Meanwhile, Over in Alabama...

A scientist/educator by the name of Albert Gapud, who is a condensed matter physicist and has worked here at ORNL, has written an editorial for the Alabama Press-Register. His plight is becoming sadly familiar:

Mobile is poised for better economic times ahead. Unfortunately, this has put a spotlight on a public education system in serious need of improvement.

Sadly, Alabama's public education system is ranked close to the bottom among all the states. This is on top of an already distressing nationwide failure in providing science education on a par with other developed nations in the world.

If we want our children to have a shot in the globalized real world, we need to join forces to improve science education in our schools. If we are to do this, however, we should also recognize our own tendencies to inadvertently sabotage our science curricula.

His is a plea for the education bureaucracy to not give in to the desires to teach ID in science classes. More power to him!

Concerns About Lucy

The headline reads "Is an Ethiopian National Treasure Being Exploited for Money?" Well, yes. Concerns still exist about the idea of shuttling the bones of AL-288, otherwise known as "Lucy" around the world. As the story in the Tampa Bay Tribune notes:

Citing ethical problems and a conviction that Lucy's fragile remains should not travel, The Smithsonian refused an exhibition. Richard Leakey, a renowned fossil scientist, said "It's a form of prostitution ... it's a gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity."

The real Lucy remains in its vault here, the consensus goes in Addis Ababa, and a replica was sent to America. The final word rests with a tall thin museum guard in a green semi-uniform who said in the Amarigna language to the trekkers' translator, "Who would be so stupid to take that risk?"

Well, off the top of my head, I can think of a gazillion people, to whom Lucy is only a ticket to more revenue. This is no different than what was done with the European Neandertal remains by Otto Hauser at the turn of the century, or the Homo erectus skull discovered in a Manhattan curio shop. To many people, the fossil record is only a ticket to money and fame.

SERIOUSLY BUMMED OUT!!!

I had been looking forward for months to the Yes 2008 tour Close to the Edge and Back. Now I have come to find that a serious asthma attack has sidelined Jon Anderson and they have had to cancel the tour. Sadness...crying...look away.

New Grand Canyon Dating

The Hartford Courant has a story on new dating of the Grand Canyon, long thought by creationists to reflect a recent creation. The article outlines the question thus:

Within the United States, the most common psychological yardstick for Earth's antiquity is the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Seeing it from above is unforgettable. One is immediately struck by the mile-deep chasm beneath the Colorado Plateau. Seeing it from below is also unforgettable. The erosive power of its foaming, grit-laced rapids is self-evident. Could such a canyon be carved in only 5,000 years, as young Earth creationists suggest? Was it cut by single torrent when Noah's flood drained away?

It then answers its own question:

It turns out that the Grand Canyon is really two canyons, an older one to the west and a younger one to the east. The western canyon began to form about 20 million years ago by the progressive erosion of a small river system toward its head. This erosion took place at an average rate of about one-quarter of one-thousandth of a foot per year. In the eastern canyon, the rate of erosion is double that rate, and didn't begin in earnest until about 4 million years ago. This was shortly after the eastern and western watersheds merged to become a through-going river.

Three points emerge from this study that should be heeded by those tempted to accept young Earth creationism as a matter of faith. First, the story of an older and younger canyon merging is inconsistent with the notion of a single biblical deluge. Second, canyon cutting is a fairly steady process, not a catastrophic one. Third, the long-term rate of erosion demands that the process began 4,000 times earlier than the young Earth creationists would suggest.

Read the article to see how they did it. Not a shining day for the YECs. This pretty much confirms that which we always thought: the Grand Canyon reflects the accurate age of the earth. Here is TalkOrigins' critique of the ICR's Grand Canyon Dating papers.

The Joy of Cooking

It has been determined that, left to their own devices, humans and apes like their food cooked. A story in New India Press relates the following:

Scientists have shown that our ancestors had a natural liking for cooked meals, by finding that several great apes, like humans, seem to prefer cooked foods over raw.

