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WASHINGTON, - A bitter debate about how to teach evolution in U.S. high schools is prompting a crisis of confidence among scientists, and some senior academics warn that science itself is under assault.

In the past month, the interim president of Cornell University and the dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine have both spoken on this theme, warning in dramatic terms of the long-term consequences.

"Among the most significant forces is the rising tide of anti-science sentiment that seems to have its nucleus in Washington but which extends throughout the nation," said Stanford's Philip Pizzo in a letter posted on the school Web site on Oct. 3.

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Yes. There was always a bit of a tendency that way, but sometime during the Reagan years, a certain faction began to equate being stupid with being cool. That's festered for 25 years or so, and now it's become the view of preference.

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Originally posted by Reverend Blair:
More frightening than that, like most bad US fads, it's creeping into Canada.

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quote:

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Is United States becoming hostile to science?

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The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).

The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).

One-third of our science teachers and one-half of our math teachers did not major in those subjects. (Quoted on The West Wing, but you can trust it -- their researchers are legendary.)

Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the Earth. Seventeen percent believe the Earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).

"The International Adult Literacy Survey ... found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).

Our workers are so ignorant, and lack so many basic skills, that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). No wonder they relocate elsewhere!

"The European Union leads the U.S. in ... the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).

"Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" (The European Dream, p.70).

Nevertheless, Congress cut funds to the National Science Foundation. The agency will issue 1,000 fewer research grants this year (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).

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Originally posted by Sven:

Are you serious? "Intelligent design" is making a foothold there, too? I really thought that was confined to the USA.

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Just a few years ago they went throught this whole thing in Abbotsford, BC. It was before 'inteligent design' but all the same arguments were raised.

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Originally posted by maestro:

Just a few years ago they went throught this whole thing in Abbotsford, BC. It was before 'inteligent design' but all the same arguments were raised.

In fact the schools had been denying evolution for years until someone brought it up. Eventually the province told the school board to stick to the curriculum.

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What I would like to see the IDers do is give us "evolutionists" a cogent definition of "scientific inquiry". Really get into the concept of testing hypotheses and the analytical nature of science. And then ask them to apply that definition to their ID "theory".

The problem with that hope is that the process of doing that is far too nuanced and rational for them to understand, let alone engage in in a constructive manner. I mean, how can you argue with people who insist that dinosaurs and humans used to live together?

The real dilema in this is that scientists cannot prove a matter of faith such as the existence of an intelligent designer. By definition, a matter of faith is just that; it does not leave any imperical evidence to be examined (and my personal religious belief is that God intended it that way). So, the ID'ers introduce this doubt every time they bring up the matter, and sensible people start getting confused. Isn't science able to explain everything? If not, then does science explain anything at all? Or is any other explanation for the origin and development of life equally acceptable as that suggested by the theory of evolution?

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Originally posted by Hinterland:
By definition, a matter of faith is just that; it does not leave any imperical evidence to be examined (and my personal religious belief is that God intended it that way).

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HARRISBURG, Pa. - A school board member who voted to include "intelligent design" in a high-school biology curriculum testified Friday that she never independently researched the concept and relied on the opinions of two fellow board members to make her decision.

Heather Geesey, a Dover Area School Board member, said she came to believe intelligent design was a scientific theory based on the recommendations of Alan Bonsell and William Buckingham — both members of the board's curriculum committee.

"They said it was a scientific thing," said Geesey....
...
Geesey testified at the end of the fifth week of a landmark federal trial that could determine whether intelligent design can be mentioned in public school science classes.

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By definition, if there were any empirical evidence for such beliefs, they would not be matters of faith.

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Not necessarily and...yes, you are right.

If, for example, the results of the examination of the Shroud of Turin had been inconclusive, or pointed to some previously unknown material that had no explanation for its existence, it might go some way to showing that faith and empirical evidence are not incompatible. But that's just it; there has never been one single instance of that in the entire history of the world. So, we end up with this circularity of meaning and there's no other way out of it, at this time, but to keep faith and science separate. Really great scientists do this without any problem.

