13 percent of biology teachers advocate creationism

I missed this LiveScience article when it came out in January, but I doubt the underlying fact has changed: 13% of high school biology teachers "advocate creationism in their classrooms."

That's depressing.

"We say [evolution is] a central idea in biology, but someone can get a biology degree and not take a class in it," Randy Moore, a science and evolution education specialist in the biology department at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. "We let that go in the name of religious freedom."

This is where Stephen Jay Gould's idea of non-overlapping magisteria might be helpful. On the other hand, Gould's argument relies primarily on this assumption:

Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

The concept of non-overlapping magisteria, relying as it does on an assumption (the Bible is neither literally true in every detail nor inerrant) that creationists consider not just repugnant but false, isn't going to gain any traction among creationism's adherents.

Truly, we're talking about faith here, and that's terribly difficult to overcome because faith, in the extreme, is immune to evidence. And those who have adopted a literalist reading of the Bible are extremely faithful.

A couple of creationism-advocating teachers, not identified by name, are quoted in the LiveScience piece. Each has a different reason for teaching creationism in the classroom.

"I am always amazed at how evolution and creationism are treated as if they are right or wrong. They are both belief systems that can never be truly or fully proved or discredited."

I can understand, and I even have a distant sympathy for, this point of view. Humans cannot "see" evolution taking place before our eyes, so a person deeply skeptical of science's extrapolations from partial evidence could conclude that there's a lot more belief required for evolution than most biologists are willing to admit. (I happen to think -- yes, to believe -- that the same scientific method that has been so successful in other disciplines like chemistry and physics, whose status as "sciences" is not in doubt, is probably producing similarly valid results in biology. Evolution, then, remains by far the best current explanation for the profusion of life around us.)

This teacher, on the other hand, is simply deluded.

"I don't teach the theory of evolution in my life science classes, nor do I teach the Big Bang Theory in my [E]arth [S]cience classes.... We do not have time to do something that is at best poor science."

A Stephen Jay Gould or an Albert Einstein would be qualified to judge whether something is poor science. Someone advocating as "science" the insipid fantasy of creationism -- or, as its current advocates would have us refer to it, intelligent design -- is clearly not qualified to pass judgment on the quality of scientific theories. And yet this nitwit is allowed to teach children "science." That's just sad.

I've said before that creationism, aka intelligent design, is not science. You can argue the contrary until you're blue in the face, but you'll still be manifestly, fundamentally, and irredeemably wrong.

Creationism is not science, period, end of discussion. Intelligent design is creationism with an asterisk and therefore is not science, period, end of discussion.

Why? Because any question posed by the fossil record that does not have an answer is assumed to represent the handiwork of God (or in the parlance of intelligent design, a designer that could, if you wished, be regarded as God).

Positing that God is responsible for as-yet unexplained anomalies in the fossil record allows creationism's supporters to declare victory and go home without even trying to answer the question.

Creationists, if you want to play in science's yard, then you play by science's rules. And creationism/intelligent design fails, egregiously, on that count.

Now if we could only get the 13% of high school biology teachers advocating for creationism -- and the 60% who "weakly [teach] evolution without explicitly endorsing or denying creationism in order to avoid controversy and questions" -- to understand that.

Maybe this simple equation will get through to the younger teachers:

Creationism = FAIL

The cross-country runner

Courtesy of Longreads, a piece by Michael Oppenheimer, "The Race That is Not About Winning", celebrating onscreen portrayals of the high school cross-country runner. That's just an excuse, though, to reflect on a certain kind of oddball that isn't accorded much attention by Hollywood, or anyone else for that matter: "the American teen male anti-athlete."

He is not a genius, he is not pathologically shy, and he is not widely loathed. Rather, he is a little shy, a little marginal, and a good bit quirkier than his classmates. He does not necessarily read constantly, but when he reads—or listens to music, or skips school to go to a matinee by himself—it is with an outsider’s wistfulness, with a hopeful eye on the world beyond high school.

I wasn't a cross-country runner but it was the only athletic activity I even fleetingly considered pursuing. Now I understand why.

This piece will hit very close to home for a few of you -- or rather, if I may be so bold, us.

Amazon takes on music publishers in the cloud

Courtesy Daring Fireball, here's a piece describing Amazon's stance on paying music publishers royalties for music stored on Amazon's "new online music locker," Cloud Drive.

... Amazon resists any suggestion that it needs licenses for storage. The company tells paidContent: “We do not need a license to store music in Cloud Drive. The functionality of saving MP3s to Cloud Drive is the same as if a customer were to save their music to an external hard drive or even iTunes.”

Bingo!

That is exactly the position that everybody outside the music industry takes, because it's the one that makes sense.

If Cloud Drive is what this article makes it sound like, an extension of one's personal music collection to the cloud, and access is limited to the collection's owner, then I would politely ask the music industry to shut the f--k up and stay the f--k out of the way, thank you very much.

Of course, somebody's always worried about pirated content:

But unless it was purchased through Amazon, the company has little way of knowing the music’s provenance—ie what’s been bought and what has, in some cases, been copied from someone else’s collection.

Correct, Amazon has little (probably no) way of knowing whence the content originated. And guess what? That's not Amazon's problem, as long as the content can only be accessed by the collection's owner. This is precisely how access to your own music collection works in your house. Any deficiencies in the model are beyond Amazon's control.

The music industry has an almost robotic tendency to respond to the concept of "online music access" by saying: "we'll take another piece of that."

No. Back the f--k off, you cretins.

Get this through your thick skulls: I am not a f--king pirate. Stop treating me like one.

I own every goddamned song in my collection, and I am not about to pay you another f--king penny for it.

