Equal Time For What?

Have you been watching Cosmos?

It's a reboot of sorts of the Carl Sagan series originally broadcast in 1980.

So far the host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, has talked about how old the age of the universe is (13 billion years or so) and the truth about the theory evolution (uh-oh).  Both of which have gotten him into trouble with the defiant, faith-based anti-science folks among us.  Tyson actually said, "The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact."

From Mother Jones:

In the first episode of Cosmos, titled "Standing Up in the Milky Way," Tyson dons shades just before witnessing the Big Bang. You know, the start of everything. Some creationists, though, don't like the Big Bang; at Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis, a critique of Cosmos asserts that "the big bang model is unable to explain many scientific observations, but this is of course not mentioned."

At that link, we find a criticism of the now-famous saying of Sagan's, that "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."  Uh-oh.  That's a problem.  Why?  Here's why:

It is denial of the supernatural, saying the only thing that exists is the physical world, the natural world. But to say that with any certainty Sagan had to get outside the physical universe and see that the physical universe is all that there is. And he would have had to do that in eternity past and in eternity future in order to say that. If he could really see that, then he would be god. It’s a very bold, metaphysical statement. It’s an assertion. But it’s not science. It’s not a scientific statement.

The only thing scientists have physical evidence for is the physical world.  So unless it's "balanced" with stories of some other world (which by definition would leave no physical evidence for scientists to study) any purely physical assertion of a purely physical universe is biased.

And for that, they're demanding equal time (or at the very least some mention that their non-science is in some what science):

[S]ome creationists believe the show lacks balance because it doesn't offer equal airtime to religious fundamentalists.

"Do they ever give a creationist any time?"

"Creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them, they wouldn’t even consider us plausible at all." (Via The Janet Mefferd Show)

There's a reason creationists aren't considered plausible on a science program: it isn't science.

Just saying it is, doesn't make it so (this should be a note to all my friends at the Trib who continue to assert - without any plausible evidence - that Climate Science isn't settled.  Just saying it isn't doesn't mean it isn't).

I'll let Tyson explain why creationists won't get be treated with any sort of scientific plausibility in Science and why "equal time" is a bad idea for science: 

"I think the media has to sort of come out of this ethos that I think was in principle a good one, but doesn't really apply in science. The ethos was, whatever story you give, you have to give the opposing view, and then you can be viewed as balanced," Tyson said, adding, "you don't talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let's give equal time to the flat-earthers."

Did I ever tell you that he and I share a birthday?

Springboro Ohio, Creationism and the Tea Party Dogwhistles

We'll start here, at Fox News:

A proposal by an Ohio school district to add creationism to a list of controversial topics deemed appropriate for classroom discussion has ignited a debate over the separation of church and state among parents and a civil rights group.

The Springboro Board of Education took comments on the proposal at a meeting Thursday night attended by parents, students and teachers. Some parents urged the board to abandon the plan, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio sent a letter to the board, saying the policy would violate the separation of church and state.

"Basically they would be teaching creationism to counteract the teaching of evolution," ACLU spokesman Nick Worner said Friday. "Anytime that you promote or teach the beliefs of one religion over all other religions or beliefs in a public school classroom, that's a problem."

And Fox later gives us some details:

According to the school district website, "evolution/creation," ''pro-life/abortion," contraception/abstinence, legalization of drugs, gun rights, and global warming would be among the topics added to a list of "controversial issues."

Many "areas of study involve issues on which differing positions are held by individuals or groups," and all sides of an issue should be explored "fully and fairly," the proposal says.

Remember the list of topics in that first paragraph. It'll become more important later.  The ACLU of Ohio sent a letter to the Springboro Board of Education outlining the constitutional issues surrounding the proposals - actually there are two policy changes.  One for policy 8800 and the other for policy 2240.  It is the second, Policy 2240, that dabbles in creationism.

My first question was the context of where these "controversial issues" would be discussed.  If it was in a "social studies" or "contemporary issues" class, then what's the problem?  As long as the facts are presented as facts (evolution=science, creationism=religion) then what's the problem?

It's how the board fails to limit the discussion in that way, is the problem.  From the ACLU letter:

This policy appears to explicitly permit the teaching of creationism because "evolution" is on the "controversial issues" list and equal facts for the opposing viewpoint means classroom time spent on the religious theory of intelligent design (or creation science). It has been firmly established that this practice is unconstitutional, in violation of the Establishment Clause.

The Supreme Court of the United States has unequivocally held that so-called "balanced treatment" laws and policies which gave equal class time to evolution and creationism were unconstitutional because they served no secular purpose and instead had a primary purpose of advancing a particular religious viewpoint.

Now here's the text from Policy 2240:

The role of the teacher in the presentation o f assigned issues is vitally important. All sides of the issue should be given to the students in a dispassionate manner. The goal is for the students to be taught to think clearly on all matters of importance, and to make decisions in the light of all the material that has been presented or can be researched on the issues.

Giving sympathetic "science" teachers the room to do the "both sides" of the "teaching the controversy" thing.

But there's another point that Fox left out.  Here's the complete text of the "controversial issues" from the policy:

For purposes of this policy, controversial issues include: religion when not used in a historical or factual context , sex education, legalization of drugs, evolution/creation, pro-life/abortion, contraception/abstinence, conservatism/liberalism, politics, gun rights, global warming and climate change, UN Agenda 21 and sustainable development, and any other topic on which opposing points of view have been promulgated by responsible opinion and/or likely to arouse both support and opposition in the community.[Emphasis in original.]