I'm not opposed to people doing research into intelligent design...outside of publicly-funded initiatives and most definitely beyond basic education for non-adults (up to the end of high-school.) I say; go nuts. Let's see what you come up with, and submit it for peer review.

[ 29 October 2005: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

The ruling elite - there, as elsewhere - is hostile to quality education for the masses. They still send their own kids to good private schools, where science is taught (as well as history, math, and classical literature). They still hire the brightest graduates od MIT and Cal-tech (not Jesus-Freak U!) to build their weapons, concoct their expensive drugs and splice their terminator soy bean DNA. They just don't want potentially socialist spawn in on the action. And they sure don't want consumers, tax-payers and cannon-fodder asking uncomfortable questions.

This has been around since Reagan's time, when for reasons of his own he found common cause with the Religious Right (recall his messianic interpretation of the Soviet Union as representing a potential battle between Gog and Magog, necessitating nuclear armaments). As a result he allowed the Religious Right to dominate social and political discourse in the USA and they have done so ever since.

I think it's probably considered more of a "fringe benefit" that the insistence on all this balderdash by the social conservatives leads to a mental hobbling of the population as a whole, than a frontal portion of the agenda of the economic conservatives.

[ 30 October 2005: Message edited by: DrConway ]

This is true. It has been my thesis for some time now that language controls thought. If you make a word mean a certain thing, or change a word's meaning, you change the way people think with that word.

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Originally posted by nonesuch:
The ruling elite - there, as elsewhere - is hostile to quality education for the masses. They still send their own kids to good private schools, where science is taught (as well as history, math, and classical literature). They still hire the brightest graduates od MIT and Cal-tech (not Jesus-Freak U!) to build their weapons, concoct their expensive drugs and splice their terminator soy bean DNA. They just don't want potentially socialist spawn in on the action. And they sure don't want consumers, tax-payers and cannon-fodder asking uncomfortable questions.

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I agree with retread's comments regarding the difference between the social conservatives and the economic conservatives (certainly there's overlap but they are not one and the same).

Also, with regard to allocating and limiting knowledge, I don't think it's possible.

For example, anyone in Minnesota (with a certain minimum level of intellectual capacity) can attend the University of Minnesota. No one can legitimately accuse the professors at the University of being rightwing stooges. They are very independent and they tend to be left of center on average with many that are very hard left.

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Originally posted by blueskyboris:
The "economic conservatives" can be described as classical liberals and their left-of-center cousins, the "economic liberals", can be described as welfare liberals... To the right of majority are the long-term conservatives - the Christians - whose "conservatism", aka as political conservation, extends back to the beginnings of the dominance of Christianty as a state religion... On the left of the welfare liberals lie the libertarians, anarchists, Marxists, and communists - logical conclusions of the Englightenment emancipatory project that freed the classical liberals.

One thing in this thread is clear: Moron-representitives of classical liberalism have transcended moronism by embracing profound retardation.

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"There have always been people opposed to learning about things that they don't want to understand. The world has had many inquisitions and many people have been persecuted by morons in the name of God, or the revolution, or the party, or whatever. When we have intelligent leadership in all things, the troglodytes are kept on a tight leash. Unfortunately, GW Bush cut the leash."

-Bush is a Troglodyte.
-The revolutions in Russia, China, etc were the result of social conditions of those times. And if those social conditions return the revolutionary environment will also return. What drives China today is the promise that "capitalism" will allow most Chinese to live the American Dream. Take that dream away and things will get very messy.
- Equating Englightenment philosophies with pre-Englightenment actions of religion, "Inquisitions" simply highlights a lack of knowledge on the tri-centential political project that is classical liberalism.
-The "faction" was result of a larger social phenomenon/project led by welfare liberalism: The modification of the stuffy, stifling, superstructured, and hence creatively vapid instituions created by classical liberals. The Christians of the 80s simply absorbed some of the more extreme sentiments of the 1960s youth revolution.

[ 30 October 2005: Message edited by: blueskyboris ]

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Originally posted by blueskyboris:
One thing in this thread is clear: Moron-representitives of classical liberalism have transcended moronism by embracing profound retardation.

