I first knew something was up when, while waiting for a lecture to start, I saw a student holding a copy of the book. I asked her where she’d got it, and she said that people were handing them out near the university tram stop. Yep, it had to be them – Ray Comfort clones, doing what they do best – spreading ignorance through the medium of semi-persuasive and seemingly educational books.
After my lecture, I met up with Richard Hughes, and later Jason Ball, both of whom grabbed a copy of the book and started talking to the people handing them out. Richard wrote about it on his new blog Divisible By Pi – check that out, he goes into detail about his particular experiences with the whole thing.
Jason was also recording his conversation with one female creationist on his iPhone (which should be online soon, probably on the Young Australian Skeptics blog), but while this was happening I found that I didn’t have anything to do, so I just stood there, looking around at the five or so people handing out free books to unsuspecting university students and staff.
It was then that I was approached by two people, one with a camera and one with a microphone. I’d noticed them earlier, interviewing one of the creationists handing out the books, and assumed that they were from a university media organisation or something, as there were no obvious signs that they were creationists as well and related to the book giving-out scheme.
I was wrong. Very wrong.
They asked me, as I stood there, if they could get a few of my thoughts about what was happening. I said sure, and stated on camera that I wouldn’t mind being interviewed and that the recording could be put online and on DVD. The first couple of questions were immediately related to the event taking place: what did I think of what was happening; did I think that they should be allowed to give out these books, etc. I still thought they were secular, unbiased reporters. But suddenly I was asked a question about irreducible complexity, and then… then I really knew what I was dealing with.
The questions came thick and fast after that. “How do you know evolution is true? What about the eye? How do organisms know what to evolve? Where are the transitional forms? What came before the Big Bang?” – the types of questions that could only be asked by a Young Earth Creationist with an interviewing agenda to push. The man interviewing me didn’t even leave me enough time to effectively state my case – I was literally trying to educate him in evolutionary theory out of his biased perspective of Christian fundamentalism, and that takes more time than what he was allowing me.
In the end, he got to the classic Ray Comfort tactic that absolutely confirmed their association with the group handing out the books – the “Have you ever told a lie?” line of questioning, designed to make the person feel guilty for their sins against the Christian God. It really doesn’t work on an atheist, since you have to accept the premise that their God exists before you can feel guilty for going against Him. I made that clear to him, and he seemed to agree, but he still went ahead anyway.
And that’s where it ended, after about 30 to 40 minutes of questioning. Overall it was a very pleasant interview – I was surprised at how calm I was throughout, probably due to going into it thinking that they weren’t creationists and that initial relaxed attitude carrying on after I gradually learnt the truth.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the interview ends up, edited, on the Internet somewhere – they’ll use it for something, and probably quote-mine the hell out of what I said, distorting each line until my words sound completely illogical and uneducated. Jason recorded at least a little bit of them interviewing me on his iPhone, so that’ll be up on the Young Australian Skeptics blog soon enough for all to see.
It was actually all a lot of fun, really. I’ll keep you informed as more information and testimonies about the event surface.
Last year, the Young Australian Skeptics started to put together an anthology of the best skeptical blog posts of 2009, calling for people to submit entries – either their own or the work of others – that they thought were worthy of consideration. Well, the final selections of the panel of judges has been released, including – somewhat surprisingly – a post by yours truly.
“What is Philosophical Naturalism, and why do I accept it?” was published on Homologous Legs in June of 2009, and is one of the many posts that has been considered to be of a sufficiently high quality to be included in the anthology. To say I’m honoured is an understatement – just look at some of the other bloggers who got their work in the final mix too: Stephen Novella, PZ Myers, Phil Plait, Ben Goldacre, the list goes on! Of course, there are a few lesser well-known skeptical bloggers in there as well (who are also clearly worthy of being included, as they are also great writers and communicators of skeptical and scientific thought), but I still can’t believe I’m going to have my work published along with such great people.
To be entirely clear here, I didn’t submit any of my posts to the anthology myself – someone else did – so this is even more surprising to me. Thank you to whoever it was who did submit my work, I wouldn’t be in this situation otherwise!