There's a dogwhistle in there, signaling to Springboro's Tea Party element. Did you see it?

It's the UN Agenda 21.  And to the folks at crazie central (aka World Net Daily) it's:

...a 40-chapter U.N. program to introduce fascism worldwide in the guise of environmental regulation.

Confusing, until you take a look at the last time this happened in Springboro:

Kelly Kohls, who was elected in Springboro on a platform of fiscal responsibility two years ago, requested last week the district’s curriculum director look into ways of providing “supplemental” instruction dealing with creationism. Fellow member, Scott Anderson, who was elected with Kohls when the district was struggling financially, supports his colleague’s idea.

And:

Kohls is the head of the Warren County Tea Party. Although she said her desire to teach creationism is not directly related to the emerging political movement, it’s not inconsistent with Tea Party ideals.

“My input on creationism has everything with me being a parent and not a member of the Tea Party,” she said. “We are motivated people who want to change the course of this country. Eliminating God from our public lives I think is a mistake and is why we have gone in the direction of spending beyond our means.”

Of course Kelly Kohls is still on the Board.

Oh, Good Lord!

From today's P-G we find this distressing assessment of our nation's educational system.

After framing the issue with a story of a young Duquesne student who received what she believed was an inadequate secondary school science education, David Templeton writes:

Her experience represents the ill-kept secret about public school biology classrooms nationwide -- that evolution often isn't taught robustly, if at all. Faith-based belief in creationism and intelligent design continues to be discussed and even openly taught in public school classrooms, despite state curriculum standards.

What follows is foul, odious and repulsive:

"Sometimes students honestly look me in the eye and ask what do I think? I tell them that I personally hold the Bible as the source of truth," said Joe Sohmer, who teaches chemistry at the Altoona Area High School. The topic arises, he said, when he teaches radiocarbon dating, with that method often concluding archeological finds to be older than 10,000 years, which he says is the Bible-based age of Earth. "I tell them that I don't think [radiocarbon dating] is as valid as the textbook says it is, noting other scientific problems with the dating method.

We've dealt with radiocarbon dating before.  Here's what I wrote back then:

[Radiocarbon dating is] a method of dating the age of once living tissue based on the rate of decay for an isotope of carbon (namely carbon-14). Isotopes, by the way, are atoms of the same element (hydrogen, uranium, and so on) that differ in their atomic weights because they have a different number of neutrons in their respective nuclei. Carbon-13 has, for instance, 7 neutrons and 6 protons in its nucleus while carbon-14 has 8 neutrons and 6 protons in its nucleus (7+6=13 and 8+6=14, get it?).

Science tells us that carbon-14 is very unstable and decays into an isotope of nitrogen at a known rate. It's formed constantly in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays interact with some of the nitrogen up there and filters down into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide where it enters the food chain (from CO2 to photosynthesis to animals). When something is alive the amount of carbon-14 in its system more or less matches the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. But once that thing dies, no more carbon-14 is added and the carbon-14 that remains begins its decay into nitrogen.

In a nutshell, by knowing the rate at which carbon-14 decays and knowing how much is left in the once living tissue, scientists can pretty accurately estimate when that thing died.

By the way for his work in first developing the science of radiocarbon dating, Willard Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.

Wow, a Nobel Prize.  That must mean that a lot of very smart people looked over the process for a long time and found it very solid and very important.  So given that, I think it's completely possible that some high school chemistry teacher from Altoona, Pennsylvania has enough sound science to overturn their 53 year old error.

But there's more from Mr Sohmer:

"Kids ask all kinds of personal questions and that's one I don't shy away from," he said. "It doesn't in any way disrupt the educational process. I'm entitled to my beliefs as much as the evolutionist is."

Which does nothing but remind me of something Isaac Asimov wrote in 1980:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

We should remember that just because ignorance is Bible-based, doesn't mean it isn't ignorance.  In order to reject (as Joe Sohmer does) the science of radiocarbon dating one has to also reject such large tracts of physics (for example the science of radioactive decay) that there's little left of the science.  No matter how much he wants to believe it, the evidence overwhelmingly supports radiocarbon dating.  It's right, he's wrong and he's mistreating his students by leading them to doubt it.  That the Altoona school district is, in Mr. Sohmer's words, "comfortable with his [teaching] methods" is an indictment of their own tolerance of Bible-based anti-intellectualism.

Templeton points out the danger of that:

The U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts have ruled time and again that teaching creationism in public schools violates the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which often is referred to as separation of church and state: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Those cases include Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in York County, which involved the district's decision to include intelligent design in the curriculum as an alternative theory to evolution. The 2005 federal court ruling said intelligent design -- the argument that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause -- and creationism were one and the same religious principle that couldn't be taught in public schools.

The school district's legal fees topped $1 million.

Regardless of the court decisions, creationism continues to find an audience in public schools, limiting students' education in one of biology's fundamental principles.

If you're curious to read it, please check out Kitmiller v Dover here.  Judge Jones conclusion starts this way:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

Templeton's piece is a good read. The only problem I have is found in this sentence:

Similar debate is occurring over the Big Bang theory, climate change and other controversial ideas of science.

And with it, unfortunately, he's giving rhetorical cover to the anti-intellectual anti-science folks everywhere.  The Big Bang and climate change are "controversial" only because those whose think their ignorance is just as good as someone else's knowledge have been shouting it from their pulpits sacred and secular for years.

With any honest assessment of the evidence, such "controversies" evaporate all too quickly.

Teaching anything but science in a public school science class is not only unconstitutional but it's damaging to our childten and the society in general.  I'll give Bill Nye the last word: