Here, Keith Olbermann brings Sarah Palin into direct competition with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams over the role of religion in government. Guess who wins...
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Liberty University does it again
PZ Myers at Pharyngula has alerted us to the fact that Liberty University's commencement speaker this spring will be Glenn Beck. I'm not certain whether this constitutes educational malpractice, as I wrote about last month, but it can't be a good thing for LU's students.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Sucking the fun out of language
Whenever you say you’re a physicist, there’s a certain fraction of people who immediately go, “Oh, I hated physics in high school.” That’s because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams. One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we’ve taken this incredibly interesting subject — how the universe works — and made it boring.My impression, after teaching linguistics for over twenty years, is that this pretty much applies to the study of language as well. People spend years in the public education system having the fun and wonder of language sucked out of them by "language arts," "English," and "English composition" teachers. These teachers do this by focusing on things that really have little to do with language, such as spelling, punctuation, "correct" grammar, and so on. The result is that when they arrive at college, students have been so thoroughly mystified (in the Marxist sense) about the nature of language that they have real problems approaching the subject from the perspective of scientific linguistics.
Here are a few ways that this mystification manifests itself:
- Confusion of language with writing. We live in a hyperliterate society. So, for most of their school careers, what students learn about "language" is really about the writing system. They carry this training into linguistics by insisting on referring to symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), such as [p] and [a], as "letters." This leads them to say that the "first letter" in the English word pot ([pʰɑt] in IPA) is aspirated. For some, taking points off never helps.
- Confusion about parts of speech. The definite and indefinite determiners (the, a) are "adjectives"; the my in my homework is a "possessive adjective" (actually, it's also a determiner); etc.
- Confusion of grammar with social rules. The classic example here is, of course, the "don't use double negatives" rule, which is a rule about social acceptability, like not farting in public, and has absolutely nothing to do with English grammar as constructed by linguists.
- Confusion about the meaning of linguistic diversity. Language arts programs focus on creating unity out of the natural diversity of human language by molding students into producers of some idealized, homogenized version of "standard" English. Instead of seeing diversity as one aspect of human creativity, students come to believe that non-standard usage results from lack of education, mental deficiency, laziness, etc.
One might conclude that the function of language arts education (perhaps most education) is the assembly-line production of interchangeable, unimaginative, and obedient carbon units, prepared to serve a predatory capitalist system that works best when its victims think that important elements of their world, like language, cannot be investigated and interpreted except by the standards of the Masters.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Where the kleptobureaucrats rule: an update
On February 28 I posted about a friend and colleague who taught a short-term course during the Christmas recess for which his university refused to pay him. The university's stated reason for withholding pay was that, since only two students registered for the course, the course should have been canceled.
My friend, realizing at the time that having only two students enrolled might jeopardize the course, tried repeatedly to contact his Dean's office and get some official word as to whether the class would run or not. However, it was Christmas break, and he was unable to get a response, and so he went ahead and taught the course. At the end, the course was still listed on the university's web site, my friend posted grades for the students, and they got their three credits from the university. He waited to be paid, but no pay (a mere $1200) was forthcoming. My friend pursued his case onward and upward until, finally, one of the highest administrators at the university actually argued, over the phone, that my friend should have "camped out" at the Dean's office back before the start of the class.
I learned today that the university administration has finally agreed to pay my friend. But instead of the almost laughably low $1200 he had been promised, they're going to give him $600. They actually sent him a memo with the $1200 crossed out and $600 written in by hand! So, basically, the university stole what they consider to be one-half the value of my friend's labor. And that brings me to the real purpose of this post: The university in question is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
One might be tempted to see this situation as some kind of anomaly, but it isn't. This is Louisiana, home of the "big easy." Consider the news that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal blackmailed his Democratic Attorney General into supporting the round of totally mindless and morally bankrupt lawsuits challenging the legality of President Obama's recently passed Affordable Care Act. That's right, blackmailed: Jindal told AG Buddy Caldwell that if he joined in the lawsuit, his employees would be immune from the budget cuts Jindal wants to use to reduce the size of state government. This earned Jindal "Worst Person in the World" for Tuesday, April 6:
No, these aren't anomalies; these are manifestations of a dysfunctional culture.
