Ready To Rumble: Texas Bible Classes Draw Reactions

Last Friday the Texas state board of education passed a measure allowing Texas high schools to teach bible classes, but did not provide guidelines for legal and illegal material. I am quite frequently wrong but this seems like an obvious disaster waiting to happen. Guidelines are very important for all class curricula, electives not withstanding. In fact, in the Spring of '09 the state board is going to be setting some interesting guidelines in the sciences classes which will effectively refute evolution by bringing in religion masked as academic freedom.

Mark Chancey, chairman of the religious studies department at Southern Methodist University offered some scathing words about the board's decision. "I predict we're headed for a constitutional train wreck. The people who suffer will be the educators and the students, and the people who will foot the bill will be us the taxpayers...the state board is sending them into a minefield without a map." Thank you Mark, that's what I've been saying about this, are there really that many people here that don't?

John Ferguson, Baptist minister, first amendment lawyer and professor at Howard Payne University in Brownwood what say you???

"It's deeply distressing," said John Ferguson, a Baptist minister, first amendment lawyer and professor at Howard Payne University in Brownwood.

State board members, who balked at establishing state standards because they might be too difficult to write, were wrong, Ferguson said. How can small school districts develop sound standards, he wondered?

"I'm not sure where these small districts with the six-man football teams in West Texas are going to come up with constitutional Bible scholars to help them craft these (standards)," Ferguson said.

The reason and rationality in this issue just came from a Baptist minister, take cover, the world may end soon.

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Those Wacky Chinese

What will they think of next? Check out this crazy skyscraper. Built to house the offices of China Central Television, the state-run media mogul of China's ruling Communist Party, this oddly shaped and eye-twisting design is slated to open before the 2008 Olympics.

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Bible Classes Ok'd in Texas Public High Schools

Uh-oh, get ready to ramp up the religious persecution and name-calling from all sides of the pew, the Texas State Board of Education gave final approval on Friday to establishing Bible classes in public high schools, "rejecting calls to draw specific teaching guidelines and warnings that it could lead to constitutional problems in the classroom."

These classes will be taught as electives (3% of schools districts offered Bible courses during the 05-06 school year according to the Texas Freedom Network) and the guidelines simply require that there will be religious neutrality and will not endorse or disfavor one religion. This of course is a very broad definition of what is and isn't allowed, leaving the door open to prejudice problems. Ed Brayton, on his trip to Netroots Nation in Austin, says he found at least one school in Texas which "has a Bible course that teaches Hamitic racism." For those of us outside the know, this is the claim that Ham was cursed by Noah and that the descendants of Ham (read: all black people) are therefore intended by God to be slaves. Technically I don't think that breaks the guidelines of promoting one religion over another, but it definitely promotes something that was supposed to be erased from our public education long ago, racism (and in the name of religion, wow these guys must have missed the "do unto others" talk in that big ol' book).

Get ready for the lawsuits to start flying. The ACLU is going to have a field day taking some naive teachers and school districts to court, and as I detailed in my posts last week concerning Louisiana's dip into the religious public education swamp someone is going to have to pay for these lawsuits. That someone will the be the taxpaying citizens of that school district, so I think it would be in the best interest of those who pay taxes to fund education to demand that strict guidelines detailing what is and is not allowed by law.

Here's one of my favorite quotes on the whole situation by Jonathan Saenz, a spokesman for the Free Market Foundation (via the Daily Texan). "It's important to remember that there's no way to guarantee that anything anyone does in a school will be constitutional...The other side is almost demanding some assurance and guarantee that nothing will happen that will be unconstitutional, and that's impossible."

You make a good point Jonathan, let's just throw out the guidelines on lethal force by police officers because it would be impossible to guarantee an officer won't cross the line into unauthorized force. What a childish argument, and one that leaves the burden of defining constitutionality with the courts, courts that cost a lot of money and will bleed dry the already suffering bank account of our state's education system.

Taken in concert with the shady practice of 11th-hour changes to the English curricula guidelines, severing ties to the National Association of State School Boards, and the upcoming vote to allow intelligent design into our state's classrooms and you have a good picture of how this state board operates. The driving motives behind these people are not the education that the students will receive or how to better prepare them for life outside of the home shelter, but simply injecting their dogmas into each and every subject they can.

Go forth and spread the good news, plant the seed and it will flourish, become fishers of men, speak to all nations of the world. Those are all from the Bible about spreading the word and works of christianity (as written by the creator himself, if you like) and nowhere does it say invade the politics and enslave the people to your beliefs. Get ready for it because it is coming.

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Vaccination and Asthma Shown to be Unlinked

Recently in the news there has been rumblings about a link between childhood immunization and asthma, which causes many parents to be concerned. Epi Wonk has written a post detailing a meta-analysis study published in the journal Pediatrics in November 2007 which found no statistical significant association between childhood vaccination and asthma.

