“Many miles away Something crawls to the surface Of a dark Scottish loch” -Sting

This is almost painful to read. The Scotland Herald has a story on the arrival of school children from the great state of Louisiana who are being taught that the actual existence of the Loch Ness Monster is proof that evolution has never happened. Rachel Loxton reports:

Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland's most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature.

These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.

and a bit later:

One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: "Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."

The bit about the private schools getting vouchers is true. That is here. Salon.com did a piece on the ACE textbooks. They fill in the remainder of the above quote:

“Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.”

I have written on the apologia textbooks before but these books seem to be every bit as bad. It is nothing short of astounding that the authors of the ACE textbooks, in their zeal to disprove evolution, have settled upon an animal for which No Credible Evidence Exists. It is not just bad science, it is cryptozoology of the worst sort. What is next? Evolution can't be true because of if it were, how would it produce the regular octopus and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus? Humans could not have evolved from lower ape forms because Bigfoot still roams the earth?

The second quote is just standard young earth creationist nonsense, continually perpetrated by Answers in Genesis and the like and has been rebutted so many times that the arguments can now reasonably be classified as lies.

Karl Giberson once said:

“Ken Ham and his Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY are becoming less relevant, as they speak for - and to - an increasingly smaller band of hyper-conservative biblical literalists. Ham's followers, ironically, are what (we've been warned about): a cult, with their own separate science.”

I have resisted calling young earth creationism a cult. Stories like this one make it increasingly difficult to do so.

More Home Schooling Frustration

After a year and a half, Melanie and I are removing our two older children from the Christian school that they currently attend. The reasons for this are three-fold: first, it is eating us out of house and home. Even with financial aid, at my associate professor-equivalent salary, the bottom is dropping out. Second, Melanie feels that she has lost touch with them in some ways and wants to reestablish this contact. Third, I have a growing unease with the science curriculum and want to be able to control the kind of instruction that they receive in this area. The school is, otherwise, top flight and it is clear that Marcus and Madeline have been challenged and strengthened in their education and faith in most areas. For that we are very grateful and we have told the headmaster that we don't want to close the door on our involvement with the school, science reservations aside. It is clear that the children made a substantial positive impact on the school and he said that we will be sorely missed.

So, since we have never seriously considered public education, we are going back to the home schooling route, which worked pretty well before the private school. Welcome to the science minefield. Dylan Lovan, of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a story about what to expect from your average home school curriculum. He writes:

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want: Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.”

It is worth pointing out that those are not necessarily the same thing. We want to give our children religious and moral instruction as well. We just don't want it to be young earth creationism. Therefore, it is not clear how many of those 83% are YEC-oriented . It is clear that this is part theology but part business as well:

The size of the business of home-school texts isn’t clear because the textbook industry is fragmented, and privately held publishers don’t give out sales numbers. Slatter said home-school material sales reach about $1 billion annually in the U.S.

Publishers are well aware of the market, said Jay Wile, a former chemistry professor in Indianapolis who helped launch the Apologia curriculum in the early 1990s.

“If I’m planning to write a curriculum, and I want to write it in a way that will appeal to home-schoolers, I’m going to at least find out what my demographic is,” he said.

So, is it about the science or is it about the Benjamins? When Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, and Virginia Tech professor Duncan Porter reviewed some of the textbooks from Bob Jones University and Apologia, they gave them Fs for failing to teach basic biology and evolutionary theory. That brought this response:

Wile countered that Coyne “feels compelled to lie in order to prop up a failing hypothesis. We definitely do not lie to the students. We tell them the facts that people like Dr. Coyne would prefer to cover up.”

That's contemptible. What is Coyne lying about? Why would he lie? What evidence does Wile have that it is failing? My son uses an Apologia science book for his class at school. After reading that quote, I am sorely tempted to burn it the minute he has his last day at class! The book is called Exploring Creation with Botany and is part of the "day" series and I have blogged about my experience with this book here. The writer didn't just get things wrong, she got BASIC things wrong—as though she had no familiarity with what she was writing about. Is this academic integrity? Is this how we want our students and children to learn?

