Former President Jimmy Carter said the state school superintendent's efforts to remove references to evolution from science curriculum standards will handicap students and damage Georgia's reputation."As a Christian, a trained engineer and scientist, and a professor at Emory University, I am embarrassed by Superintendent Kathy Cox's attempt to censor and distort the education of Georgia's students," the former president declared.
So what was Superintendent Cox up to?
State Schools Superintendent Kathy Cox said she removed references to evolution from the proposed biology curriculum because it is "a buzzword that causes a lot of negative reaction."Cox, fielding questions at a news conference Thursday, defended her decision to remove the word "evolution" from the curriculum. She said it was not designed to appease Georgians who have religious conflicts with the scientific theory that all living things evolved from common ancestry.
"This wasn't so much a religion vs. science, politics kind of issue," Cox said. "This was an issue of how do we ensure that our kids are getting a quality science education in every classroom across the state."
Not by giving people who are completely ignorant of biology and science power over the biology curriculum, madame. Cox is "a former social studies teacher". Unsurprisingly, she is keen on "intelligent design".
"That is a scientific theory," she said. "Now people say, 'Oh, those folks, they're kook scientists.' But it does have scientists, rather than theologians, talking about other ways we may have come into being."
Uh huh. I started out this morning with a visit to Coffee Grounds, which twigged me to the articles above. Quite by coincidence a later visit to the Loom uncovered a discussion of related shenanigans in Minnesota. From the trackback function of that post I was introduced to the interesting Pharyngula, who had a link to a very nice, er, synopsis of intelligent design theory. As the author of the synopsis states, regarding his footnotes, "[i]f you feel that this would detract from the humor, then feel free to skip it". (I'd say it's worth your while to follow the links, if you are unfamiliar with the subject.) I don't think Cox would split a gut, though.
This didn't end my morning meanderings off on several different more or less related tangents, but, ach!, look at the time - other duties call. Bore ya later...
I was browsing about earlier and came upon another phrase that I've long thought should be added to this category - "lover of truth". Noble praise when bestowed by another, and a disposition we all hope to maintain, despite our wonted, human, self-delusion - but signifying what when publicly bestowed on oneself? Not, that I have seen, any greater passion for truth than the next decent fellow's. Like the previous examples, the action marks a fatuous self-regard (with that quality's usual concomitant, boorishness, in varying degrees). Unlike the previous examples, it contains an implicit ad hominem: "You, sir, are an intellectual coward."
Anyone have a pithy phrase to describe such words? Or other examples of words that when used by others as self-descriptors scream "Run away! Run away!" to the wary interlocuter?
"[...]And these hands: did your lover
Dentition complete, though worn, central incisors shoveled,
No crowding or malocclusion, mild enamel hypoplasia.
admire their grace? I cannot see what he most
loved about you: your intelligence and wit, the soft brown
skin in its smooth contours, a laugh that rose from the heart. Your
Age at death, from uncertain causes, about thirty years, derived
From epiphysial union and cranial suture fusion.
abandoned skull has answers to all my questions, and your
extinct
thoughts hold a mystery no science of mine
will ever solve. You have taken your life
into the void. So be it." (Brian Harrison)
This reminded me of another poem that Languagehat reproduced earlier this month, about other types of treasures that are lost, and will be lost, from "abandoned skulls" - ours included. Excerpt:
"Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Sing-and singing-remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago." (Carl Sandburg)
UPDATE: Ah, I see USA Today trembles at my every editorial sneer. The intrepid Fleck, however, who alerted me, had made a screen shot of the fowl original.
Your amazon.com order #131-736-3991 has shipped From:"ship-confirm@amazon.com"(ship-confirm@amazon.com) To: moira@moirabreen.com
Not only the bogus shipping confirmation cited in the subject line, but the use of "amazon.com" in the bogus address. Couldn't Amazon, ya know, sue the crap out of these people? Please?
The afternoon may be so clear that you dare not make a sound, lest it fall in pieces. And on such a day I have seen the sky shatter like a broken goblet, and dissolve into iridescent tipsy fragments - ice crystals, falling across the face ot the sun. [from Richard E. Byrd, Alone]There was an arctic tone to the air and sky this morning. A truly splendid sun dog display, the finest I have ever seen, made me regret my lack of photographic equipment and photographic expertise. Below, the form of a small rock garden had effected, with the wind, the formation of a long graceful saharan dune of snow, while white alluvial terraces spread out from the other side of the yard. Miniature, transitory models for a geology class. (Ignore the half-buried Weber cooker and rusting charcoal-chimney plopped in the middle of the patio.)
Fortunately for comfort, the best available view of parhelia and garden was inside, through the windows in my upstairs office at home. (It was -4F outside at the time. Gratitude to Fleck is due, as he did all the driveway and sidewalk shoveling this morning.)
Now if only we got aurorae at this latitude.
In this essay I am neither endorsing nor dismissing the counter-narrative, but rather spelling it out and suggesting why it is plausible enough to warrant more public attention. It remains to be seen whether an impartial assessment of the evidence (and future research) will continue to lend support to the popular contemporary horror-story version of Tuskegee; or whether, alternatively, one will come to the conclusion that the Tuskegee project was neither racist nor in and of itself the cause of great harms. Perhaps the horror story will have to be revised and toned down because it has been too heavily influenced by post-1968 identity politics. Perhaps not - that remains to be seen.Racial justice matters, and social justice in general is a central value in our liberal democracy. But one must also remain open to the possibility that in this instance politics and generalised racial grievance have got in the way of critical analysis. That too remains to be seen, and debated. At the very least, the evidence suggests to me that in this instance the 'received wisdom' of the day deserves to be re-examined.
Don't let that "counter-narrative" phrasing put you off - it's an interesting and worthwhile essay. I was not so uninformed that I held the belief that the study subjects were deliberately infected with syphilis, but I certainly have accepted unquestioningly the prevailing "horror-story version" - I can vaguely recall becoming irate at an unrepentant old doctor who had been involved in the study, interviewed on some television special aired years ago. (The article also compels me to update corrupted or erroneous memory files re Ehrlich and salvarsan. I was under the impression that by the time of Tuskegee, the available arsenical compounds were a more effective - if not a more tolerable - remedy than Shweder's article suggests.)
Top Iowa politics source David Hogberg will no doubt have all the caucus that's fit to blog today, and should be posting final predictions from Iowa bloggers this morning. Tung Yin is also collecting data and making his own predictions before the betting window closes.
Among the Outsiders, The Dog himself will be hosting a caucus blogburst for Iowa bloggers, and is blogging up a storm on all things caucus. Just go on over and keep scrolling.
Jim Moore has been compiling a Big List of Iowa bloggers, and would particularly like to hear from any small-town or rural Iowa bloggers.
The weather is predicted to be pretty balmy tonight - around 6°F with the wind chill bringing it to -5°F, so it shouldn't be a problem.
On the other hand, I am gratified by the orientation of the kitchen doors. At this point in the year, for example, a mythological drama is visible through them at the borders of night and day. Not long after sunset Orion and his hunting hounds, icons of winter, glow through the glass. When I pad down before sunrise, Scorpius, bane of Orion and denizen of the summer night, is rising - offset to the south - in the frame that was filled by Orion at the beginning of the night. The scorpion is still half-submerged in the sea of daylight, but his heart, Antares, pulses through the shadowed luster at the surface.
I have often wondered how long ago our ancestors and their cousins began to note the patterns in the sky. Birds navigate astrally; could a chimpanzee see the "obvious" constellations? (I assume our brains make patterns out of the stars in "A-list" constellations like Scorpius and Orion, even without tutelage.) Did other hominids? With precession and all the untidy relative motion in the galaxy the forms and their import would change, but how long ago did we look up in the sky, see a familiar shape in the stars, and understand that it meant that it was time to move on, or that the herds would soon be migrating, or that the rains should be here by now? Did a Neandertal ever watch a sparkling image rise in the sky, and shudder at the memento of bitter winter to come? Or rejoice at the starry prophet of plenty and warmth?
The daughter and I were discussing Bush's space-speech on the way to Tae Kwon Do lessons yesterday. After disposing of the pragmatic issues we moved on to the dreams. She enthused about being an astronaut and walking on Mars, I owned that it was a mournful realization for me that I would never leave the earth. I added that I would die a happy woman if she were ever able to do so, or, really, if I could see the first solid attempts to light out for the territories. But never to leave home at all! The human race living in its parents' basement apartment forever. That's a melancholy notion.
UPDATE: Peter Sean Bradley remembers earlier space dreams and disappointments.
But it's all taken care of - good thing the spouse remembers the registration info, etc. The aracnet url for this site still resolves (well, duh, you're reading this, aren't you?); the DNS propogation for moirabreen.com will take a while. Apologies for any bounced email. The address given at the upper left should be functioning again soon (breenataracnetdotcom should work in the meantime).
Naturally I applaud languagehat's defense of the noble form y'all:
[...]y'all is a particularly bad example to cast stones at, since English badly needs a second-person plural form, and that's a convenient and (to my mind) attractive one. I use it frequently.