I fully bow to Epi Wonk's writing on the subject (he is a now retired medical school professor and senior epidemiologist at the CDC) and thought I'd pass along some of his more pertinent information on the subject. Some of this information is very important, as the authors of the Pediatrics paper put it:

“It is important that researchers clarify this issue, because… the
perception that immunization causes asthma may become a significant
determinant of parents’ attitudes toward routine vaccination of their
children.”

A few important points I took away from Epi Wonk's discussion of the study. 1) The literature was scoured for randomized controlled and relevant birth-cohort studies from 1966 to March 2006. 2) To be included, each study had to meet three criteria: Directly compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children; Validated vaccination status by medical charts; Used preset criteria to define asthma.

This front-end criteria are very important for any review or meta-analysis because it will define the significance of the results received. Epi Wonk's last statement sums this up nicely. After pouring over the data and confirming the results it is important to qualify the significance of the results based on the input criteria, here's Epi:

A recent systematic literature review of high-quality studies that directly compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children, validated vaccination status by medical charts, and used preset criteria to define asthma found no association between childhood vaccination and asthma.

This is a good time to relate how the science works to the larger public community. I have been stressing the front end criteria of this study for a reason, by using these criteria the subject of the study is narrowed significantly, meaning this is not an overriding, large-scale study that was seeking to define the complete link between vaccination and asthma. This study was simply to define correlations within birth-cohort studies.

Birth-cohorts themselves are subject to a great deal of bias (something the author of the study acknowledges) and are extremely intensive in the front-end planning stages. A mini symposium on birth cohort studies published in 2002 in the journal Pediatric Respiratory Reviews examined the experience of a large, 10-year birth-cohort study conducted in Germany (Nickel R, Niggeman B, Gruber C, Kulig M, Wahn U, Lau S. Paediatric Respiratory Reviews. Sep 2002; Vol 3; Issue 3: 169-176) . The report detailed some difficulties encountered including changing nursing staff over the years which led to different bookkeeping and even patient evaluation scores. Racial differences need to be accounted for by including as many different genotypic backgrounds. The births need to be carefully selected to be evenly distributed over a 12 month period in order to account for seasonal affects. One of the largest problems is lost subjects, those who tend to not be affected by a disease will more regularly drop out of the study, pushing a bias towards those who are affected and are more likely to continue making their appointments. Interestingly enough it was found that as the personnel at the study centers changed the loss of subjects jumped significantly.

Recall bias is also an interesting phenomenon within studies where those affected by a disease under study, or who have had family members with the disease, can more frequently recall symptoms or are more observant of their child.

Epi Wonk himself shows how these studies need to be taken in the context in which the plan is laid out. He details a study conducted in Canada which shows that the timing of vaccination affects the risk of developing childhood asthma. This should show an obvious deficiency about the study, a variable that the study was not concerned about and cannot speak about. It doesn't mean that the study was not significant or not performed correctly, in fact in means the exact opposite; that the authors correctly narrowed down the significance of the results to mirror the criteria that was established before the study took place. The authors themselves even say "the multitude of biases in studies that have used a birth-cohort design stress the need for additional adequately controlled, large scale studies."

And there you have it, being able to identify the significance of data based on the parameters in which the data is being examined.

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Saving Money by Increasing The Doctor Bill

Interesting article in the NYTimes today about a very large insurance experiment designed to cut costs by paying doctors more. The plan centers around cutting expensive visits to specialists by better paying family physicians, internists and pediatricians to devote more time and attention to their patients. This should prevent later costly procedures and emergency visits.

Currently there are just over 250,000 practicing family physicians, general, practitioners, and internists in this country, and nearly 472,000 specialists. The salary of those primary care physicians is far less than the specialists who are compensated at a far higher rate for each patient visit. The plan comes on the heels of a report in North Carolina that says a program like this saved $162 million in 2005.

I think this is an innovative idea and fair to those physicians that don't necessarily perform surgeries or procedures, but spend hours pondering over multiple blood tests, x-rays, and other common tests. The job of primary care is usually much more complicated than that of many specialists. Specialists usually have the advantage of knowing what is wrong with their patient and what they're going to do about it before they even see them, family doctors have to study histories over and over to understand the patterns that may arrive or an unusual result by a patient that hasn't presented with any symptoms for 20 years.

Trying to Save by Increasing Doctors’ Fees - NYTimes.com

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Luskin's Wrist Rant: Leave it to the Experts

I happened to be a little slow confronting the Bobby Jindal/War on Science news coming out of Louisiana, and as soon as I got my post up yesterday my email inbox was flooded with some strange news from the Discovery Institute (DI).

