In the article, Coyne begins by citing a recent survey of 34 western countries, in which the US was 33^nd in belief in evolution (only Turkey was lower).  40% of Americans said they agreed with a statement “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from an earlier species of animals.”  In contrast, the agreement was over 70% in the UK, France, Spain and Germany.   In response to these numbers, Coyne does not hold back:

This is a national embarrassment. Imagine if America ranked as low in international surveys about our acceptance of atoms or the “germ theory” of disease!

He then goes on to show how this kind of thinking is holding us back from societal growth.  In a fascinating graph shown below, he plotted acceptance of evolution with how successful the society is on 25 indices of social well-being.  Of 17 First World countries, we are at the bottom off both scales.

About the scale, Coyne writes

Paul constructed an index of social health for 17 prosperous First World democracies, the “Successful Societies Scale” (SSS). This incorporated 25 indices of social well-being, including rates of homicide, incarceration, juvenile morality and adolescent abortion,  the incidence of venereal disease and alcohol consumption, corruption, levels of poverty and income disparity, and so on. It turns out that on the 10-point SSS scale, the United States, which scored 2.9, ranked lowest, with many countries substantially higher (e.g., Sweden was 7.1, Japan 6.0, Italy 5.6, and Australia 4.8). In fact, the United States ranked dead last in 14 of the 25 categories and was above average in only five. Despite America’s self-image as a healthy and wealthy nation, Paul’s data show that, compared to other countries, we are a sick society.

Politicians need to stop having debates about the role of faith in America and instead talk about the role of science in generating real solutions to our problems.  That debate should start with the acceptance and promotion of evolution.

I also recommend watching the wonderful video of Daniel Paul Tammet, a writer who has been diagnosed with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome, in which he recites Pi to 22,500 decimal places from memory (!) in a live demonstration of his unique memory skills.  The fun starts at 4:57.

Pi is also at the center of one strangest legislative maneuvers. In 1897, the Indiana House considered a bill that would set Pi to 3.2 by legislative fiat. Fortunately, a Purdue professor caught wind of the bill and managed to convince enough elected representatives to defeat the bill. Unfortunately, government continues to the present day to vote on issues that would be better left to scientific community to sort out.

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The only downside was the NY Times required that FFRF soften the headline by using the phrase “consider quiting” rather than the more direct “quit”.

Expect the wagons to be circled in all camps.  Personally, I think the FFRF ad is spot-on, given the state of denial about both individual rights and basic health care needs in the 21st century.

While it made for good comedy, there are those who have taken this notion seriously to the extent that corporations have 1st amendment protections. The proposed Blunt Amendment in the Senate would have allowed employers to refuse federally-mandated health care coverage based on religious and moral exemptions. While in the end it did not pass (by the narrowest of margins), our own Sen. Bob Casey supported it.  He was one of only three democratic Senators who voted for the measure and justified his vote by saying

“As I have made clear continuously, I strongly support contraceptives and have voted to provide funding for family planning but I also believe that religiously-affiliated institutions should not be forced by the government to violate their beliefs.”

The religious beliefs that concerned Casey were not those held by individuals, but institutions. Furthermore, he is not talking about churches. Churches and other organizations, which primarily employ people of their own faith, have the right to restrict employment, benefits, and the moral behavior of its employees.  This “freedom” goes so far that the bedrock American Disabilities Act (ADA) does not provide any protection to religious teachers, according to a recent Supreme Court ruling.

What we are talking about is religious affiliated employers, like UPMC Mercy Hospital, which hires a wide range of employees from chaplains to computer programmers.  While I can understand restrictions on who is hired as a chaplains (athough I personally find the existence of a Department of Spiritual Care to be a rather odd concept), imposing restrictions on the lifestyle of non-religious employees is rather barbaric.  This is incredibly slippery slope that harkens back to 19th century labor camps where the company bosses ran company towns that controlled every aspect of a worker’s private life.