The authors says that the findings indicate that our ancestors had an intrinsic preference for cooked meals, and most likely had a preference for cooked foods before controlled fire emerged.

According to the team, since that happened between one million and 1.6 million years ago, hominids probably began to cook their food not long thereafter.

It probably saved on food poisoning problems as well.

Off-Topic: Well, This is a Tad Odd.

a new web site offers to send email to your friends telling them that you've been taken up in the rapture. I kid you not. Foxnews has the story here. The site itself is here. This is the opening page message:

You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends For Christ. Imagine being in the presence of the Lord and hearing all of heaven rejoice over the salvation of your loved ones. It is our prayer that this site makes it happen.

I am guessing if the rapture happens, this site is not going to be up and running. Just a thought.

Texas Continues to Heat Up

An article in the Houston Chronicle details the coming war between ID and science teachers in Texas. The story notes:

Board members say it is unlikely that intelligent design will even be considered. More likely is a fight over whether to keep an existing requirement that teachers present both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including evolution.

Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, favors keeping that standard.

"Part of preparing our students for postsecondary success includes providing them with a well-rounded education," she said. "Having the freedom to discuss the scientific strengths and weaknesses of a theory such as evolution teaches students how to evaluate both sides of an issue. It prompts them to be critical thinkers, and it also helps them to respect the opinions of other students even if they disagree."

Bradley said he does not foresee any successful effort to remove the "strengths and weaknesses" requirement from the science standards.

"Evolution is not fact. Evolution is a theory and, as such, cannot be proven," he said. "Students need to be able to jump to their own conclusions."

That's funny. The phrase "jump to conclusions" is often used of people who come to the wrong conclusion because they don't look at all of the evidence. Freudian slip? Every time a board of education member gets up and says "evolution is just a theory" it reminds me of how badly educated our education board members really are. Is this the kind of science education they are getting out of school? If so, how can we hope to reverse the process?

Scientists: Bush Be Gone!

Very few scientists will be shedding tears when the W leaves office, according to a story in Wired. The writer, David Duncan, notes:

In a demonstration of how tough it is to get science funded in the Bush II era, Senate leaders tucked both budget increases into a $156 billion war and veterans' appropriations bill. That measure passed the Senate by a wide enough margin to override a threatened veto from the president. The House didn't include the raise in its version of the bill, but is expected to agree to the increase in conference.

Like so many other things, the task of recovering from Bush's distressing disinterest in science will be left to the next president.

This is an ongoing tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats and someone, somewhere did a bivariate plot that showed that when Republicans were president, science funding went down and when Democrats were in power, funding for science went up. Not a pretty picture. This is exacerbated by movies like Expelled! which paint scientists as amoral, arrogant louts. Some are, but most are not.

Kenneth Miller Reviews Expelled!

And it is not pretty. Miller lambasts the film for the usual sloppy science but also has some seriously damning things to say about how the film was put together. He writes:

The movie also uses interviews with avowed atheists like Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," to argue that scientific establishment is vehemently anti-God. Never mind that 40 percent of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science profess belief in a personal God. Stein, avoiding these 50,000 people, tells viewers that "Darwinists" don't allow scientists to even think of God.

Puzzled, the editors of Scientific American asked Mark Mathis, the film's co-producer, why he and Stein didn't interview such people, like Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project), Francisco Ayala, or myself. Mathis cited me by name, saying "Ken Miller would have confused the film unnecessarily." In other words, showing a scientist who accepts both God and evolution would have confused their story line.

This is truly troubling—that any contrary evidence has to be suppressed—and smacks of some of the tactics that YEC supporters use. Instead of portraying a controversy the way it is supposed to be, the makers of the film want the public to see scientists as standing in the way of "true research." This is offensive and gives ID another black eye.