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So parsing this sentence I get: representatives of classical liberalism who are morons are now trying to delay progress.

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For example, anyone in Minnesota (with a certain minimum level of intellectual capacity) can attend the University of Minnesota.

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No, in fact very few people in Minnesota can go to the University, regardless of "intelligence". For one thing, there are only so many spots each year, but more importantly only the upper half of the income demographic can afford the tuition. If it were free and the eligibility were entirely based on merit, it would be a very different country.

Basically, this is all about control. Educated people are hard to control, while uneducated people are reasonably easy. But you have to have some educated people or your civilisation collapses under the weight of its own ignorance, so this education should be limited, as much as possible, to the elite, who have the most to lose by rocking the boat of power and privilege. Hence outrageous tution fees. Religion, on the other hand, makes people easy to control, as it is fundamentally about authority and obedience. To be religious about something means to be dogmatic about it, so it dovetails nicely with the erosion of critical thinking. I don't see this trend as being driven by religion, though. It is driven by fascist political elements of the elite, who want to take away the power of the lower classes to criticise their leadership. The religion is just a handy tool for these types, not an actual ideology.

J22, I have to disagree. The above statement is a horrible generalization. You should know better. History is filled with many examples were the intellectual class of various nations have anti-progressive, and supportive of loathsome regimes; and of example where religious leaders have been critical in opposing the action of the ruling classes. Plenty of well-educated people have been apologists for the status quo; and many people with a belief in a God-given rights and human dignity have opposed such people.

Liberal education, in the sense of having roots in the idea of human liberation through the activity of the mind, is paid lip service far more than it is practiced in modern universities. You know as well as I do that there are many “educated” people that are indoctrinated in to various isms, and have closed their mind to other possibilities. Dogmatism is not just the purvey of the church. The tools of critical thought are largely untaught; learning criticism is not the same thing as learning to be a critical thinker.

I doubt the US government fears university attendance will make people uncontrollable. Classicism, and elitism, along with other economic priorities are the more likely reasons for way their educational system works.

As a PS I have was having been thinking a lot lately about what constitutes an education as opposed to just being trained or indoctrinated. Is there a body of work that someone should be familiar with to be called educated; a way of thinking, certain types of tasks they should be able to perform.

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So parsing this sentence I get: representatives of classical liberalism who are morons are now trying to delay progress.

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Is that meant to be a definition of moron (someone who delays progress), a general insult aimed at classical liberals (they're morons who delay progress), or the assumption that progress follows a single path, so the progress which classical liberals think they're making is in fact a retardation?

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From the right we have the "intelligent design" creationist peddlers of balderdash who want to throw out great swaths of scientific knowledge because such knowledge conflicts with the statement, made by fiat, that the Earth is 6000 years old.

From the left we have the New Agers who think science is some kind of conspiracy to deny people control over their own lives, and the alternative-medicine people who (rightly) attack doctors and the medical profession as a bastion of privilege but (wrongly) say that the solution lies in untested remedies that have anecdotal "proof" of their effectiveness.

The problem is, science is treated as though it has to be manhandled by some kind of priesthood which you get inducted to, and so popularizers like Isaac Asimov (who has the most lucid style of exposition on chemistry, physics and biology I've ever seen) get sniffed at by scientists who have no business doing so.

An excellent example is nuclear science, which is what I do. It's treated as some kind of magical black box by way too many people and that's not right. I could probably do more to help make it accessible to people, and I should.

Isaac Asimov, incidentally, also wrote many articles on the subject of anti-science attitudes among politicians, part of which comes from the superficial treatment the media tends to give scientific problems. The problem is then exacerbated by right-wing corporate-backed Astroturf groups that create the impression that there is scientific disagreement, and journalism, steeped in the lip-service that has to be paid to equality of points of view, reports both as being equally valid.

Giving rough equality of consideration to multiple points of view may work well in the social sciences or in politics or even in economics, but when it comes to hard science, that doesn't work.

There is absolutely no dispute in chemistry, for example, that because of the laws of thermodynamics, certain processes can occur while others will not, given conditions of temperature and pressure.