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We need a serious dialog of what is and isn’t a matter of religious liberty in this country. We need a return to individual liberties. We need to respect those without any religion to live their lives without religious dogma determining what is acceptable, especially in light of scientific facts, which should be the sole determinant of a sound health care policy in this country.

On this episode, Ryan Naylor, tries to pitch the idea of BeeEss Watches, I mean, Esso Watches, which neutralize the ions and blah, blah, blah. He even did the infamous balancing trick on one the panel members, which almost convinced her it was real.

Fortunately, Mark Cuban saw right the through the crap, having heard about this scam in the sports world:

This is not new. It’s been disproven. It’s a joke. It’s a scam . It’s not real. I’m out.

You can watch the video segment here, after a short ad.

As for the balancing trick, it is a major part of the scam.  As pointed out in this video from Australia, it is all a matter of physics and a subtle change in direction that you push.  The funny thing is that every con artist does the exact same “test” of its power.

Explanation starts at 1:30

By the way, if you still believe in the power of the Esso Watches, I know a little three card game that you might be interested in.

By the way, he wasn’t talking about the paper mills, the steel mills, the clothing mills, or any other mill that makes  a product.  Those are long gone.  No, ex-Senator Rick blasted the indoctrination mills, otherwise known as colleges and universities.  As Wonkette so aptly put:

Santorum continued his ‘Knowledge Is Evil Tour’ this week with a visit to husband Glenn Beck’s radio program, where he went the farthest he’s gone yet — no guarantees that by summer’s end he won’t be recommending locking children in a dungeon with a Bible, some water and breadsticks i.e. the body of Christ for 18 years — in condemning higher education as an expensive and frightening thing that sucks Christianity right out of us, even those of us who are not Christian but had the potential to be until big heavy textbooks whalloped us over the head. Santorum, in this hour-long verbal makeout session, basically compared college to a factory, and cited some probably invented statistic that “62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it,” which really is great news, if true. As the National Journal politely put it, Santorum “declined to cite a source for the figure.”

Anyway anyway, the worst thing about this is calling colleges “indoctrination mills.” INDOCTRINATION OF WHAT, PRAY TELL? A worldview? Ideas? Creativity? Awareness? Respect? Ambition? Keg stands? Sports? Dance parties?

Santorum: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely … The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country.“

In this interview, which apparently was some weird kind of circus magic performance attended by other media members, Santorum also “expanded on his vision of dramatically reduced involvement in public education by both the states and the federal government,” in other words, the only persons who should have any say over a kid’s education is their sheltered, culturally deaf and blind parents, who know nothing of this world beyond the fact that they and all their neighbors have an average of 38 kids each and they are all beautiful gifts from this one particular lord.

Let’s see. If universities are so bad, then how many Republicans in Congress, including Ricky himself, chose to forgo the college?  More to the point, would you go to a doctor who claimed “I just learned this on my own.  No need for any formal schooling”?  Since when is education bad?  Since when is learning more than your parents learned an evil little thing (to mix metaphors)?

It is the lack of adequate funding of education is the real problem.  The U.S. far behind every other Western country in providing higher education at an affordable cost. I want the next generation to be smarter and more creative, to discover new knowledge, and to make this world a better place.

As for the 62% figure pulled out of thin air, Desert Beacon did some interesting digging:

Actually, perhaps we can clear up part of the mystery of the 62% by conjecturing that what Mr. Santorum was speaking of was a 2006 survey by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government which found that 62% of college Republicans said “religion was losing its influence on American life.”

If this is the source of the Magic 62% figure, then [Santorum's] commentary missed the report’s most important point:

“Seven in ten college students today say religion is important or very important in their lives. What’s more, a quarter of students (25%) say they have become more spiritual since entering college, as opposed to only seven percent (7%) who say they have become less spiritual.”

