Religion & Law

Florida's Children Win!

Posted on May 02, 2008
Evolution bills die in Legislature as session endsPublished Friday, May 2, 2008 at 6:19 p.m.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. ? Hotly debated evolution bills that critics said would inject religious doctrine into public schools in the guise of science died a quiet death Friday on the final day of the legislative session...

Countdown

Posted on May 01, 2008
In the category of "Nothin' gets past dem IDeologists" (from The Florida Times-Union, via Florida Citizens for Science:"I'd say someone in the House, in the name of trying to push this bill, is actually trying to kill it," said John West, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that developed a model evolution-debate law that was the basis for Florida's legislation...

I've Been Acquitted!

Posted on May 01, 2008
Hello,Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused...

Tears of a Clown

Posted on May 01, 2008
Most everyone interested in Expelled will be aware of the lawsuit by the family of a moderately famous singer/songwriter:[John] Lennon?s widow Yoko Ono Lennon and sons Sean and Julian, along with EMI Blackwood Music, filed suit on April 22, 2008 claiming that Premise Media?s unauthorized use of ?Imagine? violates copyright and trademark law...

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Casting Call

Posted on April 30, 2008
Hey, PZ! Here's another chance to break into Hollywood!Michael Barton at The Dispersal of Darwin has discovered there is another movie is in the works that's looking to interview historians and scientists for a documentary about the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species...

Morality Play

Posted on April 30, 2008
Here's a bit more on the dismissal of Nathaniel Abraham's lawsuit against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, already discussed by Timothy Sandefur at The Panda's Thumb and PZ Myers at Pharyngula.Abraham failed to bring his suit within 90 days following the dismissal of his administrative complaint of discrimination...

Mechanical Engineering

Posted on April 30, 2008
I went to post this morning and discovered that, on the "create post" page, there was one of those annoying (and frequently difficult to get to work) "word verification" boxes. Therein lies a tale that might explain why Abbie of ERV (old and new) was locked out of her blog and the content disappeared for a time...

Out and About the Intertubes

Posted on April 30, 2008
We're all ignorant. The most erudite person in the world knows only the tiniest fraction of the collective knowledge of the human species. That's why we build libraries. And human knowledge itself represents only a tiny fraction of what there is, in this vast universe and what may lie beyond it, out there to be known...

Defaming Science

Posted on April 29, 2008
A press release:Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the HolocaustNew York, NY, April 29, 2008 ? The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory...

Conserving the Environment

Posted on April 29, 2008
A thought:[H]ere is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world ? that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he?s not chattering into his cell phone...

True Lies

Posted on April 29, 2008
Canadian Christianity on Expelled:... Stein's climactic interview with Dawkins includes an exchange that is treated like a major 'gotcha!' moment, yet if anything it suggests there is something fundamentally dishonest, or at least disingenuous, about the ID movement...

Signs of Intelligence

Posted on April 28, 2008
It seems that IDeologists may not all be lacking in the essential ingredient for their "theory":The [Florida] House's insistence on language [in the so-called "academic freedom" legislation] the Senate already has rejected left John West, the [Discovery Institute's] associate director, perplexed...

Dangerous Working Conditions

Posted on April 28, 2008
John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser, is interviewed at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is some of what he had to say about Intelligent Design Creationism, starting off with the President's statement seemingly supporting the teaching of ID:If you go back and look at the circumstances of the way he made a statement, it was hardly a statement...

Reviewing Our Options

Posted on April 28, 2008
Publishers Weekly's review of Ken Miller's new book:Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's SoulKenneth R. Miller. Viking, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-670-01883-3Thoroughly enjoyable and informative, this new book by Miller (Finding Darwin's God), a Brown University biologist and leading proponent of evolution, dismantles the scientific basis of intelligent design piece by piece...

Up and Away

Posted on April 27, 2008
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an uncommonly astute editorial today. The editorial notes the report of a:... remarkable new genetic study published last week has demonstrated that the closest living relative of the giant T. rex are birds ? specifically, chickens and ostriches ? rather than reptiles like alligators and lizards...

Modern Maturity

Posted on April 27, 2008
You may remember Matt LaClair, the young man who dared to stand up to a popular teacher who was proselytizing his personal faith to his students. He's back with an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times about more institutionalized "evangelism":... I thought I was done with controversy for a while...