Of course. I use it all the time, myself. Ever since the demise of thou and its cases, English has been walking around immodestly with no proper second person plural. (Note to ignorant Yankees: one does not use "y'all" to address an individual.) Unfortunately, though "y'all" neatly bumps "you" into the second person singular slot and takes on its former pluralizing duties, the second person in English has not yet reinstated the second person singular formal duties of the second person plural. Hence I am still bereft of a form to distance myself from overly familiar whippersnappers and telemarketers (who invariably mispronounce my first name). By the way, to certain foreign bloggers - and some northeasterners, for that matter - who persist in believing that the use of "y'all" is a veritable scarlet syllable signifying, inter alia, ignorance, racism, theocratic sympathies, and in general, illiberal tendencies of satanic proportions, I say: screw you and your blinkered parochialism. May you spend eternity at a cocktail party in hell sweating the imaginary nuances - for a native speaker of American English, anyway - of person and purpose for "shall" and "will".
While I'm on the subject of existing usage, allow me a little aside on non-existing usage. I know that children, when they are beginning to master spoken language, speak, quite rationally, according to the logic of grammar, not "correctly". I was charmed at my daughter's constant use, when she began to speak, of the construction "amn't I?". And I had to wonder why English speakers do not say "amn't I". People tend, if they go near that interrogative construction at all, to say "aren't I", which makes no sense at all. "I are"? Feh. (Does "ain't" fit in here somewhere?) Could some linguistically-informed person enlighten me on the reasons for the absence of the logical and easily pronounce-able form "amn't I" from standard speech? I'm correct in my grammatical logic, amn't I?
Naturally I applaud languagehat's defense of the noble form y'all:
[...]y'all is a particularly bad example to cast stones at, since English badly needs a second-person plural form, and that's a convenient and (to my mind) attractive one. I use it frequently.
Of course. I use it all the time, myself. Ever since the demise of thou and its cases, English has been walking around immodestly with no proper second person plural. (Note to ignorant Yankees: one does not use "y'all" to address an individual.) Unfortunately, though "y'all" neatly bumps "you" into the second person singular slot and takes on its former pluralizing duties, the second person in English has not yet reinstated the second person singular formal duties of the second person plural. Hence I am still bereft of a form to distance myself from overly familiar whippersnappers and telemarketers (who invariably mispronounce my first name). By the way, to certain foreign bloggers - and some northeasterners, for that matter - who persist in believing that the use of "y'all" is a veritable scarlet syllable signifying, inter alia, ignorance, racism, theocratic sympathies, and in general, illiberal tendencies of satanic proportions, I say: screw you and your blinkered parochialism. May you spend eternity at a cocktail party in hell sweating the imaginary nuances - for a native speaker of American English, anyway - of person and purpose for "shall" and "will".
While I'm on the subject of existing usage, allow me a little aside on non-existing usage. I know that children, when they are beginning to master spoken language, speak, quite rationally, according to the logic of grammar, not "correctly". I was charmed at my daughter's constant use, when she began to speak, of the construction "amn't I?". And I had to wonder why English speakers do not say "amn't I". People tend, if they go near that interrogative construction at all, to say "aren't I", which makes no sense at all. "I are"? Feh. (Does "ain't" fit in here somewhere?) Could some linguistically-informed person enlighten me on the reasons for the absence of the logical and easily pronounce-able form "amn't I" from standard speech? I'm correct in my grammatical logic, amn't I?
As a consultant to Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s, Brody organized a historical workshop in which archaeologists explained that the Arctic was colonized across the Bering Straits by way of a land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska[...]:One of the workshop participants was a woman from a Cree community who was enrolled in a Ph.D. programme at a prestigious American university. She was not happy about the Bering Strait theory. She pointed out that her people, and most "Indian" people, do not believe that archaeologists know anything about the origins of human life in the Americas. The idea that people first came as immigrants from Asia was, she said, absurd. It went against all that her people knew...There had been no immigration, but an emergence...She would have nothing to do with so-called scholarship that discredited these central tenets of aboriginal oral culture.This objection broke up the workshop. Brody recalls feeling confused. Could something be true at the University of Toronto but false in Kispiox?¹
Now consider the following argument, a response to a defense of the scientists in the Kennewick case. It is an argument rarely made explicitly but is after all logically consequent to a belief in the intrinsic "Westernness" of science: human struggles to come to terms with the conclusions of science are not just historically and culturally distinct, but epistemologically incommensurable. In fact the whole exercise is fundamentally meaningless for non-Westerners (emphasis in original):
It is much more reasonable...to surmise that diverse native peoples lived the way they thought best as often as possible and therefore did not use the secular versus religious dichotomy that still dominates modern epistemological fashion. Why then should the blood and emotion of Europeans' struggles with their religious history be allowed to politcally encircle much older native stories, stories told by generations of tellers who never feared the Grand Inquisitor or felt compelled to take a stand on Darwinian theory? Indian histories were not forged in the history of Europe, and Indian understandings of our dead must not be neatly subsumed and therfore dismissed by what generations of European Americans have now learned to quite rationally oppose as religious. Indian understandings may be many things, but they are not reducible to the ongoing heritage of European Christendom. Indian ways are Indian ways. They are not the European "religion" overcome by European science and the European Enlightenment.²
Certain of my regular readers will immediately recognize in the above an attempt to obfuscate the obvious legal and philosophical analogy to the claims of Christian fundamentalists. If you've ever wondered how certain academic types manage to justify sneering at Baptists while honoring any other (non-European) spiritual belief - well, they don't manage to justify it. But this is as fine an example of an attempt to justify it as I've come across.
