Sorry was just bored

As some of you may have noticed, I have started posting more short stories, with little in the way of commentary. That means more updates for you, but it also means fewer open threads, as I don't have these stories lying around any more. So, on the premise that everybody love kittens, I give you this, courtesy of Cute Overload:

Just another little story for those who think that the creationists are Class A Offenders when it comes to filling schools with junk. An article in the Rethinking Schools magazine describes how some elementary school teachers used Lego to teach kids about the oppressive class-based, capitalist society:

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

Among the lessons learned were the virtues of community property and standard sizes:

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. "If I buy it, I own it," one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes." The teachers quote the children:

"A house is good because it is a community house."

"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes."

"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building."

PS. If you want to read the original article in Rethinking Schools, you'll have to pay $5 for the issue. I guess not all things should be community property.

Creationism and Baraminology Research News has some novel and refreshing thoughts on creationism and front-loading:

What often happens in the Creationary community is that we have spent so much time arguing against Darwinism that we sometimes forget what it means for Darwinism to be false. That is, once we've won the argument against Darwinism, what then? This time is quickly approaching (or perhaps is already here). The issue is that the arguments against common descent were based on Darwinism. X couldn't evolved from Y because of the hideously complicated algorithms it would have to cross. The problem is that if Darwinism is no longer assumed, this argument doesn't work against common descent. If evolution is directed, then there is no limit to the sophistication of evolutionary pathways. Therefore, complexity cannot be used as an argument against common descent.

Joseph C. Campana has been digging into media reports about Templeton and intelligent design, talking to Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president of the John Templeton Foundation (JTF). Looks like the New York Times botched the story:

The media has misrepresented the record of the intelligent design research community. According to Charles Harper, the New York Times essentially invented the claim that they put out a call for research proposals to ID scholars, and then the article's author made up the notion that ID scholars failed to respond to this non-existent request. While the JTF clearly is not enthusiastic about ID, the record shows that the JTF has funded ID research and scholarship, as well as other activities by ID scholars, meaning that the New York Times' portrayal of the JTF's funding of ID was highly misleading. Also, the fact that Templeton gives funding to scholars that are using a particular framework does not mean that they "endorse" that view. Charles Harper's explanation that the New York Times completely invented this story appears even more credible given his lack of enthusiasm about intelligent design, and the fact that he has no motive to defend ID.

What is evidence?

TheocracyWatch is a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (CRESP) at Cornell University. We should all feel safe that the scholars are out there Defending Democracy from the Threat of Theocracy. But hold on. Scroll down to the bottom of the page:

Last updated: December-2005

I guess there are more important things to do than Defend Democracy from the Threat of Theocracy.

We're doomed.

Run! They're coming our way!

In the comments to Mike's blog Sober and ID: Part II, NCSE propaganda director Nick Matzke refers to a 1999 essay by Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, in which he argues that the evolution vs. creationism debates need "a new script."

Commenter Analyysi offered further observations on the meat of that essay, per how Haynes decries the teaching of scientism in public schools as if it were science. I post below a blog written last year about how evolutionary biology is being taught in my 'economically challenged' redneck corner of the country, to demonstrate that things HAVE changed. For the better.

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In the pages of a scientific journal, Elliot Sober abandoned philosophy and replaced it with armchair pyschologizing. Nick Matzke, who is the Public Information Project Director at NCSE, attempted to rationalize this behavior and, in doing so, has offered a fairly significant observation in the comments section of Telic Thoughts.

He writes:

Another thing you folks are missing here is the impact of Of Pandas and People(both the main book, by Davis and Kenyon, and the concluding essay, by Hartwig and Meyer) on Sober's analysis. He cites it a number of times. Once you are aware of what is in that book, and the fact that all the leading ID proponents participated in and/or endorsed the book "” let alone its history "” it is extremely difficult to put the rose-colored glasses back on again and see ID as some kind of extremely subtle tweaking of biology.

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Since Nick Matzke has been back with his "ID=Creationism" talking point, I thought I would offer some one-stop shopping for those interested in this ID = Creationism meme. So bookmark this blog for future reference. After all, it's free.

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While discussing Intelligent Design in the peer-reviewed literature, Elliott Sober offers the following analysis:

Young Earth Creationism denied that human beings share common ancestors with other species while affirming that God was the designer of organisms and that life on earth is at most 10,000 years old. ID, at least when stated in a minimalistic form, is officially neutral on these three claims (Behe 1996, 2005). The single thesis of what I will call mini-ID is that the complex adaptations that organisms display (e.g., the vertebrate eye) were crafted by an intelligent designer"¦"¦ they often affirm that the intelligent designer they have in mind is supernatural ( Johnson 1991; Dembski 2002),and most deny common ancestry (Davis and Kenyon 1993; Dembski 1999). Why, then, do proponents of ID think that mini-ID is so important? After all, it leaves out so much. One reason is that versions of creationism that mention a supernatural being have a Constitutional problem"”U.S. courts have deemed them religious, and so they are not permitted in public school science curricula. ID proponents hope that mini-ID can avoid this objection. In addition, mini-ID has the advantage of expressing an idea to which all creationists subscribe; it thus presents a united front, allowing the factions to stop squabbling and to face their common enemy.

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This new book, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment, looks interesting:

Natural selection is commonly interpreted as the fundamental mechanism of evolution. Questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution often go unanswered by today's neo-Darwinists, perhaps for fear that any criticism of the evolutionary paradigm will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design.

In Biological Emergences, Robert Reid argues that natural selection is not the cause of evolution. He writes that the causes of variations, which he refers to as natural experiments, are independent of natural selection; indeed, he suggests, natural selection may get in the way of evolution. Reid proposes an alternative theory to explain how emergent novelties are generated and under what conditions they can overcome the resistance of natural selection. He suggests that what causes innovative variation causes evolution, and that these phenomena are environmental as well as organismal.

After an extended critique of selectionism, Reid constructs an emergence theory of evolution, first examining the evidence in three causal arenas of emergent evolution: symbiosis/association, evolutionary physiology/behavior, and developmental evolution. Based on this evidence of causation, he proposes some working hypotheses, examining mechanisms and processes common to all three arenas, and arrives at a theoretical framework that accounts for generative mechanisms and emergent qualities. Without selectionism, Reid argues, evolutionary innovation can more easily be integrated into a general thesis. Finally, Reid proposes a biological synthesis of rapid emergent evolutionary phases and the prolonged, dynamically stable, non-evolutionary phases imposed by natural selection.

Robert G. B. Reid is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis.

Two standard criticisms of Intelligent Design are a) that ID is untestable and unfalsifiable and b) that various imperfections in nature argue against ID. What is interesting is how the two criticisms oppose each other, where ID is both unfalsifiable and falsified.

In the recent issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Elliott Sober, a philosopher from the University of Wisconsin, points out the problems with these criticisms of ID and seeks to replace them with a new and improved version of ID criticism:

This leads Sober to jettison the concept of falsifiability and to provide a different account of testability. "If ID is to be tested," he says, "it must be tested against one or more competing hypotheses." If the ID claim about the vertebrate eye is to be tested against the hypothesis that the vertebrate eye evolved by Darwinian processes, the question is whether there is an observation that can discriminate between the two. The observation that vertebrates have eyes cannot do this.

Sober also points out that criticism of a competing theory, such as evolution, is not in-and-of-itself a test of ID. Proponents of ID must construct a theory that makes its own predictions in order for the theory to be testable. To contend that evolutionary processes cannot produce "irreducibly complex" adaptations merely changes the subject, Sober argues.

Sober comes close to the target.

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