I have Statcounter for this blog, which is kind of addictive. I don't know specifically who's reading my blog (except in a couple of cases), but it does tell me where you all come from. Most interesting are the folks that click in just once. What brought them here?
Someone from Germany landed on my "Science, science uber alles" post. Which is weird since without the umlaut on the "u" in uber (which I don't know how to do, dammit), that's just bad German. Then they clicked down to my Ursula post (Ursula being a German name) and then went to my brother's blog. I wonder what they found there? The weird thing is, they didn't come from a search engine. They just showed up.
Speaking of search engines, I'm sorry if you came here looking for "Connor MacLeod pictures" or "Kiss Me Kate spanking scene", as I'm sure you were disappointed.
A couple dropped by looking for info on Tobias Buckell or Crystal Rain. Allow me to direct you to this excerpt from the novel that Toby has up at his Crystal Rain website. (I'm so looking forward to this book).
But by far the biggest source of hits to my blog has been from a little entry entitled Bored Now, in which I said:
The other [story in Asimov's] I really liked was The Little Goddess by Ian McDonald. It had a mythology/religion back drop but used it to tell a really interesting story about a girl. I liked it immensely.
I wrote this months ago, but it's still getting hits. I kind of wished I had said more. I'm sure it's going to be in the "Best of" anthologies that come out this year (not to mention award nominations). I mentioned the mythology and religion, but it is truly a science fiction story with near-future technology and political and social situations. Every detail is perfect, but unlike in many scifi stories, the technical details are not the point. They are just the tools he uses to tell this story about a girl. If you can find it, I highly recommend checking it out.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Thursday, December 22, 2005
New link to the left
Just a quick note for those who (like me) are always hunting for sci-fi and fantasy magazines. I found an online source that looks to have everything imaginable (even Australian spec fic magazines). It's called Clarkesworld Books. Thay have back issues and everything; how cool is that? As a bonus, they have Toby Buckell's book Crystal Rain available for preorder cheaper than Amazon.com, and they are signed copies! It looks like a family-run business too, and it's always nice to shop at family-run businesses, don't you think?
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Science, science uber alles.... hey, wait
I had one more thing to say, so let's pop this quote back in here first:
NAS (National Academy of Sciences) is in agreement that science is limited to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.”
"Science is a particular way of knowing about the world." A particular way. Just one. Implying there are others. Why does the definition state it this way? Because, contrary to popular opinion, most scientists do have religious beliefs, and those beliefs are important to them.
Science is a way of knowing the world that we can share with each other. In practice this gets hard, especially with big, amorphous things like evolution, with so many bits of evidence to compile. It was easier for Galileo.
"Watch me drop these two objects from the Tower of Pisa."
"Ooooh. Do it again."
It's harder for evoltionists.
"Look at this fossil. It means what I say it means. Honestly."
How do we know? That's where the process comes in. A scientist presents his evidence to the rest of the scientific community, and they bounce it around like a volleyball (or smack it like a pinata). Some ideas like string theory are subject to great disdain in the community before enough evidence supports the theory for others to take it seriously too. Now it's consider one of the hottest new fields for young physicists to dive into.
Why won't this be the fate of Intelligent Design? Because no one is presenting evidence for it. No one is putting it out there in the scientific community to be volleyballed or pinata'ed. ID does have a role in the scientific community: the problems it raises with evolution has forced evolutionists to stop resting on their laurels and really crack down on solving those problems. There are slews of articles out there discounting every point of Darwin's Black Box. Would anyone have bothered if there had been no Darwin's Black Box? Raising questions about things is always important. Poking holes in existing theories is a crucial part of science, and ID participates in that way.
But back to the beginning of what I was saying. "Science is a particular way of knowing the world." There are others. Religion and philosophy are other ways. I think they are equally valid in a general sense. But to the vast majority of us, the truths we get from religion and philosophy are far more important to us than anything we get from science. But I said earlier that science is shared. Religion and philosophy? Not so much. And that, to me, is as it should be. Your religion, your philosophy, is a huge part of what makes you you. The idea that everyone should think and feel the same in this regard is apalling to me. I love diversity. I love having friends and family that run the gamut of Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan, aetheist; fundamentalist to downright hedonist. And I fully support everyone's right to express their own religion as loud and as proud as they feel inclined. But proselytizing my children (or anyone else's for that matter)? Now that's downright unamerican. And I think you'll burn in hell.
