From Wired Magazine, an example of how skeptical views on climate change have now become mainstream enough to earn a level of protection when educators want to explore both sides of the issue. It is unfortunate that Wired magazine chose to label the idea as “anti-science”.
They write:
House Bill 302, as it’s called, states that public school teachers who want to teach “scientific weaknesses” about “controversial scientific topics” including evolution, climate change, human cloning and — ambiguously — “other scientific topics” may do so without fear of reprimand. The legislation was introduced to the New Mexico House of Representatives on Feb. 1 by Republican Rep. Thomas A. Anderson.
Supporters of science education say this and other bills are designed to spook teachers who want to teach legitimate science and protect other teachers who may already be customizing their curricula with anti-science lesson plans.
“These bills say, ‘Oh we’re just protecting the rights of teachers,’ which on the face of it isn’t wrong. But they draw big red circles around topics like evolution and climate change as topics to be wary about,” said Joshua Rosenau, a policy and projects director at the National Center for Science Education. “It suggests this kind of science is controversial, and would protect teachers who want to teach anti-evolution and climate-change-denying lessons in classrooms.”
The bill is one of five already introduced to state legislatures this year. While more than 30 such bills have been introduced since 2004, only Louisiana adopted one as law in 2008.
full story here
It does seem a bit of a poor show for Wired, which generally wears a reasonably scientific hat, to start making snidey remarks about those of us who don’t believe in the ‘cargo cult science’ of AGW – which, as several comments above remind us, doesn’t seem to have any falsification criteria and doesn’t make any useful predictions. I shall view their site rather differently from here on – differently as in, less trusting.
As for creationism, yeah, my great great great grandad had this tyrannosaur …
I would accept more taxes taken away from me if I could get a batch of legislators that ONLY took laws off the books instead of adding more BS to them. Noble cause be damned, please can we just get a batch that removes the crap, start with the patriot act.
Used to read Wired regularly for about 10% of its content. The remaining 90 feels like it’s written by grade-school children. When they hired Spencer Ackerman of journolist fame the stench of politics finally and thoroughly overwhelmed the good bits.
I have been quite disturbed by the old exam papers, homework etc that my boys have bought home from school (UK). There is nothing to suggest in the text that AGW is a theory, it just states ‘this IS happening, this WILL happen’ etc. Basically tantamount to brain washing.
Luckily they have a Mum who is interested in science and I can get them to question things and give them the other side of the argument.
I have been most amused by my 15 year old who is in his last year at school. When the AGW subject comes up in science lessons he hasn’t been afraid to state facts, question what is being taught and infact started a debate with the whole class and teacher. I think most of his class mates are now skeptics!
Galilleo could have used such free-speech protection 401 years ago!
Linking scepticism about AGW with the questions raised in some quarters about evolution is a mistake and a sure way to lose people like me. I have two major concerns:
First, the science, in the case of AGW, we are trying to separate the science from the belief of adherents; to cast a sceptical eye on their ‘evidence’ because so much has been influenced by their belief system. In the case of evolution, there is a large and credible body of evidence that supports the theory that ‘complex forms’ evolve from simpler forms.
Second, I have grave concerns with any legislative body legislating and approach to teaching science. By their nature, legislative bodies are political animals, and are not a place in which a cool understanding of scientific principles can be applied.
If you’re looking for Intelligent Design in nature, you need go no further than the climate data coming out of NASA GISS. Cooking the books in the name of “homogenization” should yield a pretty strong Intelligent Design signal in the temp records. In fact, that was one of the earliest possible applications of the discipline… identifying experimenter contamination of raw data… what we used to call “dry labbing”.
The new McKitrick paper, “McKitrick, Ross R. and Nicolas Nierenberg (2010) Socioeconomic Patterns in Climate Data.Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, forthcoming.”, may well be a good example of how to identify the source of the Intelligent Design signal in the climate data, at least identify it as something other than Greenhouse Gas warming.
wolfwalker says:
February 7, 2011 at 3:45 am
re; no books expose weaknesses in evolution theory based on evidence
If that’s what you think then you haven’t read:
“The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism”
by Mike Behe, Professor of Biochemistry, Lehigh University, PA
http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Evolution-Search-Limits-Darwinism/dp/B002IT5OOS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1297089273&sr=8-2
“Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome”
by John Sanford, Professor of Genetics, Cornell University, NY
http://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Entropy-Mystery-Genome-Sanford/dp/0981631606/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297089446&sr=1-1
“The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues”
by Mike Gene (pen name, an engineer, no one knows where)
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Matrix-Consilience-Clues/dp/0978631404/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297089564&sr=1-1
Not a scrap of religious mumbo jumbo in any of them. All science & engineering & empirical evidence.