I highlighted in my previous post the new legislation supposing to bring "academic freedom" into Louisiana's high schools by way of allowing outside supplemental material to be brought into science classes. This new scheme though has no title, no name, and no identifying features other than to highlight the need for academic freedom, but only when the issue is evolution. The Bad Idea Blog sums it up pretty nicely:

The obvious trick in all of these bills is that they never specify a standard of accuracy that such criticisms have to meet, and they are often vague as to who is going to evaluate or enforce that standard in any case.

Scientists in general already do a pretty good job of including actual scientific controversy and ambiguity in textbooks and curricula, which makes these bills basically an invitation to introduce legally protected psuedoscience into local classrooms. If this sounds a little too much like the "teach the controversy" strategy of the original creationists, well, you and I are like the 800th and 801st people to notice that.

Whether it is publicly stated or not the DI is right now the leading public institution behind these bills and behind the majority of creationist/intelligent design/academic freedom/untitled "research" and promotion of evolution's faults. Casey Luskin, resident lawyer and cheerleader for the DI has posted an article that contains a major gaffe while trying to throw doubt on recent work by paleontologist Neil Shubin, discoverer of the transitional tetrapod Tiktaalik and the author of the excellent book "Your Inner Fish."

Here is Luskin's argument straight from his mouth.

1. Shubin et al.: "The intermedium and ulnare of Tiktaalik
have homologues to eponymous wrist bones of tetrapods with which they
share similar positions and articular relations." (Note: I have labeled
the intermedium and ulnare of Tiktaalik in the diagram below.)
Translation: OK, then exactly which "wrist bones of tetrapods" are Tiktaalik’s
bones homologous to? Shubin doesn’t say. This is a technical scientific
paper, so a few corresponding "wrist bone"-names from tetrapods would
seem appropriate. But Shubin never gives any.

Eponymous, adj: Of, relating to, or being the person after which something is named.

That quick wiktionary search just debunked Luskin's whole argument. Eponymous basically means similarly or derivitatively named, which means Shubin has given the names for the corresponding tetrapod bones (they have the same names in tetrapods as they do in Tiktaalik).

Understandably this was probably a mistake and had Luskin done the proper research (ie: get a fucking dictionary if you don't know what a word means) he would have realized his mistake, but this is one of the guy's that is going to be leading the push for so-called "academic freedom" concerning evolution. He works for an institute who's purpose is to try and punch holes in evolution and bring those holes into the public discussion.

If this is the type of "critical thinking" that the DI is trying to push into school's I think it worth people's time to see just how insufficient the DI's work is. Unfortunately this is where being a lay person and being an expert butt heads, experts are far more qualified to establish what is good and what is crap research. Lay people have trouble understanding the intricacies involved with technical jargon and statistical modeling, which is why we have experts in the first place.

I guess what I'm really trying to get at here is that the guy claiming a grand conspiracy of evolution and promoting the right to question and rethink the dogma himself cannot complete a rational analysis of the data. There is already an institution set up to monitor and judge the worthiness of a paper/journal/theory and that is the scientific community themselves. Scientists, are generally skeptical of claims made in papers. I know when I read a paper, even if I like what it says the first thing I do is scrutinize the figures and tables looking for a weakness or misrepresentation. I like to scour references to further examine the strength of the paper until I am satisfied that the author has interpreted the data correctly. And then here's the kicker; I get on the internet and search through the blogs of those guys who are experts in the field, because my opinion means very little compared to these guys.

In fact, Carl Zimmer and PZ Myers both share their thoughts on Luskin's flub in a far more meaningful way than I can.  Hopefully I will one day join them among the ranks of the experts, confident that I can tease meaning away from the primary literature.  Until then I must defer to the experts and simply add in my little thoughts.  I would hope that the google scholars and high school teachers/administrators could understand this point.  Leave the job of science to the scientists.

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What the hell is the difference?

So the White House issued a press release today discussing Bushie's recent talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Apparently, everything is moving along nicely over there, but Bush reiterated his opposition to any time lines for troop withdrawals.

You can't win a war if you have an artificial timetable for withdrawal.... Artificial timetable for withdrawal send the wrong message to the Iraqis, they're seeing it's not worth it. There's a lot of Iraqis over there determined -- trying to make up their mind whether they want to be a part of democracy, or whether or not they're going to take to the hills and see what happens. Artificial timetable for withdrawal, an early withdrawal before this finishes sends the message to the enemy, we were right about America. That's what they said. Al Qaeda has said it's just a matter of time before America withdraws. They're weak, they're corrupt, they can't stand it, and they'll withdraw. And all that would do is confirm what the enemy thinks.

Oh wait, that was from 2006. Apparently, Bush has been doing some McCain-style flip-flopping. Time lines equal surrender and failure and scary things. But "horizons" for troop reductions are just awesome, simply the natural course of the super-successful surge.