(Dude, that's a joke.)
NAS (National Academy of Sciences) is in agreement that science is limited to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.”
"Science is a particular way of knowing about the world." A particular way. Just one. Implying there are others. Why does the definition state it this way? Because, contrary to popular opinion, most scientists do have religious beliefs, and those beliefs are important to them.
Science is a way of knowing the world that we can share with each other. In practice this gets hard, especially with big, amorphous things like evolution, with so many bits of evidence to compile. It was easier for Galileo.
"Watch me drop these two objects from the Tower of Pisa."
"Ooooh. Do it again."
It's harder for evoltionists.
"Look at this fossil. It means what I say it means. Honestly."
How do we know? That's where the process comes in. A scientist presents his evidence to the rest of the scientific community, and they bounce it around like a volleyball (or smack it like a pinata). Some ideas like string theory are subject to great disdain in the community before enough evidence supports the theory for others to take it seriously too. Now it's consider one of the hottest new fields for young physicists to dive into.
Why won't this be the fate of Intelligent Design? Because no one is presenting evidence for it. No one is putting it out there in the scientific community to be volleyballed or pinata'ed. ID does have a role in the scientific community: the problems it raises with evolution has forced evolutionists to stop resting on their laurels and really crack down on solving those problems. There are slews of articles out there discounting every point of Darwin's Black Box. Would anyone have bothered if there had been no Darwin's Black Box? Raising questions about things is always important. Poking holes in existing theories is a crucial part of science, and ID participates in that way.
But back to the beginning of what I was saying. "Science is a particular way of knowing the world." There are others. Religion and philosophy are other ways. I think they are equally valid in a general sense. But to the vast majority of us, the truths we get from religion and philosophy are far more important to us than anything we get from science. But I said earlier that science is shared. Religion and philosophy? Not so much. And that, to me, is as it should be. Your religion, your philosophy, is a huge part of what makes you you. The idea that everyone should think and feel the same in this regard is apalling to me. I love diversity. I love having friends and family that run the gamut of Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan, aetheist; fundamentalist to downright hedonist. And I fully support everyone's right to express their own religion as loud and as proud as they feel inclined. But proselytizing my children (or anyone else's for that matter)? Now that's downright unamerican. And I think you'll burn in hell.
(Dude, that's a joke.)
I'm touching it, sans 10-foot pole
As you can see in "About Me" up there, I homeschool my boys "Secular Classical style". This is probably pig latin to most of you non-homeschoolers. So let me break it down for you. "Classical" means we follow something called the Trivium, which breaks all twelve grades into three stages: Grammar (1-4), Logic (5-8), and Rhetoric (9-12). Grammar is gathering information about the world, logic is making the connections, and rhetoric is taking what you know and doing something with it. Secular means we're spiritual, not religious. More specifically it means we are (*gasp*) evolutionists.
As you probably already know, there was an important court case in Dover, PA regarding evolution vs. intelligent design. The judge's decision is here. It takes a couple of hours to get through, being 139 pages long (as the judge says, "out of an abundance of caution and in the exercise of completeness"), but well worth it. (An aside, as much as I've always known I wanted to be a writer, I've had a little more trouble with what I wanted to do as a job outside of that. I used to think being a judge would be cool, specifically so I could research law books and write massive papers like this one, but then I realized that most of being a judge was a lot more like "Night Court" without the jokes, and dealing with people everyday would be a very bad career choice for me).
At any rate, here is my summary of what the judge has to say, complete with my own thoughts. I'm not flagging anything IMO, or IMHO, or anything like that because duh, this is a blog. Of course everything is IMO here.
OK, it all started over this little disclaimer:
The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no
evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.
For me, that last sentence is the real clincher, but let's leave that lay for now.
