teaching students as “intelligent design”, offered a “compromise” instead, that being “critical analysis”. The Ohio SBOE went along with that. They shepherded a “critical analysis” lesson plan by an Ohio “intelligent design” advocate through the review process and rejected alternative lesson plans that actually implemented “critical analysis”. The poor reviews of the IDC “critical analysis” lesson plan were suppressed; the SBOE didn’t get to see those. Then “Coingate” happened in Ohio and Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District happened in Pennsylvania. Requests for public records in pursuit of the shenanigans behind “Coingate” revealed the dirty political laundry of “intelligent design” advocacy behind the scenes, including political threats employed by one of the major IDC advocates on the SBOE. It also brought to light the internal reviews of the “critical analysis” lesson plan, where the education specialists from the Department of Education easily recognized the arguments in the “critical analysis” lesson plan as being the same as seen in “intelligent design” materials and “creation science” before that. The Kitzmiller case indicated that there was a significant liability risk to teaching religious antievolution. Given the clear evidence that the SBOE had been lied to on the issue of whether “intelligent design” was being advocated through the “critical analysis” language, the SBOE early in 2006 dropped the “critical analysis” language from the standards and the lesson plan from their website. Later, the voters dropped the high-profile IDC advocate on the SBOE who had threatened the governor politically to inject “critical analysis” AKA “intelligent design” into the curriculum.

The quote above does not say that the Discovery Institute won’t push for “intelligent design” arguments to be used in Texas classrooms. It just says that the Discovery Institute isn’t pushing for the “intelligent design” label for them to be required. But “intelligent design” isn’t anything in itself, it is simply a collection of objections to evolution that have been made by religious antievolutionists for decades or centuries. “Irreducible complexity”, “specified complexity”, and various “anthropic principle” arguments have explicit expression of the concepts in the work of the Reverend William Paley in “Natural Theology” from 1802. If you want to impress folks in Texas, Rob, tell them that the Discovery Institute has repudiated those arguments entirely and doesn’t want anyone to use them anymore. Teaching children falsehoods, like the arguments made under the “intelligent design” label, has no secular purpose. We’ll wait for your clarification that the Discovery Institute thinks that all the arguments that were made under the “intelligent design” label were wrong and teachers in Texas should not use those as bogus “weaknesses” of evolutionary science.

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Yeah, I didn’t think so.

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Rob, you must think that the folks in Texas are significantly more stupid than the folks in Ohio who the DI hoodwinked for almost four years. When the Discovery Institute says that they want “weaknesses” taught, they mean the same old arguments that they used to call “intelligent design”.

Texas, the DI is giving you an IQ test. Don’t flunk.

I got a call today from a friend in Texas who until recently was a high school science and math teacher. She had just read an article in Texas Monthly about the State Board of Education, its lopsided composition and “intelligent design” advocate chairman, and was hopping mad about it. I asked her if she was a member of the two Texas organizations working for good science or the National Center for Science Education. She said she was ready to sign up. So while I’m collecting the information for her, I’ll also post it here so that any others interested can also get involved.

Texas Citizens for Science
Website
Joining information
No contribution asked.

Texas Freedom Network
Website
Joining information
Annual contribution of $35 is requested.

National Center for Science Education
Website
Joining information
Annual membership is $30.

Texas has a rough year ahead of it, and thus science education nationally has a problem. Especially if you are in Texas, this is the time to get involved. The last time Texas was dealing with science education issues, those three organizations helped people find effective ways to make a difference. They are already dealing with the issues. They could use your help.

The National Center for Science Education has long planned a revision of their web pages. Now, the new version of their website is officially up and running. Check it out.

The previous version is still available, though. There will be a period of confusion until Google spiders both sites, as the old content has been incorporated into the new framework, which presents different URLs for access. The legacy site was coded and contributed by Ira Walter back in 1998. It served NCSE well for several years, but Walter’s time commitments prevented him from doing much in the way of updates. The combination of custom coding and targeting of a specific host setup caused NCSE, and me, a bit of a headache in 2006 just before Thanksgiving when Ira Walter died and shortly thereafter the server hosting the site died. It dropped into my lap to get the site running again on a new server at the same hosting company, whose different underlying software architecture required some basic changes in the way various functions worked. NCSE had been hobbling along with the patched website.

Now, it looks like they have a good basis for carrying their content into the future. The Drupal content management system is a widely-used, actively developed, open source system that is themable and flexible. If a change in presentation is needed, it only requires theme changes.

Last Saturday, there was a “Frontiers of Science” workshop led by Rob Pennock. This was part of a series of workshops given for secondary school science teachers on science topics, and Prof. Pennock took up effective lab instruction in evolutionary science as his topic. The featured subject was use of the Avida-ED software platform as a means of giving students an interactive laboratory experience in which they can observe an instance of evolution occurring as they watch.

The late dearth of posts was due to getting prepared for this workshop. Part of my tasks included the creation of a new lesson plan for use with Avida-ED to be given its first outing at the workshop. This took up the misconception that fitness is some property inherent to an individual, but must instead be thought of as a property that is defined relative to the conditions of its environment. Rob assigned me to lead the workshop on this new lesson plan. There were both good points and some procedural difficulties encountered, but overall it was well-received, and at least one attendee expressed her intention to use the lesson plan for her class. I’ll be modifying the lesson plan to incorporate improvements based on the experience.

In making introductions of workshop participants, many of the teachers expressed the concern that they quite often encounter students or parents who have the idea that evolution demands that one must choose between faith and science, either rejecting evolutionary science and accepting faith, or accepting evolutionary science and rejecting faith. In some instances, teachers related that they’ve told students to inquire of their pastors what their denomination’s stance is on the matter. For many students attending mainstream Christian denominations, they are told that their denomination does not hold to the “conflict model” so effectively sold by religious antievolutionists, and they can study without fear that they are somehow going against their church by learning the material.

For any science teachers tuning in now, you should be aware of the Clergy Letter Project and its message from over 11,000 Christian clergy that says that one can have a vital faith and not dismiss evolutionary science.

Here’s photos from the trip that I, Laura, and PZ took to the Georgia Aquarium back on July 15th. They had some really nicely done displays, but the thing that sets them apart is their 6.3 mega-gallon tank and the four whale sharks they keep in it.

I was looking for some open source courseware, and my Google search brought up this site from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They already have materials from 1,800 courses online. Have a look at the home page for the introductory Genetics course, for example.

This isn’t a distance learning site and there are no fees involved; you can self-pace yourself through the materials for whatever courses you like here. This looks to be a great resource for students and educators everywhere. It does cost them to do this, and they do solicit donations to help make this happen.