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Steve Matheson on Evolution and Calvin College

Steve Matheson has written a guest post at Steve Martin's blog "An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution" (now two days ago) on the controversy of evolution at Calvin College that is a fascinating read. Those familiar with Calvin know that it has been home to a number of remarkable scholars who have delved into these issues, notably Clarence Menninga, Davis Young (who's book Christianity and the age of the Earth is a must-read for any Christian), Howard van Till, and Terry Gray, who was notably tried for heresy by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church a number of years ago for espousing human/ape ancestry. The story is a microcosm of what many of us, as Christians, face in our pursuit of science.

Church and State Battles

There is an article in High Beam Encyclopedia with anecdotes about people fighting church-state battles (listed "bottles" in the title). There are some that deal with ID. Not a shining day

* Academic Integrity--Bryan and Christie Rehm: The Rehms were among several residents of Dover, Pa., who challenged the teaching of "intelligent design" (ID) in public schools. They served as plaintiffs in a landmark lawsuit, brought by Ameri cans United and its allies, that found the teaching of ID, the latest variant of creationism, unconstitutional.

"There was a slow and gradual change that occurred on the school board over a number of years," Bryan Rehm said. "People got in for issues other than science curriculum, and then they had their final wave. They started telling teachers, first in the Science Department, 'You will rewrite the biology curriculum, and we want creationism in it.' And then they went from all-out creationism replacing evolution to 50-50. The Science Department fought this over two years internally before it went public."

I am Continually Amazed

at the continued and widespread use of the word "Neanderthal" as a pejorative, as if that were the worst thing someone could be. Probably, like evolution, most people that use the term don't understand it and have little to no sense.

Story in the NYT

There is a story in the NYT on the rise of ID. I won't link to it and didn't read it all since I am extremely suspicious of anything that newspaper puts out but...there it is. If you can stomach the newspaper, it is by Laura Beil.

Yoko Ono Loses

A judge has ruled that the use of the John Lennon song Imagine is okay in the context of the film Expelled! Yoko Ono and the sons of John Lennon had sued to have the film distribution stopped because of what they deemed unauthorized use of the song. As the Reuters story notes, though:

But on Monday U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein found in favour of the filmmakers based on a "fair use" doctrine. "That doctrine provides that the fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes of criticism and commentary is not an infringement of copyright," the judge said.

I am sure that there was considerably more to the ruling but that quote seems a tad vague. I have little to no doubt that Weird Al Yankovic needs the okay of a music publisher before he skewers a song. Having said that, Yoko Ono has been living off of John Lennon's image for decades with little music output of her own, so I am not that sympathetic.

Faraday Institute

Steve Martin has turned me on to a site called the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Here is it's mission:

The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion is an academic research enterprise based at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. The Institute has four main activities:

1. Scholarly research and publication on science and religion, including the organisation of invited groups of experts to write joint publications.
2. To provide short-term courses in science and religion.
3. To organise seminars and lectures on science and religion.
4. To provide accurate information on science and religion for the international media and wider public.

Sounds like a place to bookmark to me!

Earliest Live Birth Recorded

Foxnews has a story about a fossil fish that has been discovered with an intact embryo and umbilical cord. The story, somewhat humorously, notes:

"When I first saw the embryo inside the mother fish, my jaw dropped," said researcher John Long, a paleontologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. "It dawned on me after studying the specimen that this was the earliest evidence of vertebrates having sex by copulation — not just spawning in water, but sex that was fun."

One more piece of the puzzle.

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Polkinghorne Link

Sorry, forgot to post the link for the Polkinghorne Lecture. Here it is.