Couple this with the knowledge that atomic combinations into molecules follow well-defined rules as governed by electron movement, and it is abundantly clear that the creationist nonsense that a nearly infinite number of atoms can combine an infinite number of ways without regard to the laws governing chemical behavior of atoms, is just that.

Once you factor in the laws which limit the number of ways in which atoms can combine into molecules, the mathematics shows (roughly from memory) that it only takes somewhere about 100 million years for something as complicated as DNA to form.

This is without dispute. Yet the creationists have been given way more air and press time than they ever should have been given because they play on the understandably honest belief by journalists, not necessarily scientifically trained, that "equal time" should be granted in this instance.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Are the fundies going to deny radioactive decay laws that prove this, and then turn around and accept the fact that the entire nuclear reactor industry works on principles partly governed by those radioactive decay laws? Their very selective desire to apply science is a most annoying one.

I would like to see the fundies try to explain why the ratio of the fissionable isotope of uranium to the nonfissionable isotope is on the order of 1 in 100, without invoking a simple law of radioactive decay which, by rule of thumb, says that ten half-lives equals the near extinction of a given isotope. (I can do the math for anyone interested in seeing how this works)

Science education, when properly done, promotes critical thinking just as much as a proper education in the humanities. It is vital that the sciences and the arts be promoted as vigorously as possible, for it would be a poor day when scientists can't appreciate their fellow human beings and the society they live in just as much as the theories and observations they make every day.

[ 31 October 2005: Message edited by: DrConway ]

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HARRISBURG, Pa. - A school board member who voted to include "intelligent design" in a high-school biology curriculum testified Friday that she never independently researched the concept and relied on the opinions of two fellow board members to make her decision. [...] "They said it was a scientific thing," said Geesey...

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Im not sure our genuine some of you are being when you mention critical thinking as a goal. Most of the posts are less concerned with the process of critical thinking than with the desired outcome, students who believe in evolution.

[ 31 October 2005: Message edited by: up ]

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Originally posted by DrConway:
I would like to see the fundies try to explain why the ratio of the fissionable isotope of uranium to the nonfissionable isotope is on the order of 1 in 100, without invoking a simple law of radioactive decay which, by rule of thumb, says that ten half-lives equals the near extinction of a given isotope. (I can do the math for anyone interested in seeing how this works)

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Oh, the nights I have wandered the floor boards pondering the exact same question. Well, OK, not exactly the same question . . .

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originally posted by DrConway:
. . . for it would be a poor day when scientists can't appreciate their fellow human beings and the society they live in just as much as the theories and observations they make every day.

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Originally posted by up:
If you only teach one possibilitiy, you are not teaching critical thinking. It doesn't matter if that one possibility is capitalism or evolution...

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Intelligent design has been designed with a motive to inject christian theology into secular institutions.

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I don't think that's what Cicero or Aquinas had in mind, and Paley had a different agenda.

I don't care if ID'ers want to pursue this line of inquiry at all; I just think it doesn't belong in discussions of science at the preliminary level. This is endoctrination, pure and simple, and the ID'ers should keep it out of the science classroom.

There is quite a spectrum both on the creationist side and the evolutionist side. There are Christian believers on both the creationist AND evolutionist sides. A lot of the time they end up fighting caricatures of the opposition---there is a lot of heat generated and not much light.

There is quite a spectrum of creationism.

At one end of the spectrum are the Genesis-literal "young earth" 6-day creation types such as:

"Answers in Genesis"
http://www.answersingenesis.org/

Their primary motivation is that if Genesis is considered "untrue" then any other part of the Bible---like the 10 commandments---can likewise be considered "untrue." Hence, they paint all evolutionists as deliberately working against religion---they do not credit them with being primarily scientists with little or no motivation either for or against religion.

Note that a literal 6-day creation is part of the dogma of the Seventh Day Adventist Church (according to their website) as well as a number of Baptist and Independent Evangelical Churches.