For those who want to skim the paper a bit, page 39 is where the judge starts digging into this whole "It's just a theory" nonsense. Look, I run in homeschool circles, and the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers are not evolutionists. So I hear this phrase a lot. Evolutionist homeschoolers usually give the "So is gravity" counterattack. They usually say it snarky, in a "let me demonstrate by dropping this piano on your head" kind of way. Do you know how evolution and gravity are really similar? The mechanisms of both are largely not understood and are often debated among scientists. Is gravity created by particles called gravitons? Particles no one has detected? Why is gravity so much weaker than the other basic forces? My favorite theory for that involves string theory, which has 10+ dimensions (depending on which string theory you're reading). The other forces exist only in the three dimensions we see, but gravity is spread out over all 10+ and is hence much diluted. The point is we don't know. YET. IDers have a way of making the public think that scientists always agree on everything and the only theory anyone is still debating is evolution.
But I'm not the only one with that guff. As the judge says:
Dr. Padian [a witness at court] bluntly and effectively stated that in confusing students about science generally and evolution in particular, the disclaimer makes students “stupid.”
Which makes ninth graders sound really gullible, but I see his point.
The real problem is presenting this whole argument as only having two sides: the religious ID/creationist side and the aethist/evolutionist side. I know a lot of people who believe in evolution. None of them consider themselves to be atheists (although a few call themselves agnostics). Which brings us to:
The McLean court explained that:
The approach to teaching ‘creation science’ and ‘evolution science’ . . . is identical to the two-model approach espoused by the Institute for Creation Research and is taken almost verbatim from ICR writings. It is an extension of Fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of
evolution.
The two model approach of creationists is simply a contrived dualism which has no scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose. It assumes only two explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a creator or it was not. Application of these two models, according to creationists, and the defendants, dictates that all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism and is, therefore, creation science ‘evidence[.]’
As Anakin would say, you're either with me or you're my enemy (sorry, couldn't resist). It bugs me when I'm only given two choices, and I don't fit with either.
But then it gets more complicated:
Students who do not wish to be exposed to the disclaimer and students whose parents do not care to have them exposed it, must “opt out” to avoid the unwanted religious message. Dr. Alters testified that the “opt out” feature adds “novelty,” thereby enhancing the importance of the disclaimer in the students’ eyes.8 (14:123-25 (Alters)). Moreover, the stark choice that exists between submitting to state-sponsored religious instruction and leaving the public school classroom presents a clear message to students “who are nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.”
The problem here is that in order to opt-out, you have to know what you're opting out of. So you'd have to read the disclaimer to know if you object to it. Or at least the parents have to. But yet the kids whose parents pull them out of sex-ed for religious reasons face the same outsider status, so I don't know if I find this argument particularly valid. Either way you slice it, someone is an outsider. Which is really the problem with institutionalizing education: it teaches to the "average" student, and no one is "average" either academically or personally (in situations like this one). So everyone is an outsider. OK, some of us are farther outside than others.
At any rate, the paper now turns to the issue of whether Intelligent Design can even be considered science. To the scientific community, this is a nonissue. This quote is from the National Academy of Scientists, an organization that both plaintiffs and defendants agreed was the "gold standard" of science:
NAS (National Academy of Sciences) is in agreement that science is limited to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.”
And furthermore:
Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.
And Dr. Padian again (speaking of the book Of Pandas and People which is specifically named in the disclaimer as the source book for students to refer to for more information about ID):
As Dr. Padian aptly noted, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." To that end, expert testimony from Drs. Miller and Padian provided multiple examples where Pandas asserted that no natural explanations exist, and in some cases that none could exist, and yet natural explanations have been identified in the intervening years.
