Razib at Gene Expression posts a link to this story about Evolution & Creationism in Christian colleges.
The article reports on 2 Christian colleges with differing policies on teaching about evolution. One Professor explains: “I teach that the universe was created in six literal days. We believe that the Genesis account refers to literal 24-hour periods.”
Can somebody help me understand what this could mean? What is a literal “day,” or a literal “hour,” before the sun exists? It’s fine with me if they want construe “day” in some way other than the time it takes for earth to rotate on its axis, but in that case what could the word ”literal” possibly mean?
Wired News:
By Lakshmi Sandhana
02:00 AM Sep, 18, 2006
Religious critics of evolution have trained their sights on one of the world’s pre-eminent fossil exhibits — Louis and Richard Leakey’s extensive skeletal collections illuminating the origins of man.
Evangelical Christians in Kenya are demanding that the exhibit at Nairobi’s National Museum edit out references to human evolution in order to prevent young African Christians from being taught falsehoods.
READ MORE …
For the BookTV program featured in the post right before this one, I also posted a notice to the TRSE email list, maintained by CUFA (the College and University Faculty Assembly), which is associated with the NCSS. When I post such things to that list, I usually get private emails from CUFA members thanking me for the information, and sometimes urging me to post more often like I was doing a few years ago. I also get a smattering of complaints from people who don’t appreciate my posts, so this last message included a note that CUFA might want to consider information & discussion channels that could be used by people who want the information, without bothering those who do not.
CUFA has lost the participation of extremely valuable members (e.g., Gloria Ladson-Billings) who have concluded that there are communities within which their participation would be more effective.
For my part, I am shifting my engagement to the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (AAACS). Please email me if you would like to get the CALL FOR PROPOSALS for the next AAACS meeting, in Chicago the weekend before AERA (twhitson@udel.edu).
I do want to share an observation, though, on the character of Social Studies in the US.
[Read more →]
re-airing On Saturday, November 11 at 8:00 am
http://www.booktv.org/History/index.asp?segID=7367&schedID=463
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note: if you would like to know about rebroadcasts in future weekends, use the RSS feed. See
http://tonywhitson.edublogs.org/2006/09/03/booktv-notification/
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I did not intend to record this, since it looked like one of those “reenactors” events that I generally don’t see as worthy of attention.
However, I did get part of it b/c the first airing followed a program about China that I did want to record. I think this one really is
worthwhile.
[Read more →]
让我看这样行不行啊
just ignore this post, unless you want to drop me a comment about whether you see Chinese characters on your system or not.
I will be looking at this on different systems that don’t have language fonts installed to see how the characters display on those screens.
and what about right-to-left script? tests: מַדָּע
from Aljazeera: خوان مصر ينتظرون اعتذارا صريحا من البابا والغضب مستمر
first, a little fun with Wells’s title, and then to the point of this post:
The title: Wells’s book is part of Regnery’s series of “Politically Incorrect Guides” to whatever hot-button topics will sell product to their right-wing readership.
The book is getting thorough critical review on the Panda’s Thumb.
A number reviewers and commenters have noted that the book’s incorrectness is not only political–it is also incorrect scientifically, historically, legally, factually, logically, and just about any other way you might want to consider. Some have taken to referring to the book as Wells’s “Simply Incorrect Guide”; and others have come up with different titles to express how thoroughly the book is wrong in all respects.
In my own search for an appropriate re-titling of the book, I have considered:
- Persistently Incorrect Guide,
- Pervasively Incorrect Guide,
- Perversely Incorrect Guide,
- Perniciously Incorrect Guide,
- Profusely Incorrect Guide, etc.
(I did want to keep the PIG initials, to maintain consistency with how others are referring to it.)
The alternative that I’ve settled on is “The Promiscuously Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.” I think it best reflects both the frequency and the reckless irresponsibility of the inaccuracies.
Now, to the substantive point: It seems to me that Wells’s PIG could perform a positive service, one that I have not seen discussed heretofore. Educators are always concerned to find ways to assess the effectiveness of their curricula. It seems to me that this PIG provides a test — a “high stakes” test, indeed — of science education for the general public. If non-scientists with high school diplomas are unable to see pervasive and profound errors and inaccuracies in this PIG, that can be used as evidence that science education for non-scientists in our schools has failed to accomplish the goals of “scientific literacy” or “science for all Americans” (cf. AAAS - Project 2061). This can provide a focus for reworking science education within general education (i.e., for non-specialists) so that high school graduates would pass the test (a test for science education, more than for the graduates as individuals) of having learned to understand the nature of science well enough that they could not be taken in by something like this PIG.
Of course, non-scientists (like myself) would still depend on specialists like the Panda’s Thumb contributors to explain errors that can be recognized only with specific knowledge that non-specialized lay people would have no reason to know. The lay person who has a solid general education in science will often still need help from specialists to see through the Gish Gallop, as explained on PT by Richard Hoppe:
Like all creationists, Wells stuffs his screed with false claims (a tactic immortalized as the Gish Gallop, each claim expressed in a sentence but requiring paragraphs to rebut).
But the Wells PIG also is replete with errors and inaccuracies that the generally-educated high school graduate should be able to see, simply on the basis of understanding the nature of science, without the need for help from specialists. Please note: I am not predicting, here, what I would currently expect from high school graduates. Rather, I am proposing that we could take advantage of this PIG by using it to think about the kind of understanding that our science curriculum should be designed to achieve among our graduates, and to test how well we do in that regard.
We can differentiate between, say, beta-type errors and inaccuracies, that would not be apparent to readers without specialized knowledge, versus alpha-type errors and inaccuracies, which any high school graduate should be able to spot. To give just one example of an alpha-type error:
Owen and Agassiz did comparative biology, yet they rejected Darwin’s theory. … So comparative biology, like most other fields in biology, owes nothing to Darwinism. (79)
Wells uses statements such as this as supposedly disproving the position of Dobzhansky (1973) and others who say that nothing in modern biology makes sense without evolutionary theory. The senses in which that point should be understood might call for some elaboration by the specialists (see Matt Brauer, for example), but the logical fallacy and implicit factual inaccuracy of Wells’s claim about Agassiz and modern comparative biology are things that lay readers, with an adequate high-school science education, should be able to spot without such help.
What do you think?
