Recently in Slightly Off Topic Category

Under that headline, Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science magazine, announced the first of 15 winners of the Science Prize for Inquiry-based Instruction. The first winner, An Inquiry-Based Curriculum for Nonmajors, describes “an inquiry-based curriculum designed to increase the scientific literacy of those who are not science majors and to impart a fundamental understanding of the nature of scientific investigation.” The curriculum uses a series of independent modules in which the students design their own experiments. The curriculum described in the paper is Light, Sight, and Rainbows. It Includes a scattering experiment and a solar oven experiment designed by the students, and looked to my (optical) eye like very sound pedagogy.

Ford’s Theater National Historic Site has banned removed from sale Bill O’Reilly’s book on the Lincoln assassination from its bookstore because the book is not historically accurate. Can it be any worse than Grand Canyon: A Different View, which is still on sale at the Grand Canyon National Park Bookstore?

According to a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the book has been moved to an apparently ad hoc Inspirational section of the bookstore, and the National Park Service has delayed issuing instructions on how to deal with creationist questions.

Is pseudoscience based on religion somehow privileged over pseudohistory? Apparently, yes.

Thanks to Walter Plywaski for the link to the Post article.

I hope this is not too far off task, but I wanted to brag that my colleague Paul Strode is one of two high-school science teachers who will take part in the national Education across the Life Sciences meeting in Washington. According to an article in the Boulder Daily Camera, he will serve on a panel on “Thinking Evolutionarily: Evolution Education across the Life Sciences.” The purpose of the meeting, which is sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, is to

enable educational leaders, members of professional scientific societies, and members of other scientific and science education organizations to develop a strategic plan that will develop a national database of resources from disciplines across the life sciences to help faculty make evolutionary science a central focus of introductory biology survey courses and other courses across the life sciences curriculum.

Incidentally, I am the unnamed Colorado School of Mines (not University of Colorado) professor who co-authored the book Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails) with Dr. Strode. I hope no one will consider it churlish of me to note that I am somewhat bemused by the fact that, when the book came out, I could not get the Camera to review it.

Barnes & Noble is bringing out a slew of Westlake books for the Nook late this month. Westlake, who died nearly three years ago, was the creator of John Archibald Dortmunder, one of the great comic criminals in the genre, and it looks like a bunch of the Dortmunder books are among those being published for the Nook.

Looks like the cartoonist Wiley Miller has started a series of strips on teaching the “controversy.” He’s got the age of the dinosaurs wrong, and carbon dating does not work that far back anyway, but, hell, the strip is called Non Sequitur. The money quote so far is, “Um, just as an F.Y.I., saying ‘facts’ would be a lot less offensive if you used air-quotes.”

Joan L. Slonczewski, a friend and former colleague who is a microbiologist at Kenyon College and a John Campbell Award-winning science fiction author, has a new science fiction novel coming out next week titled The Highest Frontier. According to the blurb, it’s about a

… college in a space habitat financed by a tribal casino, colonized by a geocentrist church, and defended from aliens by Homeworld Security.

Sounds familiar. :)

Joan’s A Door into Ocean, with themes of ecofeminism and pacifism, won the 1987 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. All her science fiction (see Wikipedia link above) is biologically informed and is to some extent at least biologically themed.

For central Ohioans, there will be a book launch gathering and book-signing at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, Sept 13, at the Kenyon Bookstore in greater downtown Gambier, Ohio. Downtown Gambier is one block long, so finding the bookstore ain’t hard. Finding Gambier, on the other hand, can be … erm … interesting. I’ll be there.

Glenn Branch of NCSE tells us, unhappily,

Sad news from Kansas: Niall Shanks, whom many of us knew and whose God, the Devil, and Darwin all of us should know, died in July; he was only 52.

I never met Professor Shanks, but he contributed a chapter to Why Intelligent Design Fails, and I found him a pleasure to work with. I am saddened by the news. You may see NCSE’s obituary here.

Guest commentary by Dan Phelps, [Enable javascript to see this email address.].

On the evening of August 9, 2011, the City of Williamstown, Grant County, Kentucky, and Ark Encounter (AE)/Answers in Genesis (AIG) held a “Listening Session” at Williamstown High School to discuss local concerns about the Ark Park. Government officials present included Williamstown Mayor Rick Skinner, the entire Williamstown City Council, members of the Dry Ridge City Council, Wade Gutman of the Grant County Industrial Board, Sally Skinner of the Williamstown Independent School Board, members of the Grant County School Board, the Grant County Planning Board, the Grant County Tourism Board, the Rural Development Board, Royce Adams of the Kentucky House of Representatives, a representative of the Veteran’s Cemetery, and Judge Executive Darrell Link of the Grant County Fiscal Court. Representing Ark Encounter/AIG were Mike Zovath and attorney Jim Parsons. Tad Long of the Kentucky League of Cities served as a facilitator. The local cable access channel videotaped the meeting. I made an audio recording.

Approximately 450 to 500 citizens attended the meeting; all seats were taken and a number of people had to stand along the walls. Interestingly, the majority of attendees appeared to be forty or older. The event was well organized and friendly throughout. Mayor Skinner briefly introduced the various people giving presentations and those available to answer questions.

Well, no, not really, but a recent program on National Public Radio in the U. S. claimed that “Evangelicals Question the Existence of Adam and Eve.” More specifically, the program noted that Dennis Venema of Trinity Western University and a few other evangelical scholars argue, correctly, that evolutionary theory precludes the possibility that all of humanity descended from a single couple. Let us hope that they are the thin edge of the wedge.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is more likely a statement by Albert Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: “Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul’s description of the Gospel .…” I have no idea whether this claim is true, but it is certainly not evidence for the existence of Adam. Venema and the others are on the right track when they note that the Bible consists of allegory and poetry, as well as history, and need not be taken literally. Mohler, by contrast, needs to learn the meaning of the phrase begging the question.