Now we turn to the main book IDers site: Darwin's Black Box. Yes, I've read it. It occurred to me some years ago that evolution wasn't really taught in school, it was just given lip service. I never had it explained to me, what it really means (and doesn't mean, like "man descended from apes" or worse "monkeys". Evolution does not say these things). At any rate, I went to the library and pulled books on creationism, ID, and evolution and made up my own mind. This was one of those books. Professor Behe asserts in the opening chapter that anything that is irreducibly complex must have been designed, it couldn't have evolved. The rest of the book is him outlining how complex bacterial flagellum, blood clotting, and the immune system are. I didn't find his argument convincing. It depends, I suppose, on what your feelings are towards the word "irreducibly". It's no question these things are complicated, but irreducibly complex? I didn't buy it.
Neither does NAS:
Structures and processes that are claimed to be ‘irreducibly’ complex typically are not on closer inspection. For example, it is incorrect to assume that a complex structure or biochemical process can function only if all its components are present and functioning as we see them today. Complex biochemical systems can be built up from simpler systems through natural selection. Thus, the ‘history’ of a protein can be traced through simpler organisms . . . The evolution of complex molecular systems can occur in several ways. Natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then, at a later time, recombine those parts with other systems of components to produce a system that has a different function. Genes can be duplicated, altered, and then amplified through natural selection. The complex biochemical cascade resulting inblood clotting has been explained in this fashion.
But this one I just love:
We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution. As a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it. Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design.
Which gives me a terrific mental image of scientists proving the Big Bang by recreating it in the lab. Ah, the Big Bang, another theory not all scientists agree about. Do we see a pattern here?
But then I'm probably just getting too silly because this:
Plaintiffs’ expert Professor Padian was the only testifying expert witness with any expertise in paleontology. His testimony therefore remains unrebutted. Dr. Padian’s demonstrative slides, prepared on the basis of peer-reviewing scientific literature, illustrate how "Pandas" systematically distorts and misrepresents established, important evolutionary principles.
just made me think of Ross Gellar on Friends. What is it with paleontologists and slide-shows? They just can't resist.
At any rate, if you are only going to read part of this judge's decision, start at about page 100, when he starts breaking down the sequence of events that led to this disclaimer. It's frightening. Some of the Board members were born-again Christians, and their mission compelled them to do everything they could to get religion back in the school starting with creationism and then going for school prayer. I know they had good intentions, they thought they were doing something good for everybody. But the way they went about it made it very clear that they knew the majority of people who would be affected did NOT think this was a good thing. Starting with the science teachers:
The unrebuted evidence reveals that the teachers had to make unnecessary sacrifices and compromises advantageous toward Board members, who were steadfastly working to inject religion in the classroom, so that their students would have a biology textbook that should have been approved as a matter of course.
The board was making decisions about curriculum in meetings to which the teachers were purposefully excluded (meetings that were held without advance notice as was the standard procedure in order to keep the parents and community at large in the dark as well). It's never said but clearly felt that these teachers suspected their jobs were on the line. In one incidence, school work (an evolutionary mural) was torn down from the walls and burned (to one Board member's glee).
OK, let's let that go. The Board members stated that what they were doing was not trying to inject religion into the school (an assertion which is refuted by other testimony, if you read the paper), but to encourage critical, scientific theory. Except:
Furthermore, Board members somewhat candidly conceded that they lacked sufficient background in science to evaluate ID, and several of them testified with equal frankness that they failed to understand the substance of the curriculum change adopted on October 18, 2004.
Cleaver [a Board member] admittedly knew nothing about ID, including the words comprising the phrase, as she consistently referred to ID as “intelligence design” throughout her testimony. In addition, Superintendent Nilsen’s entire understanding of ID was that “evolution has a design.” Despite this collective failure to understand the concept of ID, which six Board members nonetheless felt was appropriate to add to ninth grade biology class to improve science education, the Board never heard from any person or organization with scientific expertise about the curriculum change, save for consistent but unwelcome advices from the District’s science teachers who uniformly opposed the change.
Let me compare/contrast what I do as a homeschooler with the School Board here. They are not teachers. They are appointed public officials. No one expects them to know everything. BUT when an issue like this comes before them they are expected to make intelligent decisions. That means you do your homework, people. You know what things mean. You know why the choice you made was the best one, and if asked you can articulate why. That seems so basic to anything it sickens me. I make all the curriculum and textbook choices for my "school". If asked why I chose one over another, I can tell you. In more detail than you'd ever want to know, I'm sure.