At the other end of the creationist spectrum is "Intelligent Design." It is the least dogmatic about Biblicism, and some proponents (William Dembski) even reject the label of "Creationist." They do not subscribe to 6-day creationism, nor do they reject the bulk of neo-Darwinian evolution. But they say evolution can't explain everything, and they posit a "God of the gaps" to explain what evolution can't. They say some biological mechanisms (e.g. bacterial flagellae or human eyes) are too complex and too specific in their functions to have evolved without an outside designer. Such "specific complexity" is evidence of a design intelligence.

Some websites for background reading would include

"The Discovery Institute"
http://www.discovery.org

William Dembski (of the Discovery Institute)
writings at http://www.designinference.com/
blog at http://www.uncommondescent.com

Michael Behe (at Lehigh University)
bio page at http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/behe.html
research page at http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/behe.html

From Behe's bio page:

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I am interested in the evolution of complex biochemical systems. Many molecular systems in the cell require multiple components in order to function. I have dubbed such systems "irreducibly complex." (Behe 1996b, 2001) Irreducibly complex systems appear to me to be very difficult to explain within a traditional gradualistic Darwinian framework, because the function of the system only appears when the system is essentially complete. (An illustration of the concept of irreducible complexity is the mousetrap pictured on this page, which needs all its parts to work.) Despite much general progress by science in the past half century in understanding how complex biochemical systems work, little progress has been made in explaining how such systems arise in a Darwinian fashion. I have proposed that a better explanation is that such systems were deliberately designed by an intelligent agent. (Behe 1996b, 2001) The proposal of intelligent design has proven to be extremely controversial, both in the scientific community (for example, see Brumfel, G. 2005. Nature 434:1062‑1065) and in the general news media. (Behe 1996a, 1999, 2005) My current work involves: 1) educating various groups to overcome mistaken ideas of what exactly intelligent design entails, so that they can make informed judgments on whether they think it is a plausible hypothesis; and 2) trying to establish a reasoned way to determine a rough dividing line between design and non-design in biochemical systems.

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On the non-Creationist side, there are a number of "belivers" in Christianity and other religions who nonetheless do not formally subscribe to ID or any other type of creationism, and are "fully scientific" in their approach.

In that camp, I would include

Stephen M. Barr, Particle Physicist at the Bartol Institute of the University of Delaware
Research bio at http://www.bartol.udel.edu/facstaff/briefbios1.html#barr
Article in "First Things" magazine
http://tinyurl.com/64fyv

Bro. Guy Consolmagno S.J.
Vatican Astronomer
U of Arizona bio
http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/GConsolmagno.html
Interview with Astrobiology magazine at
http://tinyurl.com/73ozt

These tend to reject all creationist claims, even the relatively mild ID ones, as being outside the realm of science to even discern. Science is a tool to examine the natural world---it cannot be used to examine the supernatural world.

Some scientists who are also believers are can be at the same time quite anti-ID and anti-creationist.

And then there are people who, like Darwin himself, find evolution to be an argument against the existence of God and are therefore atheist or agnostic. Some of them are not only anti-creationist but also anti-religious. Some examples:

Richard Dawkins
hompage http://tinyurl.com/5hn9k
Book "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a World Without Design"
Amazon page: http://tinyurl.com/753nb
Book "A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love"
Amazon page: http://tinyurl.com/78p27

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Washington -- A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teen-agers could encourage sexual activity.

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It may have been brutal to you, but it serves the purpose. Critical thinking entails a process of examining the evidence before you to come up with reasonnable theories to explain what's going on.

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I think it is more than this. Critical thinking necessarily entails evaluation. which is why the teleological argument needs to be in the classroom.

I'm only talking about science.

[ 01 November 2005: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

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Nothing in science, by itself, requires positing the existence of God.

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You are quite correct. Theology must not encroach on science's territory. They are separate fields of study.

And it doesn't require positing the non-existence of God either, which some (like Richard Dawkins in my link above) do. In that case, science encroaches on theology's territory.

Science examines the mechanisms of the material world and how these mechanisms function. It doesn't say anything, one way or the other, about the designer or the purpose of the mechanism.

The teleological question is a valid one. But it should not be discussed (except perhaps in passing) in the science classroom, as the Intelligent Design folks propose. Nor in the theology classroom, as the literal-Genesis types propose.

