So, it is the lack of sex that causes speciation. Who knew?

The National Council for Social Studies has released a position statement on the teaching of Intelligent Design in the classroom. They state:

Although the National Council for the Social Studies believes in the open and thoughtful discussion of ideas, public school classrooms are not the place for the teaching of religious beliefs. Social studies is the forum for open analysis and discussion of historical, social, economic, geographic, political and global issues. Thus our recommendations seek to include the study of intelligent design within that framework.

Within this framework, they give some very good advice on how ID could be taught. Interestingly, no attempt is made to distinguish between ID and recent earth creationism. This gives the impression of equivalence between them. ID is no science, YEC is bad science.

Nova will air a special called “Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” on November 13, 2007. Here is the link.

Eugene Volokh discusses a poll about college professors and their philosophical affiliations. The money quote:

According to the survey of academics' ideology linked in my previous post, "creationist identity was also low, but with less identifiable shift by age group (the range was 3.9 to 4.7 percent) and with the strongest disciplinary support in the social sciences (17.6 percent) and humanities (5.0 percent), with negligible support elsewhere.

I am not surprised.

The oldest footprints in Europe.

Italian scientists have dated the marks, which appear to include hand prints, at more than 350,000 years ago, making them part of the genus Homo.

Footsteps of pre-human hominids have been found in Africa, dating back millions of years, but the Italian ones are the oldest traces of human steps - the most exciting discovery in years.

It doesn't mean they belonged to Homo sapiens, modern man, but probably European Homo erectus (also called Homo heidelbergensis), who was around well before the Neanderthals.

Whereas twenty years ago there was scant evidence for Homo erectus in Europe, now it is popping up all over the place.

"Militant Atheists are Wrong." So says LA Times columnist Lee Siegel. Although I could quibble with some of his points, this paragraph seems particularly on-target:

Voltaire and his colleagues attacked the dominant values of their day, at great risk to themselves. By almost comical contrast, the new anti-religionists are safely needling the dominant liberal culture's favorite bete noire. They are publishing their books in an atmosphere of complacency and self-congratulation; they preach to the secular converted, who are buying the books in droves. I'm not a particularly religious person. These arguments don't offend me or my beliefs. But they make me concerned nevertheless, because I think they strike a blow against something more important (at least to me) than belief in God. In their contempt for any belief that cannot be scientifically or empirically proved, the anti-God books are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves.

Read the whole thing.

The Daily Mail gets into it.

Europeans can't seem to get worked up about radical Islam, but they sure can get their bowels in an uproar about creationism.

Josh Rosenau is having more fun with the Discovery Institute.

Professor Michael Reiss of London University's Institute for Education thinks that creationism should be taught in public schools. He takes a unique approach:

In a book published yesterday which collates the views of various academics about the controversy, he argues: "I am not convinced that something being 'non-scientific' is sufficient to disqualify it from being considered in a science lesson."

I have long thought that if YECs really thought long and hard about it, having their ideas about the creation of the earth and Noah's flood would be the last thing they would want taught in public schools in science class. It would open them up to rigorous evaluation, which would expose them for the pseudoscience that they are. Given that the public schools are already hostile to Christian teaching (of any kind, it seems), this would have a disastrous effect.

The makers of Expelled fight back.

"I've never seen a bigger bunch of hypocrites in my life," said [Mark] Mathis, who set up the interviews for EXPELLED. "I went over all of the questions with these folks before the interviews and I e-mailed the questions to many of them days in advance. The lady (and gentleman) doth protest too much, methinks."

I will be curious to see it.

Winning over the masses, one scientist at a time, Hillary Clinton backs the teaching of evolution in schools in an NYT article somewhere on their site. Too bad the rest of her is so scary.

European parliamentarians demonstrating that, while they might know creationism when they see it, have no idea what "human rights" are.

Troy Patterson over at Slate is even less kind toward the show:

Our cavemen are diligent upper-middle-class consumers. Note the mentions of cognac and panini presses and caramel biscotti, and check out the scene on the squash court, and then wonder what is up at ABC. One suspects that Cavemen will be gone from the schedule soon enough, but how long will the network's zany experiments in packaging yuppie-male anxiety grind on?

The show does seem to be in keeping with Hollywood's generally jaded view of men.

A bad review for ABC's Caveman, even if you don't buy the racial complaints.

The October issue of First Things has an article called "God and Evolution" by Avery Cardinal Dulles, in which he addresses the different theoretical constructs commonly known as atheistic naturalism, theistic evolution and Intelligent Design. Although he is somewhat sympathetic to the notions of I D supporter Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity," he notes the same thing that Kenneth Miller notes:

As a matter of policy, it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained, because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches us that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion.

He also has a wonder rejoinder for people like Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, who think that religious belief is a human construct that has "evolved" over time:

Some evolutionists contend that morality and religion arise, evolve, and persist according to Darwinian principles. Religion, they say, has survival value for individuals and communities. But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system. Since questions of this higher order cannot be answered by science, philosophy and theology still have an essential role to play.

It is a good article.

Josh Rosenau asks "Is it a lie if you ought to know better, but don't?"

Eric Cline of the Boston Globe states that Biblical archaeology is too important to leave to the "enthusiast" crowd. His is a pretty good run-down of recent "discoveries" that turn out to be nothing of the sort. I don't remember who said it but one of my favorite quotes is "there is enough wood from the original cross of Jesus lying around to build an ark." Cline notes:

Biblical archaeologists are suddenly finding themselves in a position similar to the evolutionary biologists fighting intelligent design - an entire parallel version of their field is being driven by religious belief, not research principles. The biologists' situation makes the risk clear - they did not deign to mount a public refutation of the "science" of intelligent design for years, until it was almost too late, and thus anti-evolutionary science began making its way into the public schools.

The problem seems to be lack of engagement:

When most archaeologists and biblical scholars hear that someone has (yet again) discovered Noah's Ark, they roll their eyes and get on with their business. This can leave the impression that the report might be true.

The problem is, as John Derbeyshire noted in reference to evolution, debating these "reports" is like playing whack-a-mole. Read the whole thing.

Reason Online takes aim at Ben Stein for the recent ID film dust-up. While it appears that Ben Stein has bought into the nonsense that evolutionary theory leads to racism, violence and the possibility of the Cubs winning the World Series, Ron Bailey's argument is largely unpersuasive.

Neandertals as far east as China? That is what a new study is suggesting. eNews reports :

Geneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues compared mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from bones found from two sites -- one in Teshik Tash, Uzbekistan and the other from the Altai Mountains in Siberia -- with those of specimens from different European sites.

Scientists looking at the morphology of the remains from the central Asian sites have long disagreed as to whether they came from Neanderthals or Homo sapiens sapiens, the species name for modern man. Paabo's results settle the debate. The study, published in the British journal Nature, confirms that the adult fossils -- about 40,000 years old -- from Okladnikov Cave in Siberia genetically match the European Neanderthal.

The thought then, is that if they got to Siberia, they most likely got further south, into China.