When you sold it to me, the agreement was that I could listen to it as much as I liked, when I liked, where I liked. I'm holding you to that agreement.

As I've said before, any model of cloud-based access to music I own that requires ongoing payment of royalties to the music publishers is nothing more than a destructively greedy and illegitimate racket.

Amazon is sticking up for its customers. Good for you, Amazon.

(Disclaimer: I have never been employed by Amazon, nor do I own any stock in it.)

UPDATE: As I assumed, Amazon explicitly restricts access to the collection's owner. From Amazon Cloud Drive's official terms of use:

You may not use a name, username or email address that you are not authorized to use or share your Amazon.com username and password with others for purposes of allowing others to use the Service through your account.

Arizona bans bias-based abortions

According to Reuters:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on Tuesday signed into law a controversial bill that makes the state the first in the nation to outlaw abortions performed on the basis of the race or gender of the fetus.

This, in spite of the fact that the law's backers can point to no evidence that abortions on such a basis are happening in Arizona.

What is it about some so-called conservatives that while they decry the government's attempts to impose any restrictions on gun ownership or to collect taxes, they embrace the most draconian and offensive intrusions into our sexual practices and the results of those sexual practices?

Do you think abortion is murder? Then convince the rest of us.

Make a compelling case for your position -- a case that rests on something more relevant to the rest of us than doctrine laid down by religious authorities (persons or texts) we don't recognize as having either the expertise or the right to lay down such strictures on non-adherents.

(By the way, your position would be stronger if so many of you didn't also oppose contraception. Sheesh, this is the twenty-first century -- you can't have it both ways. You never could, but now, unlike a hundred years ago, we know that.)

Abortion opponents, weaseling your way into our most intimate and difficult decisions through batshit-crazy laws like Arizona's just makes you look like authoritarian wingnuts who can't be trusted to respect anyone else's rights.

MSNBC loses viewers by not being a news network

As of a bit more than a week ago, CNN was beating up on MSNBC and even Fox News in the ratings. The gains came in the wake of the Japanese quake and reactor crisis, coupled with the unrest in Libya.

The big ratings loser was MSNBC, and the problem was especially noticeable during the weekends when MSNBC normally airs a number of prerecorded shows about prisons. It decided to stick to its normal schedule rather than provide live continuing coverage of either major story.

MSNBC president Phil Griffin was evasive about the network's strategy on weekends.

He called MSNBC’s weekend reliance on “Lockup,” its recorded documentary-style program about prisons, a “tricky situation.” He said, “This is our strategy for weekends, and it has worked well for us.” Its audience now “has an expectation” of seeing such programs on Saturday and Sunday nights, he said.

What?

Is he seriously telling us that he, the man in charge of a news network, has not a clue about how to cover the news?

Does Phil Griffin think he's running E! or the Biography Channel? Their viewers might indeed have expected normal programming to resume. A news network's audience would have different expectations. Judging by the ratings, they did, and they had little use for MSNBC's irrelevant canned programming.

I guess Griffin wants to drive home the message that MSNBC isn't a real news network. Well, that narrows down your choices when real news breaks, doesn't it?

Google and recipes

Here's a highly critical blog entry by Nicholas Carr about Google's new specialized handling of recipes in its search results.

What's not to like about a specialized recipe search engine? Beneath the surface, though, some funny things were going on, and not all of them were salubrious. In fact, the changes illustrate how, as search engines refine their algorithms, their results become more biased. In particular, the changes reveal how a powerful search engine like Google has come to reward professional sites that are able to spend a lot on search engine optimization, or SEO, and penalize amateurs who are simply looking to share their thoughts with the world.

I suppose specialization was inevitable, but it's important to recognize the tradeoffs that Carr points out.

By the way, I didn't intend for the last few entries to be all about Google. It's what happens, though, when a company plays that big a role in our lives.

(And just so it's clear, I have never worked for or owned stock in Google.)

Google delays release of Honeycomb source

I don't care as much about tech stories as I did, but this one caught my eye because I think some commentators don't understand it. Business Week, among others, is reporting that Google is delaying release of the source code to its upcoming version of the Android operating system. The release, codenamed Honeycomb, is intended to run on tablet-style machines that will compete with Apple's iPad.

"To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs," says Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group. "We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."

Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn't prevent developers from putting the software on phones "and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones."

The same article notes that big manufacturers already have access to Honeycomb's source code. If you don't write software for a living, that probably sounds like somebody is getting screwed -- namely, smaller developers that don't have the clout of, say, HTC or Samsung. However, it's possible, and I think even likely, that these bigger manufacturers have agreed to strict controls over how they may use or modify the source. More to the point, they're probably manufacturing the tablets for which Honeycomb is intended. The smaller developers who won't be getting access to the source for the time being are likely to be developing ancillary software or peripherals.

The trouble with the coverage of the delay is that it gives prominent coverage to those who see ulterior motives in such delays:

Eben Moglen, a professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, believes that Google is simply repeating the past mistakes of other companies that tried to put tight controls around the release of their open-source software. "It's usually a mistake," Moglen says. "Long experience teaches people that exposing the code to the community helps more than it hurts you."

Professor Moglen assumes that Google is delaying the release of the Honeycomb source out of a desire to keep total control over it. I think his assumption is out of whack, likely because he has never written software.

Where he sees a dark corporate conspiracy to back off from its commitment to open-source software, I see hacks that would be embarrassing for Google to acknowledge its engineers wrote, and costly for the company to maintain if external developers started relying on them. I've written software and I've worked with big source code bases. I know how easy it is for hacks to be introduced when deadlines loom. Not every first solution is elegant, but sometimes you have to ship with the source base you've got, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld.

Google is delaying release of the source, not reneging on its commitment to release it at all. Calm down, people.