The books above are about Intelligent Design not Scientific or Young Earth Creationism. ID doesn’t dispute the generally accepted age of the earth, doesn’t pretend to have data which identifies the source of design in the universe or the mechanism by which it was imposed. It examines complexity in nature, probalistic resources (chance) and known natural mechanisms by which change occurs (law), and attempts to discriminate between things that were designed and things that formed by law & chance. It’s forensic in nature and can be applied equally well in determining if someone cheated in a lottery, arson vs. accident, random mutation & natural selection vs. directed evolution, random values for physical constants vs. fine tuning, and things of that nature. The books above are all about probabilities, evolutionary mechanisms, time & opportunity, and magnitude of evolutionary change over time.
Just as CAGW skeptics don’t like being lumped together with anti-evolutionists, many who believe intelligent design is a reasonably hypothesis don’t like being lumped together with Young Earth Creationists. I’m as convinced as one can be by scientific principles that the earth is billions of years old and all living things on this planet come from one or perhaps several unbroken cell lines hundreds of millions of years old. What I don’t believe is that the finely tuned laws of nature are some freak accident that beat nearly impossible odds or that life on this planet and mind-boggling complexity of the molecular machinery in even the simplest living cell is the result of a random dance of atoms in a prebiotic soup. It’s patently absurd once you take a serious look at the odds against it just happening without reason or intent of intelligent agency. The hallmark of intelligent agency is things that normally wouldn’t happen without it. For instance there’s a finite chance that a random arrangement of atoms could be a functional space shuttle but the number of arrangements of atoms that are not space shuttles is so large that in a finite universe a space shuttle will never happen by accident. But throw intelligent agency into the mix and viola – a fleet of space shuttles.
Sanford is a Cornell geneticist and inventor of the “gene gun”.
John Campbell says:
“For the theory of evolution, the null hypothesis would be proved were someone to find fossil rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian.”
Actually, I did find a rabbit fossil in some pre-cambrian strata, but I threw it away, since it was obviously a mistake.
Sorry but I fail to see how dumping Mann Made Global Warming ™ skepticism in with creationism helps us?
To many, this will just be further proof of how debased and removed from reality skeptics are.
Further more, dare I say it, I fear that the people who created this bill have an ulterior motive…to get the farce called creationism in to school curriculums!
Mailman
I started out skeptical…
..I’m now a full blown “D” word
I don’t care what they call me, what group they try to put me in.
It is becoming very very clear that modern Science has become indistinguishable from Religion.
Science has become a political baseball bat that is used to frighten & control people.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
It now appears that this needs updating to, “Any sufficiently inscrutable science is indistinguishable from religion.”
My rabbit comment was whimsical, bu it does have a point. To what extent will a scientist with a prior commitment to a particular paradigm consciously or unconsciously reject evidence that violates what he is committed to.
If James Hansen finds evidence that contradicts CAGW alarmism, what do you think he will do? Become a skeptic?
If a Darwinist (or neo-Darwinist or modern synthesist) finds the hypothetical rabbit in the pre-Cambrian, what will HE do?
What is happening here in this forum is a wholesale rejection of a belief system, one that is cultist, arrogant, and has no respect for dissenters.
Likewise, the Darwinist proponents are also defending a belief system, one that equally has no respect for dissenters.
Personally, I have no sympathy for Creationism… I believe it is religious and not scientific. And also, I have no sympathy for Darwinism, and I view it as a religious creation myth for atheists and materialists. There may be a limited place for evolution by mutation and natural selection in studying the phenomenal world, but it is not the “foundation of Biology”, any more than Newtonian gravitation is the foundation of Physics.
Mailman says:
“Sorry but I fail to see how dumping Mann Made Global Warming ™ skepticism in with creationism helps us?”
Nobody’s doing that. Creationism is a religious belief, whereas Intelligent Design is a pragmatically valid discipline that distinguishes the natural phenomena from the effects of animal or human behavior. Intelligent Design has no religious connotation.
My opinion on the scientific validity of abiogenesis and macro-evolution rightly holds no weight on this site. Yet I believe you have heard of Francis Crick. Humor me for a few moments by reading quotes from that Nobel laureate:
“To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA) which will be described in outline in Chapter 5. Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be?
This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20^200 and is approximately equal to 10^260, that is a one followed by 260 zeros!
This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 10^11 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 10^80, is quite paltry by comparison to 10^260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense. ” Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981) p. 51-52.
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981) p.88
And, isn’t it fair to say “the knowledge available to us now”, as opposed to the relatively smaller body of knowledge available to Crick, has only made the matter much worse for those clinging to the creation myths of abiogenesis and macro-evolution?
(BTW, Crick’s description of the comparison of 10^80 vs. 10^260 as “paltry” is an appalling understatement: If each of the 10^80 particles in our universe was transformed into a complete universe of the same size as ours, the total particles would still only by 10^160. Therefore, dust on the scales used to weigh tractor trailers is more meaningful than the number of all the particles in a universe of universes compared to the daunting permutations involved in a single middling polypeptide!)