But what saddens me is what Casey Brown, an opposing Board member who resigned (as much as I can understand why, I kind of wish he hadn't caved), had to say:
There has been a slow but steady marginalization of some board members. Our opinions are no longer valued or listened to. Our contributions have been minimized or not acknowledged at all. A measure of that is the fact that I myself have been twice asked within the past year if I was ‘born again.’ No one has, nor should have the right, to ask that of a fellow board member. An individual’s religious beliefs should have no impact on his or her ability to serve as a school board director, nor should a person’s beliefs be used as a yardstick to measure the value of that service.
However, it has become increasingly evident that it is the direction the board has now chosen to go, holding a certain religious belief is of paramount importance.
And other opposing board members were called unpatroitic, unchristian, atheists, and were even told they were going to burn in hell (ooh, I love when people say that to me).
And one last quote, from the science teachers who (every single one of them) refused to read this disclaimer to their classes:
You have indicated that students may ‘opt-out’ of this portion [the statement read to students at the beginning of the biology evolution unit] of the class and that they will be excused and monitored by an administrator. We respectfully exercise our right to ‘opt-out’ of the statement portion of the class. We will relinquish the classroom to an administrator and we will monitor our own students. This request is based upon our considered opinion that reading the statement violates our responsibilities as professional educators as set forth in the Code of Professional Practice and Conduct for Educators[.]
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT SCIENCE.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT BIOLOGY.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT AN ACCEPTED SCIENTIFIC THEORY.
I believe that if I as the classroom teacher read the required statement, my students will inevitably (and understandably) believe that Intelligent Design is a valid scientific theory, perhaps on par with the theory of evolution. That is not true. To refer the students to ‘Of Pandas and People’ as if it is a scientific resource breaches my ethical obligation to provide them with scientific knowledge that is supported by recognized scientific proof or theory.
God bless those teachers; they've had a sucky few years.
So I'll wrap up by answering what is perhaps the inevitable question: what does a homeschooler in Minnesota care about what the public schools in Pennsylvania are doing? It's not an out-there question; if you read the judge's decision you see one of the first topics debated was who could be a plaintiff. Did they have to be the parent of a ninth-grader for their opinion to count?
It's like when they have referendums to raise property taxes so the public schools can buy books; there are always a few folks without kids wanting to know why they have to pay to support someone else's kids' education. I'm not sure why this point isn't self-evident. We are all in this together. Those kids are going to grow up to be adults, and some of them will be in charge of things that will directly affect you, even if you never have children of your own. Without sounding too melodramatic, one day they will be running this country. How could you not want them to have the best possible education?
Our country is falling farther and farther behind in math and science. Most of the top degrees earned in our colleges are being earned by foreigners who then take their degrees back to their homelands and use their knowledge there. I'm not saying exclude the foreigners (of course I'm not); I'm saying there should be more American kids willing to carry the "geek" and "nerd" labels that come with wanting to be smart in math and science. And even having this sort of debate (or having these sorts of people serving on a school board) is undermining the way kids see science. And don't even get me started on "new math".
Science is not a collection of facts in a dusty old textbook. It is a process, and it's always happening. Science is not about universal truths; it's about always finding new and better ways of describing the world around us. It's about one person getting an idea and presenting it to the community so that everyone can take potshots at it (or contribute, as the case may be). Science is moving faster than ever, things change. 100 years from now, what is thought of as the "theory of evolution" will doubtless bear little resemblence to what we know now. But the core ideas will still be there, because they work.
A couple of book recommendations: Anything by Richard Dawkins, but especially The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. Anything by Steven Pinker but especially The Blank Slate. And if the idea of "contrived dualism" strikes you as an interesting way of looking at evolution vs. ID, allow me to recommend Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry by Vine Deloria, Jr., who as a Native American has a unique persective on the whole argument. Well worth the read. Of course I don't agree with everything said in all these books, but that goes without saying.
