Via Dynamics of Cats, the Guardian reports that Pope Benedict is apparently preparing to give official support to creationism in the form of Intelligent Design. Of course this is not exactly the first time the Catholic church has taken an adversarial stance towards science, but it's a big step backward since John Paul II had effectively accepted evolution. As I've noted before, the current pope approves of the way the church treated Galileo, so this development probably shouldn't be too surprising.
This will make it that much harder to teach evolution in countries where the Catholic church is influential. (In case you missed it, there was disturbing survey data a few weeks ago showing the support for creationism across developed countries, with the U.S. being particularly bad.)
“Bob” is a geologist and a teacher at a science education institution that serves several Arkansas public school districts.
[...]
Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution) with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term “natural selection.”
[...]
In his words, “I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD ... but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.”
Shellock sends along this story about a guy trying to get anti-evolution provisions into the Nevada constitution. Fortunately, he seems to be one of the less organized species of crackpot:
Las Vegas masonry contractor Steve Brown filed his initiative petition with the secretary of state's office, and must collect 83,184 signatures by June 20 to get the plan on the November ballot. To amend the Nevada Constitution, he'd have to win voter approval this year and again in the 2008 elections.Brown said Tuesday that he hopes that volunteers will help him collect the signatures, but at this point has no name-gathering organization set up. A Democrat and member of a nondenominational church, he said he hoped for broad support from people who share his views.
(I see Pharyngula also has this story.)
I tend to speak very highly of California, while mocking other, less civilized states, especially if they are below the Mason-Dixon line. However, my beloved state has been known to indulge in abject stupidity on occasion. We made Arnold governor, we continue to allow Rob Schneider to make movies, and now... "intelligent design" has come to California. The new strategy is to claim that it's "philosophy" rather than science. (They're half-right, insofar as it is indeed not science.)
In this case, the parents say in their suit that school officials in Lebec — a town of about 1,300 just west of Interstate 5 in Kern County and about 63 miles north of Los Angeles — designed their course as a way of getting around that decision.At a special meeting of the El Tejon Unified School District on Jan. 1, at which the board approved the new course, "Philosophy of Design," school Supt. John W. Wight said that he had consulted the school district's attorneys and that they "had told him that as long as the course was called 'philosophy,' " it could pass legal muster, according to the lawsuit.
Via Shellock, there's a Reuters piece today outlining concerns about increasing anti-science sentiment in the US. I was glad to see this in a mainstream source; it's what scientists have been saying for a few years now. The piece is a bit disjointed but manages to hit several related topics: Bush administration abuses of science, the intelligent design battle, general scientific illiteracy and weaknesses in science education. They could have been tougher on the ID crowd but it's nice to see them correctly place ID in the larger anti-science trend.
The other day I saw a commenter at Brad DeLong's blog assert that Intelligent Design was a scientific revolution of the kind described by Thomas Kuhn. Once I stopped laughing, I began to wonder whether this was a common belief among ID proponents.
I guess it is, since Matt Yglesias devotes a long post to rebutting this notion. I usually enjoy Yglesias' more philosophy-oriented posts, and this one is particularly good. Key paragraph:
Similarly, the brute fact that ID has a lot of problems doesn't refute it. The problem with ID is that, unlike real revolutionary science, it doesn't lead to any normal science. There are no ID-based research programs. Nothing has never been accomplished by applying the ID paradigm to a question in biology. All ID's scholarly (and "scholarly") proponents do is try to offer half-assed refutations of Darwin. You can quote Kuhn all you like, but you're not doing revolutionary science unless your purported revolution leads to some normal science. Intelligent design does not.
Hey, remember in 2000 when John McCain said this:
We are the party of Ronald Reagan not Pat Robertson. We are the party of Theodore Roosevelt not the party of special interests. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln not Bob Jones.
On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.
McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.
I missed this when it was on BoingBoing (while I was in Italy), but have now been enlightened by PZ Myers: a competing theory of Intelligent Design based around Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is demanding its place in science classes. The best part is this picture:
Also notable for their theory of global warming which involves pirates.
Kevin Drum makes some of the same points I did on Bush and evolution, but actually looks up the old Bush quotes that I was too lazy to find. That's why they pay him the big bucks, I guess.
There's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Bush's statement that Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. Now, naturally I agree with the many commenters who have remarked that ID is not a scientific theory, and teaching it will only degrade the state of US science education.
On the other hand, my reaction is less outrage than a sigh of resignation. What, Bush rejected science in favor of an ideological and religious position? The same Bush who opposes stem-cell research, promotes abstinence-only sex education, ignores climate change, and suppresses inconvenient scientific findings by government agencies? We knew we were getting this back in November when Bush won the election. Certainly anyone who voted for Bush should have been prepared to accept this kind of dumbassery as a consequence. And didn't Bush say that "the jury is still out" on evolution back in, like, 2000?
Of course, we should vigorously oppose attempts to insert ID into actual curricula, but the mere fact that Bush supports it doesn't exactly seem new.
Matt Yglesias points out that Bush's view is very widespread among the American public. Some of you may recall a poll result that I blogged last November showing 45% support for young Earth creationism.
Meanwhile, Brad DeLong remarks,
I believe I can now safely say without fear of contradiction that any scientist or academic (outside of fundamentalist seminaries, of course) who is a Republican is in serious need of help: professional help.
I'm appalled by Republican science policy, but if the Republicans were a lot better on other issues and the Democrats a lot worse, I could concievably be convinced to vote Republican anyway. But science policy isn't the only problem—in fact it's a nice synecdoche for the way the GOP sticks to ideology in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence on nearly every issue. This frightening disconnection from reality is a deal-breaker for me. The Republican scientists that I know, whatever they may think about science policy, disagree about whether there's a larger pattern of ignoring evidence. I think they're wrong, but I don't think they need professional help.