But let us take it at face value. It is certainly correct to say that we will not find one-to-one correspondence in cultural development and institutions. It is also true that the engagement of non-Europeans with the troubling truths of science will be an experience distinct from that of Europeans - from whose culture, after all, contemporary science evolved, and who particpated in an intellectual tradition, extant for millenia, that truth is best approached by reasoned argumentation. But to state these truisms addresses nothing and settles nothing. Whatever the difficulties of that engagement (and they can be very harsh and painful indeed), science is not culture-specific, and all must eventually come to terms with what science has to say about the world - not only because that is a natural response of thinking, curious human beings ("how do I make all I know fit together coherently?"), but because no culture is static and sealed, and truth claims will inevitably contest. To ignore this the author has to pretend not to notice that the "our" in "our dead" is actually the very thing under debate.
What we are left with is a pernicious exclusionary view that posits the scientific impulse as just one parochial cultural practice among others, not as a universal human predilection that flourishes or falters across time and space according to the condition of the cultural soil. With influences from all over the map, by the way. Science is intrinsically, parochially European? ("That crazy Hindu mathematical jive? Naught to do with us, Baldrick!") But the cultural soil that allowed science to flourish in the last few centuries was parochially European. What happens when such exclusionary tenets are given a foothold in those institutions that had marked out the neutral social space necessary for free inquiry and hence science?
The televisions and airplanes which [the Ayatollah Khomeini] depended on, it was pointed out to him, were the products of the West. Yes, he said, "these are the good things from the West. And we are not afraid to use them, and we do. We are afraid of your ideas and your customs. Which means that we fear you politically and socially."Liberal science is not, finally, a way of making things. It is a way of organizing society and a way of behaving. To defend it by pointing just to its technological success is to defend the laboratories while abandoning the social infrastructure that makes them work. In any case, most of what modern intellectuals do does not make technology; it makes knowledge. Sociology and economics do not cure cancer, nor are they much good at making predictions - but they, no less than physics and chemistry, deserve to be defended against people who want to tinker with their results or regulate them for political reasons.³
As the "televisions and airplanes" prove, there is no one who does not in at least some ways acknowledge, if only indirectly, the validity of what Rauch eloquently defends as the system of "liberal science", under which Group A cannot limit the inquiry of Group B because it finds Group B's inquiries disrespectful of its beliefs.
But what about the view from the other end of the issue? To what degree, if any, in a free society can Group B compel members of Group A to acknowledge the claims of liberal science in their personal lives? We do do this, as Rauch points out with the example of parents punished for withholding standard medical care from ill children. We are right to do this, protecting the lives and rights of children, but it's at such a point that I (and I suspect many others) begin to become uneasy. I sense that I am coming near to the proper limits of the sway of "expert opinion". I'm well aware that there are ostensibly liberal-minded people out there who go so far as to categorize any parental training of children in traditional religious belief as "child abuse", and I suspect they'd be more than happy to have the state "protecting" children from those dreadful unenlightened parents. That meddling fascist impulse is not a product of a scientific world view - and in fact it would shut down inquiry just as handily as a mullah might - but it does demonstrate that training in a scientific worldview won't necessarily rescue one from that meddling fascist impulse. I no more want "experts" ruling over our private lives, no matter how true their claims, than I want what are essentially anti-blasphemy rules limiting speech and free inquiry.
Well, that's enough incoherent rambling for New Years Day. It's actually 2 January as I push the "publish" button; I didn't trust that my brain was working well enough yesterday for this post to make any sense. But I feel just as crappy today as I did yesterday, and you're probably just as likely today to be wondering what the hell I'm going on about here. Hopefully all these themes will cohere in the days to come.
Hopefully.
Happy New Year.
(Related posts.)
1. In Adam Kuper, "The Return of the Native", Current Anthropology Volume 44, Number 3 (June 2003) 391-392.
2. Clayton W. Dumont, Jr. "The Politics of Scientific Objections to Repatriation", Wicaza Sa Review, Spring 2003, 123.
3. Jonathan Rauch, The Kindly Inquisitors.