York Daily Record: Ten Years Since Kitzmiller

The York Daily Record has an issue on the ten year anniversary of the Kitzmiller decision that devastated the intelligent design movement.  Among the articles, an interview with Judge Jones, the fate of the book that started the problem, Of Pandas and People, and the social and legal consequences of the decision. About Pandas:

In a deposition, school board member Bill Buckingham said he did not know how they were donated to the high school. Another member of the board, Alan Bonsell, denied that he knew anyone, except his father, who was involved in giving copies of the books.

During the trial, Buckingham said members of his church felt there was a need to give money, but that he did not consider that a collection. Bonsell said that he got an $850 check from Buckingham.

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III wrote in his decision that the "inescapable truth" is that both Buckingham and Bonsell lied during their depositions.

Today, only one "Of Pandas and People" book remains, in the Dover Area School District's administration building, according to the library catalog. The catalog also reports there's one copy of the book that's listed as "lost."

So, what happened to the other 48 books? With the exception of three copies, nobody seems to know.

Hopefully, into the circular file. That is certainly where it belongs.

Judge Jones, when asked about the misconceptions that the Intelligent Design community derived from the case:

I would say the main one is the role of precedent.

In the Kitzmiller case, there's a very clear line of cases from higher courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, that set out tests that we use in deciding whether a particular policy violates the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment. Those are etched in stone.

Now, people may disagree with those tests, but I have to, had to, as a federal judge, apply them. I have frequently said since the Kitzmiller case that I think any federal judge in the United States would have decided it exactly the same way that I did by applying those tests.

Now, they may have written the opinion a little bit differently, but the result would have been the same. That is, that the board, at that time, had a clear religious motivation, and violated the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment by its policy introducing intelligent design into the curriculum. The misconception arises because, frankly, people either deliberately — or from a lack of understanding — think that we make this stuff up as we go along, and that we're not bound to apply these precedents, these mandates, from higher courts. And that's exactly what I did in deciding the case.

All of the articles are fascinating examinations of the make up of the ID movement and its aftermath.

Hat tip to the NCSE.

Zack Kopplin Files FOIA Suit Against Louisiana Superintendent of Louisiana Department of Education

Zack Kopplin, the tireless crusader for good science public school education contends that the Education Department of the state of Louisiana has withheld documents and obfuscated regarding the details of the Louisiana school voucher program.  To combat this, he has filed suit in Louisiana court to compel the State Education Superindendent John White to release these documents.  As CenLamar reports:

The suit is designed—at long last—to ferret out what the process was leading to Jindal’s sweeping education changes—including whether there was a lack of record making or so-called “off campus” records retention, which is a particularly non-transparent practice of some government officials to hire consultants or third party firms to develop and store policy in order to shield policy making from the public.

In late May and early June, Kopplin submitted a number of requests pertaining to education policy, the overwhelming majority of which were either ignored or improperly answered. Kopplin alleges that, during the last several months, Superintendent White and officials at the Louisiana Department of Education have attempted to conceal, delay, and deny the production of public records.

This is not so different from what the Dover County School Board did in Pennsylvania in 2005, when they brought in copies of the execrable Of Pandas and People in the middle of the night when no one was looking.About his dealings with the Education Department, Kopplin is quoted as saying:

“Pretty early on, I knew this would be a ‘war of attrition,’” said Kopplin. “The hope was that if they didn’t legitimately respond to my questions, then I’d eventually stop asking them. But I never thought I’d need to file a lawsuit, and I never imagined the Department of Education would attempt to conceal so much. I had tried working with them. I even drove in from Houston to meet personally with their staff.”

This is what happens when politicians make education policy.

News Looking Up For Accurate Science in Homeschooling?

The Atlantic has an excellent article on changes that are happening in the homeschool market that suggest that many homeschoolers are getting disgusted with the bad science.  David Wheeler writes:

For homeschooling parents who want to teach their children that the earth is only a few thousand years old, the theory of evolution is a lie, and dinosaurs coexisted with humans, there is no shortage of materials. Kids can start with the Answers in Genesis curriculum, which features books such as Dinosaurs of Eden, written by Creation Museum founder Ken Ham. As the publisher's description states, "This exciting book for the entire family uses the Bible as a 'time machine' to journey through the events of the past and future."

It's no secret that the majority of homeschooled children in America belong to evangelical Christian families. What's less known is that a growing number of their parents are dismayed by these textbooks.

Take Erinn Cameron Warton, an evangelical Christian who homeschools her children. Warton, a scientist, says she was horrified when she opened a homeschool science textbook and found a picture of Adam and Eve putting a saddle on a dinosaur. "I nearly choked," says the mother of three. "When researching homeschooling curricula, I found that the majority of Christian homeschool textbooks are written from this ridiculous perspective. Once I saw this, I vowed never to use them." Instead, Warton has pulled together a curriculum inspired partly by homeschool pioneer Susan Wise Bauer and partly by the Waldorf holistic educational movement

If you will recall, it was the whole "dinosaur-with-a-saddle" problem that got Ken Ham into hot water, recently.The sad thing is that the biblical stories have been twisted so far out of proportion that they are barely recognizable for what they are and pictures like this, which should strike any student of the Bible as ridiculous, are simply accepted. 

Wheeler writes that many people homeschool not for religious reasons but because they don't like what is being taught in the public schools. That is partly so and partly not. One of the principle reasons that many do not like the public schools is that God has been summarily removed from the picture and it is hard to instill biblical values over the secular ones that the kids are pummeled with every day.

Part of the reason that some of us do not have our kids in public schools is because of the progressive dumbing-down not just of the students but of the administration, as well. Witness the recent problems resulting from lack of rudimentary common sense on the part of teachers and administrators involving children with pastries and toy soldiers. In the first case, the common sense was evident to everyone except the school officials, who suggested counseling for kids (rather than themselves) who were troubled by the incident. Most homeschoolers look on at these stories with a mixture of disbelief, horror and amusement and think, "There but for the grace of God, go we." But for those of us who despair of the lack of critical thinking in the sciences, hope is on the way:

The rising number of homeschool families striving to reconcile belief in God with today's scientific consensus has attracted the attention of at least one publisher -- Christian Schools International in Grand Rapids, Michigan...The CSI science curriculum clearly presents science from a Christian perspective, but does not attempt to discredit the theory of evolution. The content presents God as the author of all of creation, no matter how he did it or when he did it."

This is welcome news for those of us that just watched a child slog through It couldn't Just Happen, which does no better a job than Of Pandas and People in getting the biological and evolutionary sciences right. For both of these books, the emphasis is single-minded: the destruction of evolution. There is no other objective.  If conventional, accurate science is trod upon in the process, so be it.

I don't expect miracles overnight but this is a good first step.  There will be backlash from groups like Answers in Genesis, Abeka and Bob Jones, however.  I just hope that these "underdog" publishers stay true to their mission.  We will all benefit from it. 

New Book on the Dover Trial

Research and Markets is hawking a new book by Gordy Slack on the Dover trial that pitted ID against some agitated parents and wound up being a complete takedown of ID as a legitimate theory to be taught in science class. From their website:

Journalist Gordy Slack offers a riveting, personal, and often amusing first-hand account that details six weeks of some of the most widely ranging, fascinating, and just plain surreal testimony in U.S. legal history—a battle between hard science and religious conservatives wishing to promote a new version of creationism in schools.

Should be a fascinating read. I will stick it behind the other thirty books that I need to read.

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Of Pandas and People, Part 3

Two of the central concepts in understanding descent with modification are analogy and homology. Analogy is where different anatomical structures are used to solve the same biomechanical problem. An example of analogy are the differences between the bat wing and the bird wing. While these structures share the same function, a cursory examination of each reveals that they are composed of different skeletal elements and are constructed differently. This, in conjunction with the known information that bats are mammals and birds are in the class Aves, strongly suggests that these structures are not evolutionary related. Homology is similarity of structures due to common descent. An example of this would be the primate arm and bat wing, both of which are constructed from the same anatomical features.

The writers of OPAP get this concept wrong from the get go. On page 115, they write:

The Darwinian definition of homology, however, does not rest upon the two parts being identical, or even similar for that matter, in appearance or function. Darwinists have defined homology as correspondence of structure derived from a common primitive origin, a definition that assumes macroevolution to be true.

For starters, it was the overwhelming evidence of homology in the natural world that allowed Darwin to formulate his theory of descent with modification in the first place. The authors correctly state that homology as a concept had been around since before Darwin's time. Darwin simply used the concept of homology, he did not redefine it.

