Creationist lawsuit thrown out 13 Sep 2007 Larry Caldwell, a well-known proponent of antievolutionism, tried and failed to get “the controversy” taught in the school district of his kids’ school. He failed, so he sued the school board because he was “discriminated against… for being Christian”. The suit was just thrown out. What bothers me is not that antievolutionists would again try to use the legal system to change the definition and content of science – we have come to expect that in this political battle (and it is nothing else but a political battle. There’s no science or even decent philosophy there). What bothers me is the comment by one of the school board members: School board member Jan Pinney said Caldwell’s lawsuit amounted to “sour grapes.” “For two years all our energy was spent fighting this issue,” Pinney said. “He had more time before the board than anybody has ever had in my 12 years on the board.” Two years? The school board spent two years catering to this moron, while there were undoubtedly real educational issues to attend to? The fact that they even gave him a hearing is charity enough. This is incredible. General Science Politics
Evolution On the supposed bottleneck 70,000 years ago 3 May 2008 John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it’s most likely wrong. In the process he explains effective population size. It’s a tad… Read More
Politics Arbitrary execution 28 Oct 2009 Question: If a state kills people of some country not their own, because they think but have not shown in a court of law that those people have committed a crime, and the people are not combatants of a legally recognised enemy state, is this legal? Most jurisprudence would suggest… Read More
Evolution How to review intelligent design: defending Hacking 21 Sep 200718 Sep 2017 Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment “How not to defend evolution”. Here’s my take on it. Read More
Caldwell was, if memory serves, already well known in the area for being both a lawyer himself and suit happy. A certain amount of eggshell walking was prudent. But the bozo still can take satisfaction of having damaged, by distracting the board, the educations of numerous children, which, after all, was his intent from the get-go.
“. . . already well known in the area for being both a lawyer himself and suit happy.” Don’t know about ‘suit happy, but certainly as a lawyer previous to ’04. Most important was his alliance with at least two board members. Along with that was the eggshell walking that accompanies the possibility of denigrating one’s religious belief, or at least the expression of one’s belief system. Fortunately, despite his ‘disracting the board’ the education of numerous children was not (significantly?) damaged. The education of children occurs in the classroom, where I reside, not in the board room. I did not allow, as much as humanly possible, the distractions to negatively influence the education of my students. Instead, it was the children in my own home that suffered damage as I spent tired hours from staying up late with my children to combat Caldwell and/or missed events that I’ll not recover -I missed one of the only three wins from my son’s little league season that year. He was ‘fired up’;I was happy for him but don’t really know how he played, I wasn’t there – dealing with Caldwell’s nonsense (he requested, via protocol, all of the materials I use to teach Evolutin). Caldwell’s time in front of the board didn’t really occur over a two year period. June of ’03 to June of ’04 is the time period when we defeated Caldwell. During the remaining time, the battle occurred in the courts.
If I may say so, kudos to you for doing the right thing by your students and the school district. I am sorry that your kids had to bear the brunt of that raving moron’s idiocy.