Preach it, Brother!

[elfs]

PZ Meyers is one of those good guys fighting the good fight. In a recent post, he pans a book review in Science of the pro-"intelligent design" book, Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, edited by Campbell and Meyer. His objection is to this sentence: "The volume's legal, pedagogical, and social arguments--- in contrast to much of its scientific discussion-- are nuanced and informed."

Meyers responds:

I'm afraid that isn't good enough. This is a book purportedly about the teaching of science, and the science it advocates is crap. That crucial fact ought to be front and center in bold print at the heart of the review, not buried in a weak "tut, tut" somewhere in the midst of broad accolades for the author's mastery of the use of commas and paragraphs. That kind of tepid academic dithering is what's killing us in the marketplace of public opinion.

Get it out. Campbell and Meyer are wrong. They are using rhetoric and well-spoken lies to peddle dishonest crap to school children. When these frauds try to teach my kids that the sky is green, up is down, and by the way, the earth is only 6000 years old, I don't want one of the leading science journals to soft-peddle the stupidity of their cause to extol the elegance of their poesy. I want goddamned critical knives. I want furious rhetoric that puts these fraudulent clowns down. I want, just once, for a scientist to grit his teeth, make his muscles bulge, rip off his lab coat, and roar, "DARWIN SMASH!!!"

Amen.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Only one problem with Darwin Smash. Well, two, actually. One, getting all dramatic and upset about it only makes you look bad. Why is the second problem: Your proposed audience doesn't now understand why you're upset. They've been fed pablum for two generations now, and their poor widdle intellectual tummies aren't up to anything so meaty as reasoned debate and facts.

This is why the whole idea of public schools indoctrination rankles me so.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In this case (the audience of Science), I think Meyers is right. Scientists should get angry about how their work is misrepresented. They shouldn't say that the book is "good", which is what the reviewer did; they should say that the book contains dangerous rhetoric about bad science, the kind of material that is systematically threatening American science and destroying our research infrastructure.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Nice review! But having studied much in the way of historical sciences, the vibes I get from most real scientists is that they just don't want to be bothered. I know that's how I feel after more futile debates than I can count. Scientists just can't win if they try to argue against dogma. No matter how much evidence scientists provide that indicates the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, Creationists discount it all with terribly shoddy logic and come up with even more preposterous explanations. And let's not even get started on evolutionary theory. I saw a nice "evolutionary tract" parody of a Chick Tract, it has a decent enough rundown on the way the debate goes, except that in real life the Christian resorts to a fallacious circular argument ("the Bible says it's true, and since it also claims to be true itself, I just know creation is true and you're wrong!") and other intellectual dishonesty and stubbornly refuses to admit anything.

http://www.freewebs.com/phineasbg/wyd.html

I also remember watching a public screening of a Creation Science (hah, what an oxymoron!) at my parents' church when I was much younger. It was advertised to heathens too, so an evolutionist showed up and got into the after-film debate. I don't remember the details, but it was filled with the S.O.S. and the evolution scientist of course wasted his breath and well over an hour until the arguments with the most knowledgable "creation scientist" in the group started stooping to aforementioned circular arguments and preposerous "proofs" that evolution never happened.

That quote at the bottom (presumably Meyers is quoting the original reviewer?) sums it all up: "Scientists seek to explain the natural world, whereas creationists seek to find unexplainable mysteries in the natural world." I'll have to remember that one :)

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Agreed 100%.

And as to the "public schools indoctrination" bit, I counter that the purest science available be taught in science, and let creationism be taught by parents and in religion classes, rather than have science teachers indoctrinating kids with creationist pseudo-science bunk. Science and metaphysics each have their places and probably shouldn't be mixed.

My opinion on it...(Don't laughed) I'm dead serious.

[flying-pegasus.livejournal.com]

Definition on the word “Science”

1. [n] ability to produce solutions in some problem domain; "the skill of a well-trained boxer"; "the sweet science of pugilism"
2. [n] a particular branch of scientific knowledge; "the science of genetics"

Lets take word “Genetics”


Definition:[n] the branch of biology that studies heredity and variation in organisms


Heredity….Darwin Theories.