As you probably already know, there was an important court case in Dover, PA regarding evolution vs. intelligent design. The judge's decision is here. It takes a couple of hours to get through, being 139 pages long (as the judge says, "out of an abundance of caution and in the exercise of completeness"), but well worth it. (An aside, as much as I've always known I wanted to be a writer, I've had a little more trouble with what I wanted to do as a job outside of that. I used to think being a judge would be cool, specifically so I could research law books and write massive papers like this one, but then I realized that most of being a judge was a lot more like "Night Court" without the jokes, and dealing with people everyday would be a very bad career choice for me).
At any rate, here is my summary of what the judge has to say, complete with my own thoughts. I'm not flagging anything IMO, or IMHO, or anything like that because duh, this is a blog. Of course everything is IMO here.
OK, it all started over this little disclaimer:
The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no
evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.
For me, that last sentence is the real clincher, but let's leave that lay for now.
For those who want to skim the paper a bit, page 39 is where the judge starts digging into this whole "It's just a theory" nonsense. Look, I run in homeschool circles, and the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers are not evolutionists. So I hear this phrase a lot. Evolutionist homeschoolers usually give the "So is gravity" counterattack. They usually say it snarky, in a "let me demonstrate by dropping this piano on your head" kind of way. Do you know how evolution and gravity are really similar? The mechanisms of both are largely not understood and are often debated among scientists. Is gravity created by particles called gravitons? Particles no one has detected? Why is gravity so much weaker than the other basic forces? My favorite theory for that involves string theory, which has 10+ dimensions (depending on which string theory you're reading). The other forces exist only in the three dimensions we see, but gravity is spread out over all 10+ and is hence much diluted. The point is we don't know. YET. IDers have a way of making the public think that scientists always agree on everything and the only theory anyone is still debating is evolution.
But I'm not the only one with that guff. As the judge says:
Dr. Padian [a witness at court] bluntly and effectively stated that in confusing students about science generally and evolution in particular, the disclaimer makes students “stupid.”
Which makes ninth graders sound really gullible, but I see his point.
The real problem is presenting this whole argument as only having two sides: the religious ID/creationist side and the aethist/evolutionist side. I know a lot of people who believe in evolution. None of them consider themselves to be atheists (although a few call themselves agnostics). Which brings us to:
The McLean court explained that:
The approach to teaching ‘creation science’ and ‘evolution science’ . . . is identical to the two-model approach espoused by the Institute for Creation Research and is taken almost verbatim from ICR writings. It is an extension of Fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of
evolution.
The two model approach of creationists is simply a contrived dualism which has no scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose. It assumes only two explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a creator or it was not. Application of these two models, according to creationists, and the defendants, dictates that all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism and is, therefore, creation science ‘evidence[.]’
As Anakin would say, you're either with me or you're my enemy (sorry, couldn't resist). It bugs me when I'm only given two choices, and I don't fit with either.
But then it gets more complicated:
Students who do not wish to be exposed to the disclaimer and students whose parents do not care to have them exposed it, must “opt out” to avoid the unwanted religious message. Dr. Alters testified that the “opt out” feature adds “novelty,” thereby enhancing the importance of the disclaimer in the students’ eyes.8 (14:123-25 (Alters)). Moreover, the stark choice that exists between submitting to state-sponsored religious instruction and leaving the public school classroom presents a clear message to students “who are nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.”
The problem here is that in order to opt-out, you have to know what you're opting out of. So you'd have to read the disclaimer to know if you object to it. Or at least the parents have to. But yet the kids whose parents pull them out of sex-ed for religious reasons face the same outsider status, so I don't know if I find this argument particularly valid. Either way you slice it, someone is an outsider. Which is really the problem with institutionalizing education: it teaches to the "average" student, and no one is "average" either academically or personally (in situations like this one). So everyone is an outsider. OK, some of us are farther outside than others.
At any rate, the paper now turns to the issue of whether Intelligent Design can even be considered science. To the scientific community, this is a nonissue. This quote is from the National Academy of Scientists, an organization that both plaintiffs and defendants agreed was the "gold standard" of science:
NAS (National Academy of Sciences) is in agreement that science is limited to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.”
