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Doctor Myers is one of the great atheist luminaries of recent times. I pilfered his speech from his blog Pharyngula because the speech describes much of what rational secular people are up against in our societies today and the battles that have been fought and are being fought today. I also believe it is a heartening speech that demarcates what has been done and still what needs to be done with no reservations and no regrets for rocking the boat as far as offending religious “sensibilities” are concerned. It may look TL:DR, but it is worth your time to peruse all of what PZ has to say, you’ll just have to trust me on this one. :)
I’m going to begin with where I entered this conflict — and make no mistake, it’s a real battle — with my experience in science education, and specifically with the teaching of evolution. Biology has been a lifelong passion for me, and when I first began teaching way back in the 1980s, it was a shock to discover students who had nothing but contempt for the great unifying principle of my discipline, who were happily wallowing in self-inflicted ignorance and who outright denied plain and simple facts about science. And when I discovered that there were ministers who came onto our campus and lied to our students, presented half-truths and weird fantasies to substitute for evidence, i was outraged. We Gnu Atheists have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake: we didn’t start this war. If you want to place blame, put it on the backs of religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young for a long, long time.
This is another theme in this conflict: Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn’t. If you aren’t angry about what’s being done to undermine education in this country, you haven’t been following along.
But we also respond rationally. My early incredulity about the nonsense being promoted by creationists was followed by a lot of fact-finding. You can do it too — look up the history of creationism, and you find that we’ve been fighting this same battle for at least half a century, and dealing with the same inane arguments over and over again. Where once Duane Gish was the creationist dinosaur roaming the earth, he was replaced by Kent Hovind, and he is now superseded by Ken Ham and Ray Comfort and Eric Hovind. Nothing has changed but the names. We have had a succession of court cases: Epperson v Arkansas in 68, McLean v Arkansas in 82, Edwards v. Aguillard in 87, Kitzmiller v Dover in 2005 — are they coming to an end? Did any of these trials diminish the influence of creationists? One flareup will be squelched, and next year there will be another. Similarly, we see a succession of politicians come and go, and nothing changes. Ronald Reagan becomes Santorum becomes Bush becomes another dreary chain of Republican know-nothings at every election cycle. It’s 2010, and guess what: Christine O’Donnell is running for the senate, and I’ve still got a local fundamentalist pastor coming on to my campus every week to instruct my students in the video fables of Brother Kent Hovind.
We have been treading water for 50 years. In one sense, that’s a very good thing: better to stay afloat in one place than to sink, and I am deeply appreciative of organizations like the NCSE that have kept us bobbing at the surface all this time, and please don’t ever stop. But isn’t it also about time we learned a new stroke and actually made some progress towards the shore? Shouldn’t we move beyond just reacting to every assault by Idiot America on science education, and honestly look at the root causes of this chronic malignancy and do something about it?
The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics. We keep hearing that the answer is to find the still waters of a more moderate faith, but I’m sorry, I don’t feel like drowning there either.
There is an answer, and it’s on display right here in this room. The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design out of our classrooms are important, but they are endless chores — at some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.
That’s where the Gnu Atheists get their confrontational reputation. We’re fed up with fighting off the symptoms. We need to address the disease. And if you’re one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you’re part of the problem and we’ll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.
One of the foundational aspects of science is sharing. Along with a rigorous peer review process studies and findings are published so that wider scientific community can test, assess and prove the quality of research findings. Steven Harper is not really a big fan of science, or other disciplines that base their results in reality (please see Stockwell Day’s imaginary offenders, for which we need to build more prisons). The CBC takes a run at the issue:
“Recent access-to-information documents obtained by PostMedia News reveal that all media inquiries to scientists
Canadian Science: Safe Sane and Censored!
working for Natural Resources Canada must now pass through a Byzantine thicket of “subject matter experts” and the minister’s director of communications — “no exceptions.”
As one bureaucrat warned in an internal email: “What may appear to be a simple request for facts may actually relate to policy or high-profile issues.”
The email simply puts in print what journalists covering the Harper government deal with on a daily basis.”
Thank you Mr. Harper I would tick off the boxes on the promises of an open, transparent, accountable government but I seem to have lost my pen. Or perhaps Mr.Harper has constructed a closed,tightly buttoned, top-down regime that seeks to control all messages put out by the government, to make sure the correct spin is in place. From the Montreal Gazette
“University of Alberta ecologist David Schindler states: “Muzzling under the Harper government is the worst it’s ever been.”
The Vancouver Sun quoted University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver: “The concept of free speech is non-existent at Environment Canada.” Weaver is close to the epicentre. As one who regularly co-authors studies with EC colleagues, he understands the impacts on federal scientists. He calls it “Orwellian,” and says that as a result, “morale is at an all-time low.”
Yep, protecting our rights to free speech, always priority with Harper and his reality challenged band of anti-intellectual populists. Another example:
“NRCan scientist Scott Dallimore co-authored the study, published in the journal Nature on April 1, about a colossal flood that swept across northern Canada 13,000 years ago, when massive ice dams gave way at the end of the last ice age.
The study was considered so newsworthy that two British universities issued releases to alert the international media. It was, however, deemed so sensitive in Ottawa that Dallimore, who works at NRCan’s laboratories outside Victoria, was told he had to wait for clearance from the minister’s office.
Dallimore tried to tell the department’s communications managers the flood study was anything but politically sensitive. “This is a blue sky science paper,” he said, noting: “There are no anticipated links to minerals, energy or anthropogenic climate change.”
But the bureaucrats in Ottawa insisted. “We will have to get the minister’s office approval before going ahead with this interview,” Patti Robson, the department’s media relations manager, wrote after a reporter from Postmedia News approached Dallimore.”
I guess we will just have to be happy with ‘Conservative Approved’ Science.
Theoretical Physics is always just so darn useful according to the CBC:
“A geometric “atlas” of the internet has been created in an effort to preserve it in the coming decades.
U.S., Spanish and Cypriot researchers say they have discovered what they call a negatively curved space hidden beneath the surface of the internet known as a “latent, hyperbolic” geometry.
This discovery has enabled them to create a new way of mapping the internet, a process they believe will help it to operate in the future.
“We compare routing in the internet today to using a hypothetical road atlas, which is really just a long encoded list of road intersections and connections that would require drivers to pore through each line to plot a course to their destination …,” Dmitri Krioukov, principal investigator of the project, said in a release.
I’m a little fuzzy on ‘negative parabolic space’ but the abstract from the journal is actually quite helpful.
“The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads associated with the primary function of the Internet—routing information packets between any two computers in the world—cause concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. In this paper, we present a method to map the Internet to a hyperbolic space.”
So, if the intertoobz fail, we’ll at least know why.
Thunderf00t is always recording neat experiments to watch. This one comes with a substantial do not try at home warning, for very good reason I might add.
I like it when people on TV are right. :) I’ve already talked about Germ Theory Denial in a previous post, more of the here, but P&T do a great job on destructing and deconstructing the foolishness that people engage in.
Orac has a few qualms, but agrees mostly with what P&T have to say.
Astrophysics caught a magnificent break when they registered a huge burst of X-rays emanating from a galaxy in our neighbourhood.
We have to stop dancing with those who brung us and embrace thinking that will actually work, instead of the circles of futility much of the debate around GW and AGW has degenerated into.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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