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POPSDon't Know Much Biology This attitude has enormous political—and educational—implications. What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician's "spiritual truth"? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming. Ignorance about evolution may be widespread, but it's not nearly as dangerous as dogmatic certainty about the real world based on faith alone.
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POPSDo You Really Believe That? Noah's Flood Edition If continual and arbitrary violations of physical law are invoked at every turn, any chain of events, no matter how ridiculous or impossible, can be allowed. But the sheer number of miracles that would be needed gives some idea of just how implausible the flood story is. Nevertheless, there are a significant number of theists who believe this silly story really happened and want to see it adopted into the scientific canon and taught in public schools as fact. Yet most of these people, I'd wager, want this only because they have been told by their trusted religious authorities that this story is true and have never thought through its implications for themselves. To theists who fit this description, I suggest you take a closer look at the story of Noah's flood and all it entails, and then ask yourselves: Do you really believe that?
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POPSWhat Is Denialism? 5 general tactics are used by denialists to sow confusion. They are conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.
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POPSChallenges facing K-12 science education A state college is going to set them back about $20,000 per year; a private college is going to be double that, easily. Yet here come these poorly prepared kids who are going to be paying all that money for instruction in basic algebra, remedial English, and with heads full of unscientific garbage that we need to spend a year draining. It's such a waste of time and effort on our part and theirs, and these students are going to struggle and suffer and in many cases fail. Every time a school levy fails, every time some anti-education bozo gets elected to the school board, I want to grab the parents responsible and explain to them that that decision is going to personally cost them tens of thousands of dollars when they send their son or daughter off to a college to teach them the stuff they should have learned in 10th grade - PZ
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POPSCollege Needs Biology Faculty Teach the evidence, but ignore it so that you arrive at the theologically 'correct' answer. Link to their Biblical Foundations Statement.
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POPSThe Problem of Ignorance The scientists are losing the battle for education, despite the fact that creationism cannot legally be taught in public schools. The problem, naturally, is that even though teachers cannot teach creationism, many of them feel as if they should avoid teaching evolution in any detail for fear of public reactions from parents.
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POPSBlog Against Theocracy - April 6-8 So get involved in a little blogactivism and help raise awareness on the need to preserve separation of church and state and protecting the First Amendment. Your help in recruiting bloggers for Blog Against Theocracy is needed and appreciated too.
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POPSScience in the World 2050 Alonso Fyfe on Neil deGrasse Tyson's presentation at Beyond Belief 2006. However, Tyson offers a different conclusion. He argues that the acceptance of intelligent design, even among scientists, even among the best and brightest minds in science, is a problem. The problem is that where scientists (and others) evoke intelligent design, they quit studying, and they quit learning. They draw a line in the sand and refuse to venture past it. Even if you are as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops. It just stops. Your kinda no good any more for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who does not have God on the brain, and who says, ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ They come in and solve it.
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POPSTextbook Disclaimer Stickers Wording for the first disclaimer (top left) is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District ("A community with a passion for learning") in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama's evolution disclaimer ( view ). Really, I'm not making any of this up. The other 14 are mildly educational variants that demonstrate the real meaning of a scientific "theory" as well as the true motivations of the School Board members and their creationist supporters. Ideally, the above stickers will deter other districts from using textbook disclaimers as a way to undermine the teaching of evolution.
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POPSCareer day at the Discovery Institute preschool In case you ever doubted that the Discovery Institute's real goal is the promulgation of ignorance, that's a genuine quote: Michael Egnor is directly addressing high school kids and telling them they don't need to learn basic biology, because he doesn't use it.
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POPSBiblical Paleontology Ken Ham and Kent Hovind and their ilk have been trying to appropriate dinosaurs for creationism, so help them out and go along with it. Help yourself to these examples of biblical paleontology. Remember, you don't need to actually know anything to do biblical paleontology—just make it up as you go along. Your only tools are your imagination and photoshop.
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