A Whiff of Evolution

Posted on April 27, 2008
There is an article by Faye Flam entitled "Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors" that is based on Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, a book I recently finished and found to be a very readable and clear explanation of the power of evolutionary theory to explain the living world around us...

Off the Court

Posted on April 26, 2008
Ed Brayton has the story of the dismissal of what he calls "one of the strangest lawsuits I've ever heard of." Having seen the kind of looney-tunes cases Ed has uncovered in the past, I could not help but have my curiosity piqued, so I hunted down the decision...

Trump Card

Posted on April 26, 2008
Is it just me or has there been an uptick in the "elitism" meme since the release of Expelled? Anti-science advocates have always played that card, going back at least as far as William Jennings Bryan, "The Great Commoner," and his crusade against "Darwinism...

Dispelled

Posted on April 25, 2008
Okay, so I'm not so much posting this for your benefit but my own, as a handy place to park these links where I can find them again. But you few hardy souls reading this might want to peruse the articles anyway and maybe tuck them away where you can retrieve them for later use...

Buggy

Posted on April 25, 2008
Today is World Malaria Day. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the disease kills 1.3 million people each year, mostly children under the age of five. The United Nations has announced a new global initiative to eliminate malaria but it won't be easy: The US National Institutes of Health said in a separate statement that malaria has proven to be "remarkably resilient, resurging because of the emergence of drug-resistant parasites and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes"...

Editorial Discretion

Posted on April 24, 2008
From a good editorial in the Tampa Bay Times:With newly passed science standards that require the teaching of evolution, Florida is finally on track to give its young people a solid educational grounding for careers in biology and medical science.Not so fast, says state Sen...

You Gets What You Pay For

Posted on April 24, 2008
The maneuvering continues in Florida:A proposed law allowing teachers and students to question the scientific theory of evolution is in jeopardy.The Senate narrowly passed its version Wednesday, but rejected an amendment that would have brought it in line with the House version -- and compromise may not be possible before the annual lawmaking session ends next week...

... But It's All About the Science!

Posted on April 23, 2008
William Dembski, Florida Baptist Witness, April 24, 2008:Controversy surrounds [Expelled]. Reviews tend to be extremely positive or extremely negative. Who likes it? People who think God may have had something to do with our being here and therefore find it reasonable that God may have left tangible evidence of His involvement in creation...

The Efficacy of Prayer

Posted on April 23, 2008
The Institute for Creation Research has been seeking approval in Texas to offer an online master's degree in Science Education. It has also been asking for prayers and support in the run-up to its final hearing before state education officials tomorrow, April 24th...

Hard Days Night

Posted on April 23, 2008
Uh, oh! Now they've gone and done it:John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and his sons are suing the filmmakers of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" for using the song "Imagine" in the documentary without permission.The family, along with privately held publisher EMI Blackwood Music Inc...

Mein Expelled

Posted on April 23, 2008
John Wilkins has an excellent point:One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had causes quite unrelated to the Jews, mostly caused by the overweening ambitions of the German militarists and industrialists who pushed the German speaking nations into the Great War...

Macro-Lies

Posted on April 22, 2008
One thing creationists, including the Intelligent Design sort, inevitably get around to is claiming that there is some insurmountable difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution." The usual trope is that microevolution, as evidenced by such observations as the changes over human time spans in "Darwin's Finches" or the Peppered Moth, is nothing more than minor adaptations to the environment, different in some unspecified way from those necessary to result in a different "kind" of animal...

Gifts from Above

Posted on April 22, 2008
Troy Britain at Playing Chess with Pigeons has an excellent two part post demonstrating how Intelligent Design Creationism is really just warmed-over "Creation Science," with all the same old tired "arguments" against evolution. Troy compares the "Leadership Guide" (a fairly large pdf file) offered at the official Expelled site, to statements by such stalwarts of "Creation Science" as Henry Morris, Duane Gish and Gary Parker...

Political Science

Posted on April 21, 2008
A thought:Whether from genuine religious feeling or political calculation, elements of the political right wage war against miscalled "Darwinism" ? therefore against honest science teaching.Why "miscalled"? Because to revile evolutionary science, 140 years after the Darwin-Wallace insight, as "Darwinism" is ignorance or rabblerousing...

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