And furthermore:
Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.
And Dr. Padian again (speaking of the book Of Pandas and People which is specifically named in the disclaimer as the source book for students to refer to for more information about ID):
As Dr. Padian aptly noted, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." To that end, expert testimony from Drs. Miller and Padian provided multiple examples where Pandas asserted that no natural explanations exist, and in some cases that none could exist, and yet natural explanations have been identified in the intervening years.
Now we turn to the main book IDers site: Darwin's Black Box. Yes, I've read it. It occurred to me some years ago that evolution wasn't really taught in school, it was just given lip service. I never had it explained to me, what it really means (and doesn't mean, like "man descended from apes" or worse "monkeys". Evolution does not say these things). At any rate, I went to the library and pulled books on creationism, ID, and evolution and made up my own mind. This was one of those books. Professor Behe asserts in the opening chapter that anything that is irreducibly complex must have been designed, it couldn't have evolved. The rest of the book is him outlining how complex bacterial flagellum, blood clotting, and the immune system are. I didn't find his argument convincing. It depends, I suppose, on what your feelings are towards the word "irreducibly". It's no question these things are complicated, but irreducibly complex? I didn't buy it.
Neither does NAS:
Structures and processes that are claimed to be ‘irreducibly’ complex typically are not on closer inspection. For example, it is incorrect to assume that a complex structure or biochemical process can function only if all its components are present and functioning as we see them today. Complex biochemical systems can be built up from simpler systems through natural selection. Thus, the ‘history’ of a protein can be traced through simpler organisms . . . The evolution of complex molecular systems can occur in several ways. Natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then, at a later time, recombine those parts with other systems of components to produce a system that has a different function. Genes can be duplicated, altered, and then amplified through natural selection. The complex biochemical cascade resulting inblood clotting has been explained in this fashion.
But this one I just love:
We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution. As a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it. Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design.
Which gives me a terrific mental image of scientists proving the Big Bang by recreating it in the lab. Ah, the Big Bang, another theory not all scientists agree about. Do we see a pattern here?
But then I'm probably just getting too silly because this:
Plaintiffs’ expert Professor Padian was the only testifying expert witness with any expertise in paleontology. His testimony therefore remains unrebutted. Dr. Padian’s demonstrative slides, prepared on the basis of peer-reviewing scientific literature, illustrate how "Pandas" systematically distorts and misrepresents established, important evolutionary principles.
just made me think of Ross Gellar on Friends. What is it with paleontologists and slide-shows? They just can't resist.
At any rate, if you are only going to read part of this judge's decision, start at about page 100, when he starts breaking down the sequence of events that led to this disclaimer. It's frightening. Some of the Board members were born-again Christians, and their mission compelled them to do everything they could to get religion back in the school starting with creationism and then going for school prayer. I know they had good intentions, they thought they were doing something good for everybody. But the way they went about it made it very clear that they knew the majority of people who would be affected did NOT think this was a good thing. Starting with the science teachers:
The unrebuted evidence reveals that the teachers had to make unnecessary sacrifices and compromises advantageous toward Board members, who were steadfastly working to inject religion in the classroom, so that their students would have a biology textbook that should have been approved as a matter of course.
The board was making decisions about curriculum in meetings to which the teachers were purposefully excluded (meetings that were held without advance notice as was the standard procedure in order to keep the parents and community at large in the dark as well). It's never said but clearly felt that these teachers suspected their jobs were on the line. In one incidence, school work (an evolutionary mural) was torn down from the walls and burned (to one Board member's glee).
OK, let's let that go. The Board members stated that what they were doing was not trying to inject religion into the school (an assertion which is refuted by other testimony, if you read the paper), but to encourage critical, scientific theory. Except:
Furthermore, Board members somewhat candidly conceded that they lacked sufficient background in science to evaluate ID, and several of them testified with equal frankness that they failed to understand the substance of the curriculum change adopted on October 18, 2004.