In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals -- such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.

Ok, so I have a question. I'm pretty sure that when Democrats (and other sentient beings) have called for a time line for troop withdrawals from Iraq, they we asking for something like "Down by 50% in 2 years, down to no more than 20,000 in 4 years, contingent on conditions permitting." I don't remember anyone credible demanding a time line which called for every single US service member to be outside of the Iraqi borders by June 10th, 2009 at 8 am, no exceptions. And my question is, what the hell is the difference between setting a time line, which according to Bush is tantamount to recasting the Statue of Liberty in Osama Bin Laden's image, and setting a horizon? They mean the same damn thing! They are both a tentative plan under which our leadership attempts to reduce the number of American forces in Iraq. From Obama's website:

The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began.

Nothing about that plan even implies a "date-certain" deadline. Seems to be another example of the Bush/McCain strategy suddenly mirroring what Obama and other Democrats have been advocating for years.

Obviously the difference is the source. When Dems call for...well...anything, it is treason and betrayal, but if the Bush Cabal makes the same determination, its part of their carefully planned and patriotic vision for Victory.

Obviously.

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The Louisiana Science Education Act: A Step Closer to Religious Science

Louisiana, with strong support from it's Rhodes Scholar Governor, Bobby Jindall, recently signed into law the "Science Education Act." The stated goal of the legislation is to allow for "academic freedom" in high schools with the respect to teaching science (more on academic freedom later), but this is in fact a cover for the true reason behind the law, to allow the teaching of religious ideals at the expense of examining the evidence and reasoning that have led to the modern synthesis of science.

Under the Act Louisiana teachers may, under protection of the law, "use supplementary textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner." The law is also explicitly clear on prohibiting teaching religion in the name of science, stating that its provisions "shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine." This is the biggest lie I've seen in legislation in a while, although I understand why its there, to protect the constitutionality of the law. By denouncing religious motivation the Act will not be subject to federal separation laws, but the law itself is meant to encourage unconstitutional behavior from local school boards.

Here's where the tricky part comes in, the ACLU knows they can't challenge the law in court as it was deftly written to conform to constitutional standards, but its implications will not be covered under the law. If religion is brought into a science classroom the ACLU will sue, or parents who were irked by religious instruction will sue. This will produce a noisy, expensive federal lawsuit, followed by even noisier and more expensive appeals. Guess where a local school board is going to get the money to fight these lawsuits; the property owners of the school district. The Discovery Institute (DI), a creationist think-tank and clear leader in the anti-science movement, helped support this bill and promoted it over the state. Where will they be when the shit hits the fan and these same school boards are being sued and need the legal and monetary support?

Defending creationist school boards isn't the DI's game, they like to a) sell creationist textbooks and b) keep creationism in the news so they can keep the lecture gigs and wealthy funders going. Just like in the Dover case, where the DI's own book was put on trial, once the books were sold the Institute left the school board and their taxpayers to fend for themselves.

Hoodwinked, being played, becoming the patsy, these are all good ways to describe what the DI did to Louisiana. The motivation behind this should be pretty transparent, the DI really really wants to start selling more books in the classroom and they'll encourage state legislators and clueless governors to enact laws that tempt local school boards to unconstitutional behavior. And when the sucker school boards are spending their own tax dollars on the defense of a hopeless bill the DI will say they had absolutely nothing to do with it, they just offered support to an academic freedom bill.

Now what exactly is academic freedom? The American Association of University Professors' definition refers to the ability to do research and publish outside of the influence of administrators. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) says that this bill has co-opted and misused the term to appeal to the public. Academic freedom is not a principle that applies to high school. Yes we want you to be able to question the evidence and understand the critical thinking process that led to the interpretation of data, but you are not doing research and publishing. High school is a place for students to learn the basics of science so that they may pursue and take full advantage of academic freedom in a university setting and beyond.

This time the DI's motivation was promoting the book, Explore Evolution, a text offering the standard intelligent design critiques of evolution. But unlike its predecessor, Of Pandas and People, which fared badly during the Dover trial, it does not use the term "intelligent design."

They're learning what it takes to pass laws that can stand the test of constitutionality while at the same time allowing individuals to perform unconstitutional acts through a false protection of the law. The DI will certainly benefit in two years when the Supreme Court hears a case that references their book many many times.

Another big problem I have with this law is the availability of students to attend a school that will teach religion. Louisiana has a multitude of catholic schools who will give your child a good religious background, but you may want to be careful because they study evolution in their sciences classes (with the support of the Vatican). Another option is to home school the kid and you can teach him whatever he wants, that's true academic freedom. Just don't expect him to be a doctor or a scientist when you send him to college and his "science" background fails miserably at preparing him for college science courses.

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