Flask says:
February 7, 2011 at 6:19 am
“Biology and much of medicine rely on concepts required by the theory of evolution, it isn’t all about dinosaurs.”
Right you are. It relies on concepts like a pathogenic bacteria in your bloodstream won’t grow into a parasitic animal like a liver fluke.
Oh wait. You probably didn’t mean to say that much of biology and medicine relies on the limits of evolution. You just wanted to make the tired old point that bacteria can acquire resistance to antibiotics through random mutation & natural selection.
I bet you didn’t know that evolutionary biology is not a required course to become a medical doctor. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit strange when a theory that is purportedly so important to medicine isn’t a required course for medical practioners? That should be prima facie evidence that your claim is hogwash. People who subscribe to dogma seldom let facts get in the way of their beliefs.
Right on!
What I am suggesting is that Mann Made Global Warming is an attempt to study the effects of Intelligent Design (the effects of our industrial civilization) on the natural climate system.
In order to defeat or contain it, its Intelligent Design premises must be analyzed and established, and placed into context.
Equating climate skeptics with holocaust deniers is the same tactic that Darwinists employ against intelligent design pundits when they equate them with Young Earth Creationists.
I can’t seem to find where that fits into the scientific method or the philosophy of science. It fits pretty well into the philosophy of war and counter-intelligence operations though. Sun Tzu would approve but Karl Popper would not.
Anthony Hughes,
Im sorry but that is a load of bollocks…especially when the main driver for ID is the Discovery Institute, who in turn believe that it is God that is responsible for Intelligent Design…which in turn is reflected in their propaganda.
Therefore, lumping those of us who are skeptical around mans role in Mann Made Global Warming ™ with creationist [trimmed] does our case no good at all.
In fact, lumping us in with those [trimmed] only makes our case all that much harder because people will automatically switch off because Mann Made Global Warming ™ skepticism has been tainted by association with creationism.
Mailman
In fact, I would go as far to say that climate science as practiced by “The Team” is pretty similar to the science that goes in to creationism…and the defenders of both will move heaven and earth to protect their religion from being examined in any detail that would expose it for what it is.
Mailman
As a retired geology professor who has always believed in Darwinian evolution and never believed in AGW, I think most comments are missing a major point. While I believe in evolution, the truth is, whether a dinosaur (or any organism) was created by Biblical creation or natural selection evolution, the dinosaur will have zero impact on the daily life of any human. On the other hand, if the warmists like Gore, Hansen, and Obama ram the whole AGW down our throats and destroy modern society in the name of saving the planet with their stupid unscientific ideas, every human will have his life altered for the worse. Every activity from paying a utility bill to driving a car will be made more expensive and complicated for no good scientific reason. The false God of AGW makes the God of the creationist seem trivial by comparison of the effects on mankind and his economy.
They do not call them theories for nothing. If there were no holes they would be laws. Darwin’s own words from On the Origin of Species point out weakness:
Even something as basic as the bacterial flagellar motor illustrates such irreducible complexity.
Mr Watts, you make a grave mistake posting anything about Creationism on this forum, as it brings out the crazies. Now scientifically minded people will read this blog and conclude that being skeptical about CAGW is synonomous with Creationism and religion.
Ditto about evolution, as it allows the non scientific minded to postulate their pet ‘theory’, as opposed to examining the physical evidence.
Fascinating. Least there be some understanding of the ‘ being necessary to the security of a free State’ New Mexico is practicing the purpose of a ‘free state’. Free from? Education is the practice of learning. How to learn not what to learn. Lessons should be examples of how to learn. The what is learned builds the library of knowledge
Plate Tectonics, half a century ago, I became informed was a theory. Unproven. And the words of that great teacher “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”
And a long ago school experience, one such teacher presented the notion that in the world of political science the evil of a Nazi was on a graphic scale to the right of my Constitution. I questioned not for a decade that notion. But reason did with clarity disprove that notion. That teacher may have been under the influence of teaching ‘blind-folded fear’.
This state bill is not a new concept nor an off the wall legal provision assessment. Experts in legislative process say ‘will probably never see the light of day’. Other States have attempted to do some similar protective custodial legislation.
The issue is not subject matter, but the authenticity of any Theory to be presented under the ‘blind-folded fear’. An off the wall, at least in those decades ago, elective cultural anthropology teacher presented a controversial Theory. Intelligent design vs the accepted emperical-academic acceptance of Darwin. Intelligent design by this teacher was not biblical but perhaps reason – Alien visitation-genetic manipulation via what we today call DNA-engineering. This teacher did not dwell-preach such outlandish thoughts – he only presented the notion of the possibility of Intelligent Design Theory. How did man originate. Some of the religious Darwinists called his thoughts blasphemous-repent the desecration of Darwin.