We inherit genes and by true fact most humanity does act like animals. Rage uncontrollable madness….”Anger Control” class are the equivalence of the Rabies shot.

If you look at the characteristic of animals and weigh them toward humanity you’ll find that Darwin Theory is not to far off. If you look at most religious faith, most of the do have a fantasy or try to base their persona towards the animal kingdom, why? We’re bunch of mammals.

What comes first the Egg or the Chicken….Here’s one DNA, RNA, and protein molecules. Hay what the hell does Mutation means? Why does my dog Essences have 2 extra toes or why is my son feet webbed. Why do we have twins that are joined…. Cells do have nucleus right? Each nucleus determines what?

Now if we inherited all these cells from our ancestries from our DNA, but yet we have our own minds to think with and we seldom look like our parents because our DNA has been alter and combine to be different individual than our parents. So I’m more towards the Darwin Theory, myself.

Most men and women are hairy beast that can be mistaken for Grizzly bears or MONKEY!

[http://users.livejournal.com/dominic-m-/]

I agree totally but imagine the uproar from the religious community. they will call us heathens and that we are trying to teach their children false beliefs(maybe).

Creationism persists in many disguises

[(Anonymous)]

Darwin is hard to swallow, even for (especially for?)
self-identified "rationalists".

I was browsing in a new book at Barnes & Noble last
weekend, _The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in
the Age of Darwin_ by a cognitive psychologist named
Keith E. Stanovich
( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226770893/ ).
As the Amazon blurb mentions, "According to Stanovich,
we're only just beginning to grapple with the deep consequences
of Darwin's theory of natural selection." Very, very true[*].
However, as another Web review of the book puts it,
"Accepting and now forcefully responding to this decentering
and disturbing idea, Keith Stanovich here provides the tools
for the 'robot's rebellion,' a program of cognitive reform
necessary to advance human interests over the limited interest
of the replicators and define our own autonomous goals as
individual human beings. He shows how concepts of rational
thinking from cognitive science interact with the logic of
evolution to create opportunities for humans to structure
their behavior to serve their own ends."
( http://www.gnist.no/visbok.php?varenummer=1706090 ).
In other words, "Evolution, Mr. Allnut, is something we
were put in this world to rise above."

This **seems** like a very humanistic response to the bitterness
of the Darwinian world-view, but I find that expunging
Creationism from the universe's past only to plant something
like it in the future is a, well, a rather half-assed
response to the Darwinian challenge. "Oldthinkers
unbellyfeel selectionism." ;-> I find that transhumanists,
Extropians, and "Singularitarians" are ever-so prone
to a kind of thinly-disguised religionism, based on the
hope that "rationality" will somehow free us from the dire
contingencies of Darwinism, contingencies that a more
dispassionate observer might suspect are forever inescapable
within a Naturalistic universe. Since I know that you,
Mr. Sternberg, are interested in this sort of stuff
("immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988" ;-> ), and
since I know you're on Orkut, maybe you'd like to take
a look at my soapbox there ("Unbound Singularity"):
http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=38810&tid=1

Jim F.

[*] ongoing fallout from Darwininan thinking in
the contemporary world includes the discovery that the
immune system works (within an individual organism)
in a variation+selection manner analogous to the
inter-generational classical Darwinian pattern, and
a radical proposal (made by Gerald M. Edelman,
Jean-Pierre Changeux, and other so-called "selectionist"
neuroscientists) that nervous systems, and therefore
intelligence itself, operates in a similar fashion.
(See http://www.orkut.com/CommMsgs.aspx?cmm=38810&tid=6 ).

Edelman calls the alternative to selectionism "instructionism",
and if you're discussing, say, artificial intelligence,
it looks an awful lot like creationism (with human
designers in the role of God). The dichotomy comes up
over and over (and over) again.