My friend, realizing at the time that having only two students enrolled might jeopardize the course, tried repeatedly to contact his Dean's office and get some official word as to whether the class would run or not. However, it was Christmas break, and he was unable to get a response, and so he went ahead and taught the course. At the end, the course was still listed on the university's web site, my friend posted grades for the students, and they got their three credits from the university. He waited to be paid, but no pay (a mere $1200) was forthcoming. My friend pursued his case onward and upward until, finally, one of the highest administrators at the university actually argued, over the phone, that my friend should have "camped out" at the Dean's office back before the start of the class.
I learned today that the university administration has finally agreed to pay my friend. But instead of the almost laughably low $1200 he had been promised, they're going to give him $600. They actually sent him a memo with the $1200 crossed out and $600 written in by hand! So, basically, the university stole what they consider to be one-half the value of my friend's labor. And that brings me to the real purpose of this post: The university in question is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
One might be tempted to see this situation as some kind of anomaly, but it isn't. This is Louisiana, home of the "big easy." Consider the news that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal blackmailed his Democratic Attorney General into supporting the round of totally mindless and morally bankrupt lawsuits challenging the legality of President Obama's recently passed Affordable Care Act. That's right, blackmailed: Jindal told AG Buddy Caldwell that if he joined in the lawsuit, his employees would be immune from the budget cuts Jindal wants to use to reduce the size of state government. This earned Jindal "Worst Person in the World" for Tuesday, April 6:
No, these aren't anomalies; these are manifestations of a dysfunctional culture.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The illusion of difference
Racialist "scientists" sometimes defend their ideas about the reality of human races by invoking the "it's so obvious" argument. Look at the photo below, they might say, and you can tell immediately which person has African ancestry and which has European ancestry:
And of course it is pretty obvious that, statistically speaking, the Reverend Gary Davis, on the left, is more likely to have recent African ancestors, while the little girl on the right is more likely to have recent European ancestry. It was sudden confrontations with people who looked and behaved very different from themselves that led Europeans to develop their ideas about "racial" differences. In the age of European exploration and conquest, Europeans for the first time boarded sailing vessels, sailed away from people who were familiar, and after long sea voyages were suddenly faced with people who were maximally unfamiliar. This experience of human diversity led to Linnaeus's taxonomic classification of humans into four distinct groups and, a few years later, Blumenbach's elaboration of five categories.
The problem, as we now know, is that the nature of biological variation does not favor the division of species into discrete subcategories (subspecies, or races). Biological traits display clinal distribution, as shown by the gradual increase in frequency of the B blood type allele as we move east across Eurasia.
The same is true for traits that we think of as diagnostic of human "races," such as skin color. There is no clear division between "black" and "white" skin colors; instead, skin color varies clinally with skin tending to be darker near the Equator and gradually becoming lighter in populations that are located farther and farther from the Equator.
We can get an idea of how this looks on actual people by examining portraits from (left to right) Scandinavia, Spain, Morocco, and Nigeria.
The concept of "races" as discrete categories is as bogus for humans as it is for any other wide-spread species, such as Puma concolor (a.k.a. cougar, mountain lion, panther, etc.). This is a fact that is increasingly accepted by biologists, but still denied by race-affirmers like J. Philippe Rushton, who divides humans into three categories: mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid and then attributes different behavioral traits to these groups. But more about this in a future post.
And of course it is pretty obvious that, statistically speaking, the Reverend Gary Davis, on the left, is more likely to have recent African ancestors, while the little girl on the right is more likely to have recent European ancestry. It was sudden confrontations with people who looked and behaved very different from themselves that led Europeans to develop their ideas about "racial" differences. In the age of European exploration and conquest, Europeans for the first time boarded sailing vessels, sailed away from people who were familiar, and after long sea voyages were suddenly faced with people who were maximally unfamiliar. This experience of human diversity led to Linnaeus's taxonomic classification of humans into four distinct groups and, a few years later, Blumenbach's elaboration of five categories.
The problem, as we now know, is that the nature of biological variation does not favor the division of species into discrete subcategories (subspecies, or races). Biological traits display clinal distribution, as shown by the gradual increase in frequency of the B blood type allele as we move east across Eurasia.
We can get an idea of how this looks on actual people by examining portraits from (left to right) Scandinavia, Spain, Morocco, and Nigeria.