On page 124, they write this about homology:

But consider how limited the usefulness of the concept is; it cannot replace subjective judgments, nor can it deliver us from the influences of our presuppositions. Notice that the truth of Darwinism must be assumed before such an assessment of relationship can be made. Marsupial pouches and bones are considered homologous because it is assumed that the organisms possessing them descended from a common ancestor.

This is exactly backward. The fact that the animals display homologous traits indicates that they share a common ancestor. Linnaeus formulated his binomial taxonomy based on relationships between organisms based on homology. All palaeontologists do is extrapolate that concept into the past to make inferences about descent.

On the next page, they write:

Why were not the North American placentals given the same bones [as the marsupials]? Would an intelligent designer withhold these structures from placentals if they were superior to the placental system? At present we do not know; however, we all recognize that an engineer can choose any of several different engineering solutions to overcome a single design problem.

We don't know? If something has been intelligently designed, it ought to be obvious, like the truck in the middle of the field. If the placental system is better than the marsupial system and yet the marsupial system is the norm in Wallacea (Australia and New Zealand), how intelligent is that? The only reason the marsupial system is the norm in Wallacea is that the Wallace Trench prevents placentals from entering the region. Where they are transported to the region by other (more modern) means, they outcompete the marsupials for resources--hence the "Rabbit-Proof Fence."

In the "A Note to Teachers" section, the authors state that:

Since the 1970s, for example, scientific criticisms of the long-dominant neo-Darwinian theory of evolution (which combines classical Darwinism with Mendelian genetics) have surfaced with increasing regularity.

The sources the authors cite are an amazingly diverse lot. Four of them are creationist sources, Six are general sources and several are journal articles. Three were published prior to 1970. I have read most of the journal articles and they do not criticize the domiant neo-Darwinian theory of evolution as defined here. There are questions about the tempo and mode of evolution but all evolutionary biologists assume that genetics play an important role. The authors do not define "classical Darwinism." This is a standard creationist ploy--make a blanket statement and then support it with references that are either outdated or do not necessarily support what they are saying.

On page 154, the authors state:

In the spirit of good, honest science, Pandas makes no bones about being a text with a point of view. Because it was intended to be a supplemental text, the authors saw no value in simply rehashing the orthodox accounts covered by basal textbooks.

"In the spirit of good, honest science..."? Since when is it good, honest science to promote a particular viewpoint? Science goes where the evidence leads, not where you hope it will lead. Then you report what you find and integrate it into a larger body of knowledge about a particular field.

On page 155, the authors pull the old "double shuffle." They state:

Many people assert that evolution in this second sense [descent with modification] is a fact, just as gravity is a fact. But the two situations are hardly analagous . The fact of gravity can be verified simply by dropping a pencil--an experiment anyone can perform. Common ancestry, however, cannot be directly verified by such an experiment.

In the first part of this section, the authors mention "descent with modification." In the last part, they talk about " common ancestry." The two are not the same. Descent with modification can be observed in just about any population of organisms. A change in gene frequencies from one generation to the next is "descent with modification." This is basic evolutionary theory. It is the theoretical extrapolation through time across the species boundary that the authors object to and they have lumped it all together.

There is this goody on page 160:

For example, the mutational events that allegedly produced reptiles, birds, mammals, and even humans have never been observed--nor will they ever be observed. Similarly, the transitional life forms that occupy the branching-points on Darwin's tree of life are also unobservable. Transitional forms exist now only as theoretical entities that make possible a coherent Darwinian account of how present-day species originated.

By this reasoning, no fossil form could ever be transitional. So when we find Archaeopteryx, with its reptilian body plan and hollow arm bones and feathers, this is not transitional. It is simply a form of animal that was created by divine fiat--despite what its existence STRONGLY suggests.

Other scientists have reviewed this book and a list of those reviews can be found here. These usually proceed from specific subject areas of expertise but, when taken together, form a consistent theme: OPAP is bad science and a bad textbook. If this is the current state of Intelligent Design education, then it surely does not belong in a science classroom, First Amendment issues aside. Reading this book was a truly depressing experience and it shows that many creationists have made little to no progress at understanding basic biological concepts in the last seventy years. If your child is in a school district that is using this book or you know of one, alert them immediately!! This book should be avoided.