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In 1981, the State of Arkansas passed into law a bill that demanded that if evolution was taught in state-supported schools, then something called “Creation Science” — aka the book of Genesis read literally — had also to be taught. This happened during the interregnum between Bill Clinton’s first time in the governor’s mansion and when he regained it two years later. The bill was debated for all of half an hour by the legislature and signed by the then-governor, a man as unqualified for the post as he was surprised at getting it.

Obviously this law violated the First Amendment separation of church and state, and so the ACLU swung into action to get it declared unconstitutional. After a two-week trial, the federal judge ruled precisely that and so that was the end of the Arkansas “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Scient Act,” as it was called. I was one of the witnesses for the plaintiff, called in to testify on the history and philosophy of science, showing that whereas evolutionary theory is science, creation science is not science but religion.

Among the other expert witnesses was the late Stephen Jay Gould, the well-known paleontologist and popular-science writer, and the late Langdon Gilkey, the most eminent liberal theologian of his day. But far more impressive than any of us was a local, high school biology teacher. I remember sitting in the courtroom as he testified. The assistant attorney general was trying to tie him into knots over some technical point in evolutionary biology. Finally, the man blurted out: “Mr. Williams, I’m not a scientist. I’m a science educator. I love science, I really do. And I love my students. My job is to take the science and teach it to my students. I am not a leading researcher. I am an educator, and I have my pride and professional responsibilities. And I just can’t teach that stuff [meaning creationism] to my kids.” Sometimes it is just a privilege to listen to other human beings and recognize that they are better people than you are. (I am quoting from memory. I have just looked at the actual transcript of the trial. The teacher’s words are even more moving that I remembered.)

I have been thinking about that man a lot since I wrote my piece on why I am weeping for Florida State University. In that post, I made the point that there is something seriously out of kilter in an institution, claiming to be a place of higher education, that lavishes funds on the football program but starves the academic side. In passing, I made reference to one of the very good things that is happening on the FSU campus,: the project to upgrade the teaching of future school teachers of mathematics and science.

Continue reading at Brainstorm >>

Michael Ruse is author of several Cambridge titles on the intersection of Science and Religion. His Science and Spirituality will be available this Spring.

Ruse’s latest post “Why I am Weeping for Florida State University” ties in neatly to Weisbrod and Asch’s piece on college football coach bonuses. His Science and Spirituality will be available this Spring.

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As we start the New Year, Florida State University is in the headlines for two reasons. The first is that on New Year’s Day, in the Gator Bowl, FSU beat West Virginia. It was the final game of our coach, Bobby Bowden. The lead headline in the New York Times Sports Section is “Bowden Goes Out on Top of Shoulders.” The magazine Science also has news about FSU. “Recession Hits Some Sciences Hard at Florida State University.” We have just fired 20 tenured faculty and another 15 tenure-track faculty.  And don’t think that these were just second-raters or indeed presume that any of them were.  Included was Dean Falk, one of today’s leading paleoanthropologists and, among other things, the expert on the brain of Homo floresiensis (the hobbit). She got a pink slip on her 65^th birthday.  (Disclosure: Dean is a good friend. In this post I am absolutely not making a judgment about whether, given the firings, she was legitimately included or not. If you read the Science article, you will see that decisions were made on the judged vulnerability of departments, and she is a member of one such department, anthropology.)

I don’t know which item of news depresses me the more. At the best of times (and God knows when those are), I look upon collegiate sports in the USA, football and basketball particularly, as deeply corrupting. At FSU we are just emerging from a major scandal about football players taking courses that were rigged. Bowden lost some of the many victories with which he is credited. (Again: In this post I am making absolutely no judgments about who was responsible. These issues are still being contested.)

But of course the actual dishonesty is just a tip of the iceberg. Frankly, what any of this has to do with education beats me. I do know that there are aspects that I — and I of all people am not Mr. Politically Correct — find deeply offensive. Start with the Red Indian (and I use that term advisedly) who starts each game by plunging a burning spear into the ground and go on with the “chop” that the fans give throughout the game. Add in the drinking — Mike’s Beer Barn supposedly sells more kegs than any other outlet in the USA — and don’t forget, as is becoming all too certain, the damage we are doing to young men’s brains in the name of entertainment.

Keep reading at Brainstorm >>

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I am a climate scientist who worked in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s. I have been reflecting on the bigger lessons to be learned from the stolen emails, some of which were mine. One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice suffers as a consequence.

Surveys of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic about man-made climate change continue to tell us something politicians know only too well: The citizens they rule over have minds of their own. In the U.K., a recent survey suggested that only 41% believed humans are causing climate change, 32% remained unsure and 15% were convinced we aren’t. Similar surveys in the U.S. have shown a recent reduction in the number of people believing in man-made climate change.