It is bad theology, as well as bad science, to try to make science conform to Bible.

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Originally posted by up:
I think it is more than this. Critical thinking necessarily entails evaluation. which is why the teleological argument needs to be in the classroom...

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Intelligent design claims to describe both the origins of life, and how it became what it is now. In this theory, evolution could be the mechanism of whichever deity you subscribe to.

Whether you believe that life originated from God, or through some natural mechanism, modern knowledge of genetics and how DNA is altered over time should stand on it's own as fact. The accumulation of genetic mutations over time is undeniable, and still on-going even amongst humans (for example, sickle-cell anemia). There's no reason to believe that given enough time, the mutations would accumulate until what exists bears only passing resemblance to what it once had been.

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Originally posted by up:

I think it is more than this. Critical thinking necessarily entails evaluation. which is why the teleological argument needs to be in the classroom.

You cant just say, weve done the critical thinking for you and this is the result. Thats absolutely not critical thinking.

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It seems to me that by this argument, absolutely everything should be in every classroom, because there's no grounds for denying or discriminating between any pieces of information and whether and how they apply to any subject.
Setting a curriculum is absolutely about doing some critical thinking, and categorization, for the students. There's no way around it. You shouldn't deny them the opportunity to go do broader reading on whatever they feel like. But if you don't winnow out some of the chaff, you're basically asking them to recreate human knowledge from scratch by themselves. Makes it hard for them to pull a Newton and stand on the shoulders of giants. Teaching is about introducing students to the giants they can stand on. There's certainly a balance there--you want to try to make sure you aren't saying "Thou shalt stand on this giant and no other--ignore these other towering figures!" But that does not imply an obligation to equally present all the myriad bugs claiming to be giants and fool them into thinking they're up there and not just standing on a squashed bug.

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In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

and

The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)

snip

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray harder.

Bush's speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic appeal: ''For all Americans, these years in our history will always stand apart,'' he said. ''You know, there are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time that needs -- when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation.''

The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge -- his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.

Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.

''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. ''Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.''

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...Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals. Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict: suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all along. "This is not who we are," we realized inwardly, in revulsion at our own long bender.

So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant - no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word "treachery". The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do nothing right. ...

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:

It seems to me that by this argument, absolutely everything should be in every classroom, because there's no grounds for denying or discriminating between any pieces of information and whether and how they apply to any subject.
Setting a curriculum is absolutely about doing some critical thinking, and categorization, for the students. There's no way around it. You shouldn't deny them the opportunity to go do broader reading on whatever they feel like. But if you don't winnow out some of the chaff, you're basically asking them to recreate human knowledge from scratch by themselves. Makes it hard for them to pull a Newton and stand on the shoulders of giants. Teaching is about introducing students to the giants they can stand on. There's certainly a balance there--you want to try to make sure you aren't saying "Thou shalt stand on this giant and no other--ignore these other towering figures!" But that does not imply an obligation to equally present all the myriad bugs claiming to be giants and fool them into thinking they're up there and not just standing on a squashed bug.

Sometimes, you'll make a mistake. Pedagogy often does. But the answer is not to abdicate pedagogical responsibilities because one politically connected group of "theorists" complain that every criterion available shuts them out, so we have to stop making judgments entirely for their benefit.

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Originally posted by NWOntarian:
...Intelligent design claims to describe both the origins of life, and how it became what it is now. In this theory, evolution could be the mechanism of whichever deity you subscribe to.

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Problem is, the ID set don't believe in evolution of any sort. That was the whole argement of Michael Behe, irredicible complexity.

Hostile to 'science' in general? No. It takes science to develop the technology to produce cruise missiles, silicone chips, space stations, vaccines, artificial hearts, purple gummy bears, Walmart delivery systems, etc.

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Hostile to one aspect of science: evolution? Yes, in a growing chunk of the population.

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Originally posted by Policywonk:

The Republicans in particular are not so much hostile to science but subverting it for short term gain. Most egregious is their rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming.