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John Polkinghorne on Speaking of Faith

John Polkinghorne is Christa Tippett's guest on Speaking of Faith. The mp3 is almost 50 megs in size so you might want to listen to the stream. Dr. Polkinghorne is a physicist and Anglican Priest. It is a fascinating listen. The interview took place in 2005. About beauty, he says this:

Well, beauty is a very interesting thing, and a form of beauty that is important to me is mathematical beauty. That's a rather austere form of aesthetic pleasure, but those of us who work in that area and speak that language can recognize it and agree about it. And we've found in theoretical physics that the fundamental laws of nature are always mathematically beautiful. In fact, if you've got some ugly equations, almost certainly you haven't got it right and you should think again. So beauty is the key to unlocking the secrets of the physical world.

On quarks:

Well, quarks are, in some sense, unseen realities. Nobody has ever isolated a single quark in the lab. So we believe in them not, because we've, even with sophisticated instruments, so to speak, seen them, but because assuming that they're there makes sense of great swaths of physical experience. And I was lucky enough to be a humble member of the particle physics community during the time all that was being worked out, and it was great fun to be, in a small way, part of it.

On light:

You take both answers into account. And the important thing I want to emphasize is that people had to cling on to taking both insights into account before they understood how they fitted together. We don't make progress by chopping experience down to a size that fits into our current theories. We have to allow the way the world is to modify our understanding of the world. And if you're a Christian theologian, and you're telling that sort of story that I've just told about light being both particle-like and wave-like, we know that the Christian story about Jesus Christ is that He is, of course, a human being but also, in some real sense, needs to be described in terms of divine language. And it's the same sort of dilemma, if you like, and we're not quite so clever, theologically, at finding the precise answer to that. But, again, we don't make progress by denying our experience.

About Quantum theory and a Clockwork Universe:

Well, that's right. Well, if the world were clockwork, then I suppose you'd have to hope that God had designed the clockwork and wound it up in such a way that things wouldn't turn out too badly. But 20th-century science has seen the death of a merely mechanical and merely clockwork view of the world. It came first of all through quantum theory. At the subatomic level, quantum events are not precise and determinate. They have a certain randomness to them. They have a certain cloudiness to them, so that that process isn't clockwork. And we've learned, of course, from chaos theory, the "butterfly effect" - very small disturbances producing enormously big consequences - that even the everyday world described by the sort of physics that would have been familiar to Newton isn't as clockwork as people thought it was.

Listen to the whole thing.

Things Heat Up in Texas

Trinity University has held a forum called “Religion, Science, and Evolution: The Pending Showdown in Texas Science Education." According to a story in MySA.com, the web site for the San Antonio Express-News and KENS Channel 5:

“Never before has the drumbeat for some form of teaching intelligent design and its inclusion in science textbooks been louder,” moderator Eliza Sonneland said Tuesday.

The panel included Rabbi Barry Block; St. Mary's Hall science teacher Carol Brown; Ryan Valentine, deputy director of the Texas Freedom Network; and Dr. David Ribble, chairman of the Trinity University Biology Department.

The Texas Freedom Network, the Sol Center at University Presbyterian Church and the Biology and Education departments at Trinity University sponsored the event.

The panel gave its views about the Texas Education Agency reviewing and selecting a new science curriculum for textbooks by 2010 and the possibility that religious creationism could be included, voted on by members of the Texas State Board of Education who back intelligent design.

Lending weight to concerns is that the chairman of the board of education, Don McLeroy, has sided with creationism supporters in the past.

At the heart of the panel's explanations was one common theme: Science and religion should remain separate in school lessons.

The article also noted that fears about what happened in Kansas a few years ago is driving the fear in the science community. It should.

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British Scientists Take to the Streets

The Guardian has a story about the 18-month long celebration of evolution that is taking place in schools across England. This has been well-thought out:

People all over Europe will take part in a mass experiment to discover evolutionary changes to a species of snail; a major series of programmes is to be shown by the BBC; several books are to be published; and the Open University plans a new course on the subject.

Entries for a competition to design "Darwin's Canopy" – a piece of art to cover a ceiling in the Natural History Museum – will be unveiled this week, and the museum will hold a major exhibition on Darwin beginning in November.

I will be curious to see how well this works.