A reader sent me this link with the subject line above. The state and the county have committed $40 million in tax credits, as well as other perks, to a for-profit venture to build an Ark Park in order to spur “economic development.” Someone may correct me, but unless I am mistaken such enticements for sports stadiums and other ventures almost never pay for themselves. Besides, a state senator notes at the bottom of the article, the developer said it did not need the incentives, so why were they offered?

See also an earlier article here.

About two weeks ago, the Federal Circuit–one of the nation’s Courts of Appeals, and therefore the second-highest level of the federal judiciary–handed down its decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. PTO, a case about the controversial subject of gene patenting. The court upheld the patenting of genes–though not other patents, which cover certain methods of comparing or testing genes, and this has sparked some (to my mind, correct) outrage on the part of researchers, who see gene patenting as an obstacle to research and progress in genetics. Because this is not really about evolution, I examine the decision over at my personal blog, Freespace.

According to an advance review of a program tonight on the Discovery Channel, Stephen Hawking (unsurprisingly) says no. In the U. S., the program is on the tube at 8:00 Eastern time.

PZ Myers, Ed Brayton, The Digital Cuttlefish, Chris Rodda, and DarkSyde are starting a blog network called FreethoughtBlogs.com. It’ll open August 1, tomorrow. From the comments on the Facebook announcement of the opening it looks like Ophelia Benson will be joining it soon, too.

As predictable as the sunrise, creationists are launching another round of the disgusting practice of trying to tie every mass murderer to Darwin and evolution, self-consistency and logic be damned. This time it’s about Brevik, the bomber and shooter in last Friday’s killings. We saw this at Uncommon Descent on Sunday (“Norway shooter a Darwinian terrorist?”) – itself relying on an article from the fundamentalist WorldNetDaily (“Terrorist proclaimed himself ‘Darwinian,’ not ‘Christian’”), and today from alleged scholar John West at the Discovery Institute (“Fundamentalist Christian or Deranged Social Darwinist?”).

West does the usual thing, word-searching Brevik’s 1500-page screed for the few references to Darwin, and brazenly playing down the hundreds of references to Christianity and God and the Templars and Christian holy war against Islam. These are just brushed off by West. West pretends that Brevik calls himself a “Christian atheist” through pretty optimistic (optimistic from West’s perspective) readings of some Brevik passages, which completely ignores the various quite direct references that Brevik makes towards his own belief in God. Here’s West:

I guess everyone knows it by now, but the world ends tomorrow. I anticipate a headline the day after tomorrow, “The world ended yesterday.”

Nevertheless, this human-interest article in the Times was disturbing. For example,

Andrew Weil practices “alternative” medicine, that is, medicine for which there is no evidence of efficacy. Now, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, he recommends that evaluations of the efficacy of a treatment include “[p]atient factors – including how patients felt about the treatment, whether they can afford it and any evidence of a placebo response” (the words are those of the reporter, not Weil).

Some of Weil’s other recommendations, such as consideration of the funding source and possible unintended consequences, make sense, but “how patients felt about the treatment” is an invitation to peddle snake oil - maybe we should perform all clinical trials using red pills to get the best outcome.

Paraphrasing Weil, the article goes on to say,

Medicine has become enslaved to “evidence-based” approaches that rely on randomized, clinical trials as the only measure of whether a treatment is valuable[.]

Enslaved to evidence-based approaches? Reminds me of nothing more than William Dembski’s pathetic level of detail.

Well, no, not exactly, maybe, but a recent article in the Los Angeles Times cites a study to the effect that young adults who participate regularly in religious activities are more likely to become obese than those who do not. Specifically, people with very high involvement in religious activities were 50% more likely to become obese than those who did not participate at all, even after the data were controlled for such factors as age, sex, race, income, and what I will call the initial condition, that is, the body-mass index of the subjects at the beginning of the study.

Why? The principal investigator, Matthew Feinstein, would not commit himself, but thought it might be the weekly potluck dinners. The LA Times worries about the future of the Jell-O salad. I immediately thought of the movie where Woody Allen decides to become a Catholic and brings home a loaf of white bread and a jar of mayonnaise.

iConfess. Speaking of Catholicism, this month’s issue of The Progressive cites a Reuters dispatch to the effect that the Catholic Church in the United States has approved an iPhone app for confession. Priests need not worry about technological unemployment, however; there is, at least so far, no app for absolution – or is that iAppsolution? – so Catholics will still have to get absolution from a priest.

According to an article in the Guardian, the European Court of Human Rights has reversed its own earlier decision and now says that it is lawful to display a crucifix in a state schoolroom. The earlier decision caused “uproar,” so the full court reconsidered its earlier decision and concluded that the crucifix was “an essentially passive symbol.” As the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser might have said, Yeah, yeah, and a Christmas tree is just a secular symbol.

France, meanwhile, has banned religious symbols worn by students in state schools. So here is a philosophy question: Can you both permit and prohibit religious symbols at the same time?

According to a couple of articles by Stephen Glain, one in The Nation and one in Foreign Policy, right-wing fundamentalists have been allowed to proselytize in the United States military and in particular in the Air Force Academy. As far as I know, the only organization actively opposing these fundamentalists is the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, headed by Mikey Weinstein.

By Donald Prothero, Occidental College

As many of us watch the horrors of the nonstop news coverage from Japan, a lot of misinformation seems to be sweeping through the media and the blogosphere. Since I’m a geologist trained in seismology, and also the author of the new book Catastrophes: Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Tornadoes, and other Earth-Shattering Disasters (Johns Hopkins University Press), I’ve been asked to write up a brief summary of the fact and myths about the earthquake.