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Orchids, Evolution and a "Creation Confirmation"

My son Marcus goes to a private Christian school that, while having a great curriculum in history, languages, grammar, mathematics and Bible, uses creationism as its basis for science. To that end, each year they learn about a different topic from a slightly peculiar point of view. This year it is botany. We tootle along in the book, explaining monocots, dicots, carnivorous plants and so on. Interspersed among these safe topics are these "Creation Confirmation" sections. The book is from Apologia Education Ministries and is written by Jeannie K. Fulbright. Apologia's page has this to say about her:

Following graduation and marriage, her writing and speaking focused on building up the Christian community, teaching marriage and parenting classes, in addition to writing articles and Bible studies. After her homeschool journey began, Jeannie discerned an immense need for Creation-based, scientifically sound, engaging, easy-to-use science curricula.

In other words, she doesn't have any education in palaeontology or biology. Is this what they mean by "scientifically sound?" One of these passages focuses on orchids, long a controversial issue among palaeobotanists, only in the sense that it is not clear when they evolved. She writes:

Orchids give us further evidence against evolution. Flowers don't use nectar for themselves. They only use it to attract animals to help them in pollination. Flowers spend a lot of energy making nectar that just gets eaten by the animals. Since orchids like the bee orchid get pollination without actually feeding the animals, survival is easier for them. They don't have to keep making food for animals. Evolution would say that since these orchids have an easier time surviving than orchids that actually feed animals, they should be the main kind of orchids in creation. Why, then are they rare compared to other orchids? Only a few orchids attract animals by imitation. Most of them use a lot of energy making food for animals in order to attrack them. The fact that most orchids (and flowers in general) produce nectar for animals to eat shows that God intended flowers and animals to work together to survive. ¹

Where to start. She manages to write about orchids without ever mentioning the pollinarium, a key feature of these plants. As Johnson and Edwards (1999) write:

The packaging of pollen into a compact unit known as the pollinium, which together with accessory structures for attachment to pollinators comprises a pollinarium, was undoubtedly a key innovation in the evolutionary history of the Orchidaceae, and may have played a role in promoting the tremendous radiation of the group, which numbers at least 19 500 species (Dressier 1993).²

But, of course, this doesn't explain why the Bee Orchid is less prolific than other orchids. Why would this be the case? Subsequent to the publishing of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin wrote about, you guessed it, orchids. In the work of Darwin on the Orchid family is an explanation for why this is. As Johnson and Edwards put it:

The majority of orchid species (and most flowering plants) are hermaphroditic: each individual possesses both male and female reproductive organs. Hermaphrodism might seem like a good way of ensuring reproductive success and hence evolutionary persistence. But Darwin was convinced that self-crossing—and even mating between relatives—decreased the survival and reproductive abilities (the "vigor and fertility") of the offspring produced (e.g., 1859, 96-97; Darwin worried about how bad it might have been for his own children that he had married his first cousin, Emma; see Desmond and Moore 1991, 575). The more hermaphroditic plants he studied, the more mechanisms he found for the promotion of intercrossing. Among orchids, self-crossing was exceedingly rare. Darwin knew of only one case, the bee orchid, Ophrys apifera (which he predicted would go extinct, and he confided that he wished he could live a thousand years in order to see the last one go; see Desmond and Moore 1991, 511-512).³

Myriad examples exist in nature of the means of increasing genetic variability in any given offspring generation. Even among humans, not only is there a mixing of the genetic traits of the mother and father, but there is crossing over of homologous chromosomes to further increase genetic variation. Darwin's lament is the lament that is echoed by most societies in the world, who have taboos against inbreeding. Inbreeding does two things: it restricts the amount of potential genetic variation in the next generation and it also results in the expression of recessive deleterious traits that might otherwise be hidden in the next generation.

The point behind the above is that this is classic Mendelian inheritance, something that is taught in high school biology classes. It took me very little time to run down the reason for the comparative lack of heartiness of the Bee Orchid, something Ms. Fulbright couldn't be bothered to do. Consequently, the question she asks is very easily answered within an evolutionary framework and constitutes no evidence against evolution whatsoever.


¹Fulbright, Jeannie K. (2004) Exploring Creation with Botany. Anderson, Indiana: Apologia Education Ministries, Inc. p.54

²Johnson, S.D. and Edwards, T.J. (2000) The structure and function of orchid pollinaria. Plant Systematics and Evolution 222: 243

³Beatty, John (2006) Chance variation: Charles Darwin on Orchids. Philosophy of Science. 73: 629-641.
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