Interesting, while 62% of college Republicans bemoaned the declining influence of religion in American life, 25% of their cohorts were becoming more spiritual while only 7% were becoming less so.   A smaller study conducted by the Newman Society of specifically Catholic institutions found that only 6% of the young people educated at Catholic institutions had left the faith after graduation.

Be that as it may, after an afternoon of “Googling” to find the source of the serious 62%, as close as I could come was the Harvard Study, and it’s impossible to conclude that because 62% of college aged Republicans are dismayed by the “decline” in religious influence they perceive in American life that their collegiate friends are having the same experience.

Whatever Santorum was trying to claim, I would suggest that he return to school and get real facts under his belt, rather than create them on the fly or misquote them out of context.  Clearly he needs to spend a little more time in the “mills”.

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute shows public school science standards in Pennsylvania are given a “D”, as compared to Ohio, Maryland,  New York, Virginia and Massachusetts, which were in the “A-” to “B” range.  The top scorer in the US was California.

Why only “D” for Pennsylvania?  The full report details how Pennsylvania is full of vague standards with little sense of scientific rigor or a coherent ordering through the grades.

The Pennsylvania science standards are generally poor. If a bright spot exists, it’s in the earlier grades, where the coverage does occasionally earn reasonable marks for rigor. In high school, however, the material generally descends into flabbiness and disorder. By no means could these standards serve as the foundation for a sound science curriculum for students in the Keystone State.

Throughout the standards for science, there was little in terms of expectations.  The reviewers wrote:

In addition, much of the high school content simply demands too little of students. For instance, biology standards scattered among the tenth-grade expectations are pitched at such a low level that they do not merit discussion.

But, what really hurt the ratings was the lack of clarity:

[T]he standards are written in such vague language as to be incomprehensible, as in the glossary definition of the rock cycle: “The process by which rocks are formed, altered, destroyed, and reformed by geological processes and which is recurrent, returning to a starting point.” It is a “process” made up of “processes” and returns to a starting point?

No wonder the kids are confused.   The drafters of the standards have no idea of how to describe basic concepts.

Finally, the standards fail to support any basic science that might conflict with theology.  For example, human evolution, which as in the 2002 standards, was dropped from the 2009 standards! A the same time there was support of pseudoscience that has been creeping into science classes throughout the US:

Other standards foster the insinuation of pseudoscience into science content by inviting teachers to “teach the controversy” about evolution and global warming, when delineating the specific scientific content they should learn would obviously be preferable.

As written here and elsewhere, Governor Corbett’s plan to improve education is to slash budgets and while providing state vouchers to religious schools.

It is time real standards for real science are adopted statewide.  Let’s hope this report will be a wake up call for legislators to get to work on the real issues of day.  Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

“ To my colleagues Robert Plomin, Günter Wagner, Martin Nowak, and Brian Greene, among many other scientists on the Foundation’s payroll: have you no shame at all at about taking money from Templeton—an organization that’s just given three million dollars to fund studies of Jesus, and about how to reconcile neuroscience with a nonexistent soul? And to hire a pastor in residence to counsel those who get into trouble when trying to reconcile brains and souls? Is there no organization so soaked in religious woo that you scientists won’t take money from it?  

I must say that although these scientists turn their back on Templeton’s pro-woo activities so they can fund their own pro-science initiatives (e.g., The World Science Festival), I find that kind of cognitive dissonance contemptible. In the end, such scientists, by lending their Big Names to Templeton’s website, only put their imprimatur on the Foundation’s pro-religion and pro-right-wing activities.  I call that selling out.

And I call on journalists to question these scientists how they take Templeton money with one hand while covering their eyes with the other.”

Militant?  Our detractors, of course, would say so and are the first to hurl this accusation in our general direction.  They have to, otherwise the voices of sanity and reason might seek their their hermetically sealed bubbles.  All so-called “Gnus” must constantly deal with such epitaphs simply because we dare to speak what is an obvious and unimpeachable truth.

