One of the (many) things I enjoy about teaching is seeing students develop the confidence to take part in discussions & present (& defend) their own views on the topic du jour. Classes where that happens are really seriously enjoyable. And so it was on Friday, when I was in a tutorial class & we […]
Continue readingTag: creationism
creationist ‘report’ writing: marked down again
Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone using the pseudonym ‘WinteryKnight, who said: I was just wondering if you have any recent research publications on experimental biology? I am thinking about writing a blog post comparing you to Michael Behe, and I want to be as fair as possible when I compare your research publications […]
Continue readingan ancient origin for the human eye
We understand a fair bit, these days, about the evolution of the complex, ‘camera-type’ vertebrate eye. Not that this has stopped creationsists (most recently the ‘intelligent design’ camp as represented by the Discovery Institute) from arguing that the eye is an excellent example of How Evolution Is Wrong – what, they ask, is the use […]
Continue readingmy humble little blog is found by the discovery institute
Well, colour me startled! It seems that some of the things I said in a recent blog post & its associated comments thread have attracted the attention of the Discovery Institute. They don’t appear to be particularly happy with me. I don’t think that I’ve ever been called "dishonest" and "a liar" before, had my […]
Continue readingattitudes towards teaching evolution in the (US) classroom
A little while back I wrote a post on the fact that so-called ‘intelligent design’ is simply creationism by another name, a name intended to obscure the link & to get around the US prohibition on teaching religion in science classes. When this was posted on the NZ Sciblogs site, one commenter said, Firstly, there […]
Continue readingthe improbability of an eye
Because I seem to have very little time on my hands at the moment, I thought I would re-post something I wrote very early on in my blogging career – it hasn’t dated & in fact is quite relevant to a more recent post on ‘intelligent design’ creationism The camera-type eye of humans (& in […]
Continue reading‘intelligent design is not creationism in any shape or form’ – yeah, right!
A few weeks ago one of my fellow SciBloggers, Siouxsie Wiles, wrote an interesting piece about a childrens’ film that she’d seen where the underlying message seemed to be: you don’t have to understand, you just have to believe. Which as she says, does rather encapsulate a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense that’s promoted these days […]
Continue readinga young-earth creationist’s view of flood geology (& much more besides)
Things have been totally hectic since I got back from the conference trail – all the usual end-of-year stuff plus heaps of students coming in for advice about their study plans for next year. (Hint for future students – try to do a bit of planning before you come in; it makes the process much […]
Continue readingso who are these ‘scientists anonymous’?
A friend of mine, who happens to be a biology teacher, recedntly forwarded me an e-mail. Quite apart from the fact that the sender had sent it to what looks like every secondary school in the country & didn’t have the courtesy to bcc the mailing list, there are a number of issues around it […]
Continue readingmount st helens as a model for the grand canyon? somehow i don’t think so
Recently our local paper ran an article on Mt St Helens, which hit the headlines with a violent eruption back in 1980. The words ‘big bang’ were mentioned in the title. This seems to have struck a chord with one reader…
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