The concept of "races" as discrete categories is as bogus for humans as it is for any other wide-spread species, such as Puma concolor (a.k.a. cougar, mountain lion, panther, etc.). This is a fact that is increasingly accepted by biologists, but still denied by race-affirmers like J. Philippe Rushton, who divides humans into three categories: mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid and then attributes different behavioral traits to these groups. But more about this in a future post.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Educational malpractice at Liberty University
The internet news site Common Dreams carried an article recently about a group of students from Liberty University visiting the Smithsonian Institution. Students at LU are encouraged to fit natural history, and especially biological evolution, into the fantasy religion-based creationist biblical literalism advocated by the school's founder, the late fundamentalist evangelist Jerry Falwell. And, as an Indonesian fundamentalist Islamic saying goes, "when faith and facts conflict, faith wins."
Illustrating how faith wins over facts, LU students scoffed at the Smithsonian's model of a 210 million year old rat-sized creature hypothesized to be the common ancestor of all mammals. First, there's no way a ratty-looking thing could ever become a human being. Second, the 210 million year window for this to happen violates the young earth creationism taught at LU, which is based on arithmetical gymnastics of Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) who calculated that God created Everything on October 23, 4004 BC, making the Earth only around 6,000 years old.
Further reinforcing the triumph of faith over facts, Marcus Ross, an Assistant Professor of Geology at LU, made this comment about Adam and Eve:
"I feel they were real people, they were the first people."
OK, then. But there's a problem. "I feel..." is not a legitimate way to introduce a scientific proposition. "The evidence suggests..." would be more appropriate. But for these folks, evidence is not required. In fact, evidence that conflicts with "faith," which really means unquestioning obedience, is ignored, disparaged, ridiculed, tossed aside. It doesn't matter that the evidence suggests that there really never was, at any single point in time, a "first woman" or "first man." When evidence conflicts with faith, faith wins.
Anyway, I was intrigued by this article, so I went online to look for course descriptions at Liberty University. After all, LU is accredited by the same agency as my school, the University of North Florida. I found a course called History of Life, and here are the description and "rationale" for that course:
COURSE DESCRIPTIONWow. The "History of Life" is essentially a course designed to show students how to ignore almost everything we know about the history of life in favor of a rambling collection of myths written down by some Middle Eastern nomads centuries before anyone even knew that life on Earth is carbon-based. And just to drive the point home, here are the course's "measurable learning outcomes" (at least they have the academic assessment jargon down pat):
An interdisciplinary study of the origin and history of life in the universe. Faculty of the Center for Creation Studies will draw from science, religion, history, and philosophy in presenting the evidence and arguments for creation and against evolution. This course is required for all Liberty students.
RATIONALE
This course is designed to instill in our students a clear understanding of the relationship between science and Scripture as it pertains to the study of origins. In particular, it is designed to help students develop a clear and consistent Biblical creationist worldview and defend it.
A. Students should be able to discuss and contrast creation science and evolution worldviews.B. Students should be able to discuss the creation science view from Biblical accounts and rebut creation compromise views.C. Students should be able to discuss the theories of natural selection and evolution.D. Students should be able to discuss scientific evidences in support of a recent creation.E. Students should be able to discuss the evidence of the fossil record and its implications of origins.F. Students should be able to discuss evidence for the unique creation of man.G. Students should be able to discuss evidence for creation using concepts such as irreducible complexity.H. Students should be able to discuss the importance of the Biblical creation message in understanding major doctrines and application for personal evangelism.
Why is this "educational malpractice," as I suggested in the title of this post? It's malpractice because this university's faculty are lying to their students, just as egregiously as if, in an astronomy class, they taught them that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And, by the way, this would be true even if the lies were not based on religious dogma.
The empirical, objectively valid facts about the history of life on Earth, the falsifiable hypotheses that scientists create to describe and explain those facts, and the theories that result when related unfalsified hypotheses converge on the explanation of some set of those facts, cannot be evaluated by what's in the Bible, any more than they can be evaluated by what's in Lord of the Rings.
I believe that the accrediting agency should put Liberty University's program in biology on probation until those who teach in that program stop lying to their students.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Florida Governor Charlie Crist does not like atheists!
And if you want to get an idea of how much he doesn't like them, read this personal account by one who tried to talk to him. (Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula.)
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