I wish it weren’t so, but direct experience tells me that Coyne’s cry for help from journalists will fall mostly on totally deaf ears; they are too enamored with woo of all stripes themselves to  understand the contemptible, cognitive dissonance of which Coyne accuses them.  Just take a quick gander at the writings of Pittsburgh’s own Jack Kelly if you have any doubts.  This contemptible little squeak of a man believes with all of his being that he - in the fine tradition of the Thomas Sowell * Cal Thomas * Sean Hannity * Bill O’Liellly * Pat Buchanan School of Journalism in which he is a magna cum laude graduate – has carte blanch  license to spew as much misinformation, disinformation, distortions of the truth, incoherent nonsense and outright lies to his audience that he wishes.   It matters little to him what negative or challenging reactions he might get from his audience.  Why do I say that?  Simple.  It’s because he knows that he can simply ignore any challenges that come his way.

Jack Kelly’s not writing for reality-based people.  He’s working to shore up support from and give more encouragement to the lunatic fringe in his audience.

His employer is guilty of the very same crime.  The simple fact is, the Post-Gazette needs these readers, and the income their subscriptions bring to them.  From the Gazette’s perspective, lunatic dollars are just as green as the dollars spent by reality seekers.  So why not nurture that angle as long as they possibly can for the profit that can be wrenched from it?  Seriously now, think about is for a nanosecond.  What else could possibly explain Kelly’s continued employment at the Post-Gazette or Thomas Sowell’s or Cal Thomas’ syndicated columns appearing in newspapers throughout the US?

Jack Kelly – like his brethren of the school of journalism of which he is a member – is shameless.

The Wyndgate Country Club in Rochester Hills, MI, cancels Center for Inquiry–Michigan event with biologist Richard Dawkins because of his atheist philosophy.

Prejudice against atheists manifested itself again when The Wyndgate Country Club in Rochester Hills, Michigan (outside of Detroit), cancelled an event with scientist and author Richard Dawkins after learning of Dawkins’s views on religion. The event had been arranged by the Center for Inquiry–Michigan (CFI), an advocacy group for secularism and science, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

The Wyndgate terminated the agreement after the owner saw an October 5th interview with Dawkins on The O’Reilly Factor in which Dawkins discussed his new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True.

In a phone call to CFI–Michigan Assistant Director Jennifer Beahan, The Wyndgate’s representative explained that the owner did not wish to associate with individuals such as Dawkins, or his philosophies.

Although privately owned, The Wyndgate facilities are open to the public for special events and occasions. According to Title II of the Federal Civil Rights Law of 1964, “open to the public” means “all persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

By the way, his new book has nothing to do with atheism; it is about science.  This means that a noted international scholar from Oxford University, who will speaking on the wonders of science, is denied a public venue because of his (lack of) religion.  Just incredible.  What century are we living in?

Clergy have never been an official part of the 10 remembrance ceremonies at ground zero, which include one six months after the attacks and one on each 9/11 anniversary since. Instead, the events have featured moments of silence during which audiences may reflect and pray.

A little slow on the uptake, the religious right are all in twitter over this “new” development.

“It’s unbelievable,” says Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. “We live in a country where the overwhelming majority of people identify as Christian or have a religion, and clergy were some of the first people to respond on 9/11 to minister to victims.

Excuse me? I thought for sure it was firefighters, police and other first responders. You can be upset, but let’s not rewrite history. Or, redefine terminology to suit your needs.  In a recent article, the Christian Post quoted John Long, who bizarrely concludes

“You can’t have a memorial service without religion. If it wasn’t for God and his direction, you couldn’t have memorial services to begin with.”

This comes as a real shock to atheists. In fact, memorial services are exactly what atheists, agnostics, and non-religious folks often hold to remember those gone.  Fortunately, the Mayor’s Office is going to continue doing what they have been doing for the past ten years.  I am pleased to hear that the commeration will be focused on remembering the lives lost and not on religious (or even political) speeches that often serve to divide rather than unite.