One reaction to this “unreasonableness” is to get scientists to speak louder, more often, or more dramatically about climate change. Another reaction from government bodies and interest groups is to use ever-more-emotional campaigning. Thus both the U.K. government’s recent “bedtime stories” adverts, and Plane Stupid’s Internet campaign showing polar bears falling past twin towers, have attracted widespread criticism for being too provocative and scary. These instinctive reactions fail to place the various aspects of our knowledge about climate change—scientific insights, political values, cultural moods, personal beliefs—in right relationship with each other. Too often, when we think we are arguing over scientific evidence for climate change, we are in fact disagreeing about our different political preferences, ethical principles and value systems.

If we build the foundations of our climate-change policies so confidently and so single-mindedly on scientific claims about what the future holds and what therefore “has to be done,” then science will inevitably become the field on which political battles are waged. The mantra becomes: Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it. . . and we will have won. Not only is this an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty.

The events of the last few of weeks, involving stolen professional correspondence between a small number of leading climate scientists—so-called climategate—demonstrate my point. Both the theft itself and the alleged contents of some of the stolen emails reveal the strong polarization and intense antagonism now found in some areas of climate science.

Climate scientists, knowingly or not, become proxies for political battles. The consequence is that science, as a form of open and critical enquiry, deteriorates while the more appropriate forums for ideological battles are ignored.

Keep reading at the WSJ >>

We’ve released an anniversary edition, with an introduction by Jim Endersby. Endersby was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, listen here >>

A stethoscope amplifies inaudible heart and lung sounds in a very satisfying way. If, however, the owner of the organs under evaluation decides to make a comment during the exam, what results is a painfully loud, unintelligible blast of noise directly into the doctor’s head.

It was during such an interruption almost 30 years ago that Dr. Richard Baron, a Philadelphia internist, grumbled at his patient: “Shhhh. I can’t hear you while I’m listening.” The phrase has undoubtedly been said by many, but Dr. Baron was the one with the wit to stop and laugh (and reflect at length in a classic medical article), realizing that he had enunciated in pure koan form probably the single greatest tension in modern medical practice.

Against the siren song of all those beautiful instruments and machines, whatever the patient has to say is sometimes just an annoying interruption. Medical technology is addictive; it is exclusionary and expensive, and it begets versions of itself like the sorcerer’s brooms. It complicates everything, and yet from X-ray and M.R.I. to the stratosphere of gene analysis, only a simpleton would opt to fly without it.

Dr. Stanley Joel Reiser, a physician, historian and medical ethicist now at George Washington University, has been ruminating on these matters in scholarly circles for years. His latest collection of essays escapes the ivory tower and resonates precisely with today’s headlines. Anyone with more than a passing interest in our present health care logjam will be intrigued and enlightened by Dr. Reiser’s painstaking retracing of its origins.

He begins with the stethoscope, the greatest medical hit of 1816. “Before stethoscopes, the coin of evaluation was words — the doctor learned about an illness from the patient’s story.”

Then, suddenly, the doctor was paying attention to something else.

Keep reading at the New York Times >>

On Saturdays when I was a boy of 14 or 15, it was my habit to ride my red Roadmaster bicycle to the various thrift shops in my home town. One afternoon, at Clarice’s Values, I unearthed a beat-up paperback of Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science,” a collection of essays debunking crank beliefs and pseudoscientific quackery, with wonderful chapters about flying saucers, the hollow Earth, ESP and Atlantis. The book, Gardner’s second, was originally published in 1952 under the title “In the Name of Science.” I probably read it around 1962 and found it — as newspaper critics of that era were wont to say — unputdownable.

In 1981 as a young staffer at The Washington Post Book World, I reviewed Gardner’s “Science: Good, Bad and Bogus,” a kind of sequel to “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science,” and found it . . . unputdownable. A few years later, in 1989, I wrote about “Gardner’s Whys & Wherefores,” a volume that opened with appreciations of wonderful, if slightly unfashionable, writers such as G.K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany and H.G. Wells. I wrote at much greater length in 1996 about Gardner’s so-called “collected essays” — really just a minuscule selection — gathered together as the nearly 600-page compendium “The Night Is Large.” There I called its author our most eminent man of letters and numbers.

By that last word I was alluding to Gardner’s celebrated Scientific American columns devoted to mathematical games and recreations. Written over the course of 25 years, these are currently being repackaged by Cambridge University Press as “The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library“; the most recent volume, No. 3 of a planned 15, is titled “Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll and Reversi.” Amazingly, Gardner is largely self-taught in mathematics.

I give all this personalia just to underscore that I’ve been an awestruck Martin Gardner fan my entire life — but then I’m in very good company. Gardner’s admirers have included Arthur C. Clarke, W.H. Auden (who particularly cherished “The Ambidextrous Universe,” a study of symmetry and asymmetry), Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter and the entire French literary group called the Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature). Of course, Gardner is particularly revered — by all kinds of people — for his most famous book: “The Annotated ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking-Glass’ ” (later complemented or replaced by “More Annotated Alice” and “The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition”). That first book virtually launched the entire mini-genre of “annotated” classics, among which are Gardner’s own “Annotated ‘Casey at the Bat’ ” and “Annotated ‘Night Before Christmas.’ “

And that’s still not all.

Keep reading at the Washington Post >>