When the Young Australian Skeptics Blog Anthology 2009 becomes available to buy (either as a physical book or a PDF), I’ll let you know – judging by the list of posts that are to be included, you’d be crazy not to get it for your bookshelf.
Yep, I mentioned it a while ago, but it’s finally up. Jason, Elliot and I (of the Young Australian Skeptics) were interviewed by Kylie Sturgess for the Skeptic Zone podcast about being young in the skeptical movement, blogging as a communicative medium and our own experiences in the wild world of podcasting. It was a fun interview to do, as we all know Kylie, so we had a few laughs. Skepticism can do with a bit of youthful humour sometimes, can’t it?
If you’re an impatient person, here’s the direct link to the episode, but you can also subscribe to their podcast through iTunes and download it that way. Don’t forget to check out their website as well – perhaps consider donating to either the podcast and/or the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe fund to help pay for their trip for TAM Australia in November. Both are good causes.
After you’ve had a listen, tell me what you thought of it. I don’t do many interviews (if I did, I’d certainly tell you about them), so I’m always conscious about how I sound.
It’s currently O-Week (Orientation Week) at my university, and I start classes on Monday. I’ve been doing a lot of timetable planning these past couple of days, removing clashes and making sure I know what prac groups I’m in – and this has lead naturally to me planning my, er, entire Bachelor of Science out. Yeah, technically you’re not supposed to do that yet, but I thought, “What the hell, I know what I want to do – why not structure my course completely now on paper so I don’t have to worry about it later?”
Of course, none of these listed except my first year studies are set in stone, but I like fantasising about what I’ll be doing in the future, so it was at least fun thinking about what subjects I could be taking.
The subjects after the “—” are breadth subjects – subjects that are unrelated to science (for the most part) and are supposed to “enrich” your degree. I tend to agree, although it would be nice to do even more biology subjects…
1st Year
Semester One
Biology 1
Chemistry 1
Introduction to Life, Earth and the Universe
—
Music Language 1
Semester Two
Biology 2
Chemistry 2
Australian Flora and Fauna
—
Philosophy: The Big Questions
2nd Year
Semester One
Principles of Genetics
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Experiments in Genetics
—
Music Language 2
Semester Two
Techniques in Molecular Science
Biochemical Regulation of Cell Function
Genes and Genomes
—
God and the Natural Sciences
3rd Year
Semester One
Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics
Genes: Organisation and Function
Molecular Aspects of Cell Biology
—
Darwinism
Semester Two
Genetic Analysis
Protein Structure and Function
Advanced Techniques in Molecular Science
—
Communicating Science and Technology
Pretty nice, eh? That course plan would leave me with a major in Genetics – the closest thing I can do to evolutionary biology without also having to do ecology as well. Not a huge fan of ecology.
And yes, the “Darwinism” subject is about the social impact of evolutionary theory. Should be rather fun – I hear one of the books you have to read was written by a Discovery Institute fellow…
Yes yes, my dear readers, you’ll get some actual content to read soon enough (the Discovery Institute have done some crazy things lately…), but it’s University O-Week at the moment in Australia, and between that and a spot of intensive audio editing I have to do, no time is left for beating up on intelligent design proponents.
So – what do you do when you have no content? It’s usually “post videos of kittens” in the rulebooks of other blogs, but here on Homologous Legs I like to share my passion for music. Hence these two videos of the musician St. Vincent – the first one a performance on Letterman of the song “Marrow”, and the second a video of a tour version of “Marry Me”. Both are excellent – St. Vincent is probably my favourite new artist at the moment.
Did you hear the saxaphones in that first video? Oh man, they get to me every time. So. Friggin’. Awesome.
Are you pumped for the new season of Doctor Who, the one with Matt Smith taking over as the Doctor after David Tennant left in the last season? Well so am I, so here’s a new trailer to keep you happy until Easter (or considerably later, if you live in Australia like me, where things from the BBC take nearly half a year to get here).
Although… “happy” is a very loose term. If anything, it made me a little less excited about the new season – the look and feel of this trailer (no actual content from the TV show) wasn’t like the Doctor Who we’re used to seeing. Hmm. I wonder how much Steven Moffat has changed from the days of Russell T Davies…
Why? Because tonight, along with Elliot and Jason from the Young Australian Skeptics, I’m going to be interviewed by Kylie Sturgess for the Skeptic Zone podcast, about various topics relating to podcasting, young skepticism and general youth-ness. Should be a wonderful experience, most likely!
