Wrist bones and academic freedom

By Kent on July 14, 2008 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | View blog reactions

Remember that "academic freedom" bill that passed in Louisiana? Remember what that famously liberal newspaper the Wall Street Journal had to say about such bills in May? Carl Zimmer has the lastest over at The Loom.

We're all for open and objective discussions of scientific theories, right? Who wouldn't be? If your kids are taking physics in high school, you want them to read critiques of gravity, right? After all, shouldn't they know that there are some serious weaknesses in the theory of gravity? Right? For instance, the theory of gravity says that gravity makes things fall down. But planets don't fall into the sun. They go around it. So which is it-down or around? Clearly the theory of gravity is deficient. Right?

Wrong, of course. You don't teach critical thinking with patent nonsense.

Absolutely. And patent nonsense is exactly what our friends at the Discovery Institute are peddling.

Here's the punch line from Zimmer's analysis of a post Casey Luskin made on the Discovery Institute web site.

If Luskin were offering a real scientific hypothesis, he could do an anlysis of lungfish, Tiktaalik, tetrapods, and other vertebrates-comparing not just their limbs but their heads, spines, and so on to figure out their evolutionary relationships. That's exactly what Shubin and his colleagues in their original paper on Tiktaalik. They compared 114 traits on species from nine different lineages of tetrapods and their aquatic relatives, including the lineage that produced today's lungfish. And that analysis shows that Tiktaalik is more closely related to us than to lungfish.
Luskin apparently doesn't need to do this sort of science. He can just announce what seems right to him personally.
If this is the sort of stuff that's used to promote "critical thinking" in Louisiana classrooms, don't be surprised to hear about the great gravity hoax.

What more can I say?