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There is scientific consensus on the fact that global temperatures are up a couple of degrees but there is no scientific consensus as to the causes of that change. Prior to humans having any impact on global temperatures, climate and temperatures varied widely over time (e.g., the desert of western South Dakota was once a jungle; Iowa used to be under an ocean).

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Originally posted by tallyho:
The United States is a big place and there are all manners of opinion on evolution, etc.

Hostile to 'science' in general? No. It takes science to develop the technology to produce cruise missiles, silicone chips, space stations, vaccines, artificial hearts, purple gummy bears, Walmart delivery systems, etc.

Hostile to one aspect of science: evolution? Yes, in a growing chunk of the population.

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There's science and there's technology. I understand that it's hard to separate the two now that technology is so science dependent, but they are still two different fields.

People accept technology (partly because they have no choice), but for the most part are ignorant of the science that makes the technology possible.

As slumberjack pointed out, you can't be opposed to just part of science. Science is as much a method as it is anything, and all science depends on the use of that method of discovery.

It is really the scientific method they're oppposed to, because it has a way of exposing falsifiers and fakers.

Science is also much more integrated today than it was in ages past. Evolution has to match up with biology, plate tectonics, chemistry, physics, geography, etc, or it doesn't make any sense. If evolution is not true, then a whole bunch of other stuff is not true.

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Originally posted by Cougyr:

When we have intelligent leadership in all things, the troglodytes are kept on a tight leash. Unfortunately, GW Bush cut the leash.

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Originally posted by Sven:
There is scientific consensus on the fact that global temperatures are up a couple of degrees but there is no scientific consensus as to the causes of that change. Prior to humans having any impact on global temperatures, climate and temperatures varied widely over time (e.g., the desert of western South Dakota was once a jungle; Iowa used to be under an ocean).

So, yeah, it is ignorant to say there is no "global warming" but there isn't such a consensus regarding the causes.

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RealClimate explanation:

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...In summary, we know that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is entirely caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation because many independent observations show that the carbon content has also increased in both the oceans and the land biosphere (after deforestation). If the oceans or land had contributed to the rise in atmospheric CO2, they would hold less carbon. Their response to warming may be real, but it is less than their response to increasing CO2 and other climate changes for the moment...

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An earlier RealClimate article on the topic.

IPCC report; showing the consensus opinion:

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...Before the Industrial Era, circa 1750, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration was 280 ± 10 ppm for several thousand years. It has risen continuously since then, reaching 367 ppm in 1999.

The present atmospheric CO2 concentration has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years, and likely not during the past 20 million years. The rate of increase over the past century is unprecedented, at least during the past 20,000 years.

The present atmospheric CO2 increase is caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2. About three-quarters of these emissions are due to fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel burning (plus a small contribution from cement production) released on average 5.4 ± 0.3 PgC/yr during 1980 to 1989, and 6.3 ± 0.4 PgC/yr during 1990 to 1999. Land use change is responsible for the rest of the emissions...

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DOVER, Pa., AP -- Voters came down hard Tuesday on school board members who backed a statement on intelligent design being read in biology class, ousting eight Republicans and replacing them with Democrats who want the concept stripped from the science curriculum.

The election unfolded amid a landmark federal trial involving the Dover public schools and the question of whether intelligent design promotes the Bible's view of creation. Eight Dover families sued, saying it violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Dover's school board adopted a policy in October 2004 that requires ninth-graders to hear a prepared statement about intelligent design before learning about evolution in biology class.

Eight of the nine school board members were up for election Tuesday. They were challenged by a slate of Democrats who argued that science class was not the appropriate forum for teaching intelligent design.

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...The board of Dover Area School District in south-central Pennsylvania lost eight of its nine incumbents in an upset election that surprised even the challengers, who had been hoping for a bare majority to take control of the board.

The new board, which includes teachers, opposed the incumbents' policy of including intelligent design in science classes...

...Bryan Rehm, one of the winning board members and a former teacher at Dover High School, said the new board will hold a public meeting to decide the precise future of the policy. He said intelligent design will no longer be a part of the science curriculum, regardless of how the court rules...

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