I’ll let you all know when the interview is released, if, for some strange reason, you want to hear the sound of my voice babbling slightly coherently about things.
It has to be one of the greatest t-shirts of all time. It just has to be. Well… for a person of my generation and with my interests, anyway. Without further ado, I present to you – the Darwin/Pokemon mashup shirt:
Oh yes. I’m going to get one of these – right now, dammit. I’ll be wearing it at the Global Atheist Convention, don’t you worry.
I even love the title: “Endless Forms Most Battleful”. Perfection. Mwah.
Hat-tip to Jen over at Blag Hag. Check out her blog, everyone.
If you haven’t read the sidebar in a while, or at all, you may not know that I’m a 17 year-old who’s just finished their high school education, and is starting their undergraduate university degree this year. This puts me in a bit of a unique situation – I’ve been blogging on Homologous Legs since April 2008, when I was in Year 11 and was 16 years old (my birthday is in March, if you’re confused). This made me an extremely young science blogger at the time. It’s rare to see 16 year-olds blogging about serious topics like science, religion and skepticism – most of the little blogging that does happen at that age is focused on the private life of the blogger, ala. Livejournal.
So when Bora, from A Blog Around the Clock (over on ScienceBlogs – ooh, respect is oozing out of my young student pores), wrote about young science bloggers, I was intrigued. He talked about some recent projects by science educators at the university level that have tried to incorporate blogging into teaching plans – the main one being Mason Posner (he blogs at A Fish Eye View) who gets his senior students to start blogging about science in teams in order to help their science communication skills.
Now, the blogs of Posner’s students don’t seem to last much past the end of the course – which got Bora asking the question: “Why did they stop?” A good question, and one that many a person decided to have a go at answering. Below are two of the more notable responses.
Arikia Millikan thinks that the reason that young people don’t blog is due to visibility and they don’t want to have a blog on the Internet that could affect their chances of landing a job in the future.
Mason Posner himself weighed in with his thoughts – he’s found, through experience with his students that young bloggers need community, and will stop blogging if not enough people comment on what they’ve written.
My own experience with blogging, unlike Posner’s students, has been completely voluntary. I came into the world of blogging after going to the Australian Biology Olympiad Science Summer School in 2008 and coming back revitalised about evolutionary biology, genetics and biology in general. I had been refuting the claims of creationists for over a year before that point on YouTube and listening to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast, so I felt it was natural to start a blog about it all.
At first, I blogged because I felt that eventually I would become a well-respected member of the skeptical blogging community if I just kept it up and slowly raised my profile. Yes, to start with all I cared about was, in a way, the “fame” aspect of having a blog that lots of people read. After spending a bit of time in the blogosphere, I began to notice that there were a ton of blogs around, some of which had serious thematic and general content overlaps with Homologous Legs. This lead me to realise that if I just continued to blog with the vague intent of becoming well-read, producing the type of content that a lot of popular blogs seemed to produce, I wasn’t going to succeed at my goal, and this would lead to a disenchantment with the concept of blogging. I had to find a good reason to continue with my blog – I was investing quite a bit of time into writing about topics that only a few people wanted to read about. Why continue?
The answer came when I got into the Discovery Institute’s many blogs – I realised that the misinformation that ID proponents and creationists put out onto the Internet wasn’t being challenged in a way that would allow for laypeople searching on search engines about those topics to find significant scientific responses to them. I decided to continue blogging because I felt that they needed at least one more voice out there that they could stumble upon to find out the truth about what these people were telling them.
Clearly, this blog has turned into a little more than that – I don’t just focus on breaking down creationist articles, I also comment on skeptical topics and others things as well – but that was what kept me going when I felt like giving up.
