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POPSIgnorance-only Sex Education It is strange that there's this whole suite of positions that would seem to be unrelated, but almost always seem to be adopted wholesale. If you know someone is against evolution, you can pretty much predict their positions on abortion, stem cells, the death penalty, education, GW Bush, and homosexuality. I wonder what common force ties all those disparate ideas together? - PZ
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POPSScience is Hard! At least he's being honest and now we know why Evolution isn't popular in the United States... It's too hard to understand.
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POPSBad Desires Desires that thwart other desires of the agent The suicide bomber, or even the holy soldier whose desire to serve some god is strong enough to motivate him to risk injury or death Desires that tend to thwart the desires of others Opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ (promoting an ignorance of evolution), adding misery to the lives of homosexuals, inhibiting the education of women, inhibitions on free speech and the free exchange of ideas Desires that cannot be fulfilled A parent with a desire that his children be healthy and happy will act in ways in which he believes will bring them health and happiness. However, the only acts that have real value are those that generate true health and happiness. If an act harms his children, even though he acted with the best intentions, the fact that his children were harmed means that this is an act he has reason to wish he had never performed
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POPSUSA: A Nation of Uneducated Morons So tell me, everyone: why are scientists supposed to respect religion, this corrupter of minds, this promulgator of lies, this damnable institution dedicated to delusion, in our culture? Maybe we need to start picketing fundamentalist churches. Maybe it's about time that we recognize religious miseducation as child abuse.
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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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POPSChristian Academy Science Fair Winners Named Christian Academies shouldn't have science fairs. Can you tell me with a straight face that these kids are getting a quality education? It's one thing for this to be an entry in the fair, but it's completely absurd that it won! I think we found a future president.
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POPSWhy would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? If my doctor were treating me, I would want to know that he or she knew about evolution. Evolution is so ingrained in medicine that every doctor should have studied it. As Theodosius Dobzhansky stated, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”; evolution is inescapable in all of the life sciences, including medicine. I have been fortunate in that my personal physicians have been knowledgeable about evolution; I even learned a bit from them. However, it disappoints me that a few doctors do not hold such a view and I feel even sorrier for their patients.
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POPSThis Old Earth - Part 1 Response to a young earth creationist's arguments. The first two parts are debunking the arguments for a 6,000 year old earth, and the third part will detail how we know the earth is 4.5 billion years old.
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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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POPSA Call to Action This is my favorite post from Alonso Fyfe, who blogs at Atheist Ethicist . I run into people all the time who tell me "I'm a Christian and I'm for stem cell research" or "I'm a Christian and believe in Evolution" or "I'm a Christian and I don't have a problem with homosexuals". Then speak up! Stand up to the Robertsons and Dobsons and let them know it is wrong.
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POPSIgnorant and Proud One does not have to be a fundamentalist to put a Jesus fish on one's car. Some of those who do so are certainly fundamentalists, but many more would better be described as moderate Christians. And yet, they share at least something with the fundamentalists - some degree of pride in their faith (i.e., their belief of something without evidence). It is not enough for these individuals to believe; they want others to know about it.
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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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POPSRichard Dawkins Quotes "Leon Lederman, the physicist and Nobel laureate, once half-jokingly remarked that the real goal of physics was to come up with an equation that could explain the universe but still be small enough to fit on a T-shirt. In that spirit, Dawkins offered up his own T-shirt slogan for the ongoing evolution revolution: Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators."
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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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