For me, unlike Posner’s student bloggers, I never felt disenchanted by the lack of large amounts of comments on my posts – the content I was producing would rarely spark any debate amongst people that were on my side of the skeptical coin, and my target audience wasn’t expected to comment back: they were just looking for opposing views, that’s all. And I have never felt that I would be put off blogging if a future employer saw Homologous Legs – I rarely post personal things on here, and when I do they are ludicrously tame to the point of being pointless. In fact, I feel that it could at the very least increase my chances of being employed, given that the employer was a research lab and wanted someone with enthusiasm about evolutionary biology/genetics.
But this is just my view. I know I’m a unique case – very rarely do young science bloggers blog in order to help perpetuate good information about little-understood areas of knowledge in the general population. Without the drive that I found I had, I can easily envision them becoming bored with the prospects of writing about topics that they feel nobody cares about. Thus, I have to agree with the message that Bora exuded in his most recent blog post on the topic of young bloggers: “Go and comment.”
Young bloggers need motivation! They might be enthusiastic about the topics they write about, but they’ll stop writing if they don’t think anyone cares. Site hits may tell you how many people are visiting your blog, but comments will tell you how many people are reading your blog. Blog communities need to spring up around young bloggers – each of them needs to feel that they have an important role in the community, perhaps they’re the person people turn to for particle physics news, rainforest news or geology news, etc. They need to motivate each other through continual feedback – either mentions in their own blogs or comments on their posts.
You can thank Kylie Sturgess for this – she forced me to use my newfound scientific journal access (oh yes, I’m in the game, finally) to search for educational research into student blogging, and I came up with a couple of papers which were relevant, and they seem to back up what people have been saying on this topic. Both were studies on real student blogging models at the university level.
Derntl, 2009 found:
Our simplified blogging activity model reveals a simple yet effective spot that can be used by instructors / facilitators to spark and sustain blogging activity: “comments posted” is the only variable within the student community that is actually under co-control by instructors. From the student point of view, this effect is less obvious, since the blog portal does not reveal who commented on an entry; it merely shows how many comments were posted, which is anonymous until the blog entry is actually visited. So keeping external factors constant, the easiest way to facilitate bloggers would be to make inspiring comments to their blog entries.
Ellison, et al., 2008 found:
This preliminary finding regarding the peer-to-peer learning potential of blogging needs further study, and should be confirmed by empirical evidence of learning. What is interesting is that explicit feedback on one’s entry was not considered as useful as the implicit feedback about one’s ideas found in others’ blog entries—implicit in that we can assume students are comparing their ideas to others. Additionally writing one’s own entry, which would appear to be the critical component of the assignment, was seen to be less helpful than reading others’ entries. This may be because students are benefiting from the diverse perspectives provided by their peers as opposed to the initial act of documenting their ideas.
So, it seems pretty clear – student bloggers need a community of comments and mentions in order to stay focused on their task of science communication. Let’s hope we can all find the student blogs before they decide to close down. Actually, Bora provided a very good list of young science bloggers in this post (me included), so, er, go and comment.
—
References:
Derntl, M. (2009). Understanding and Facilitating Student Bloggers: Towards a Blogging Activity Model Advances in Web Based Learning – ICWL 2009, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. Volume 5686/2009: 140-149.
Ellison, N. and Y. Wu (2008). “Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 17(1): 99-122.
Welcome to the 135th edition of the Carnival of the Godless blog carnival. Is that love in the air… or just beetle pheromones? Are you attracted to your partner’s gifts of chocolate, giant teddy bears and roses… or their sensuously-evolved secondary sexual characteristics? Ooh yeah baby, that’s right, it’s time for some lovin’ – Darwin style.
Valentine’s Day on the 14th of February has become boring. And while this edition of the blog carnival comes out a day too late, I hearby declare that the 13th of February shall be known as Darwintine’s Day, where science lovers (in more ways than one) celebrate their love for Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection – and each other. Who needs a deity for love when you’ve got the whole Tree of Life?
Homologous Legs is the blog of Naon Tiotami (aka. Jack Scanlan), an Australian undergraduate biology student who has a serious problem with creationists and intelligent-design proponents.
Here you can find rebuttals to articles found on various high-profile creationist and intelligent-design websites, news about the creation/evolution "war", and mostly coherent thoughts from an 18 year-old music-loving student.
Creationists on the University of Melbourne campus! Today! Handing out Ray Comfort’s “Special Edition” of On the Origin of Species!
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