Cleaver [a Board member] admittedly knew nothing about ID, including the words comprising the phrase, as she consistently referred to ID as “intelligence design” throughout her testimony. In addition, Superintendent Nilsen’s entire understanding of ID was that “evolution has a design.” Despite this collective failure to understand the concept of ID, which six Board members nonetheless felt was appropriate to add to ninth grade biology class to improve science education, the Board never heard from any person or organization with scientific expertise about the curriculum change, save for consistent but unwelcome advices from the District’s science teachers who uniformly opposed the change.
Let me compare/contrast what I do as a homeschooler with the School Board here. They are not teachers. They are appointed public officials. No one expects them to know everything. BUT when an issue like this comes before them they are expected to make intelligent decisions. That means you do your homework, people. You know what things mean. You know why the choice you made was the best one, and if asked you can articulate why. That seems so basic to anything it sickens me. I make all the curriculum and textbook choices for my "school". If asked why I chose one over another, I can tell you. In more detail than you'd ever want to know, I'm sure.
But what saddens me is what Casey Brown, an opposing Board member who resigned (as much as I can understand why, I kind of wish he hadn't caved), had to say:
There has been a slow but steady marginalization of some board members. Our opinions are no longer valued or listened to. Our contributions have been minimized or not acknowledged at all. A measure of that is the fact that I myself have been twice asked within the past year if I was ‘born again.’ No one has, nor should have the right, to ask that of a fellow board member. An individual’s religious beliefs should have no impact on his or her ability to serve as a school board director, nor should a person’s beliefs be used as a yardstick to measure the value of that service.
However, it has become increasingly evident that it is the direction the board has now chosen to go, holding a certain religious belief is of paramount importance.
And other opposing board members were called unpatroitic, unchristian, atheists, and were even told they were going to burn in hell (ooh, I love when people say that to me).
And one last quote, from the science teachers who (every single one of them) refused to read this disclaimer to their classes:
You have indicated that students may ‘opt-out’ of this portion [the statement read to students at the beginning of the biology evolution unit] of the class and that they will be excused and monitored by an administrator. We respectfully exercise our right to ‘opt-out’ of the statement portion of the class. We will relinquish the classroom to an administrator and we will monitor our own students. This request is based upon our considered opinion that reading the statement violates our responsibilities as professional educators as set forth in the Code of Professional Practice and Conduct for Educators[.]
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT SCIENCE.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT BIOLOGY.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT AN ACCEPTED SCIENTIFIC THEORY.
I believe that if I as the classroom teacher read the required statement, my students will inevitably (and understandably) believe that Intelligent Design is a valid scientific theory, perhaps on par with the theory of evolution. That is not true. To refer the students to ‘Of Pandas and People’ as if it is a scientific resource breaches my ethical obligation to provide them with scientific knowledge that is supported by recognized scientific proof or theory.
God bless those teachers; they've had a sucky few years.
So I'll wrap up by answering what is perhaps the inevitable question: what does a homeschooler in Minnesota care about what the public schools in Pennsylvania are doing? It's not an out-there question; if you read the judge's decision you see one of the first topics debated was who could be a plaintiff. Did they have to be the parent of a ninth-grader for their opinion to count?
It's like when they have referendums to raise property taxes so the public schools can buy books; there are always a few folks without kids wanting to know why they have to pay to support someone else's kids' education. I'm not sure why this point isn't self-evident. We are all in this together. Those kids are going to grow up to be adults, and some of them will be in charge of things that will directly affect you, even if you never have children of your own. Without sounding too melodramatic, one day they will be running this country. How could you not want them to have the best possible education?
Our country is falling farther and farther behind in math and science. Most of the top degrees earned in our colleges are being earned by foreigners who then take their degrees back to their homelands and use their knowledge there. I'm not saying exclude the foreigners (of course I'm not); I'm saying there should be more American kids willing to carry the "geek" and "nerd" labels that come with wanting to be smart in math and science. And even having this sort of debate (or having these sorts of people serving on a school board) is undermining the way kids see science. And don't even get me started on "new math".
Science is not a collection of facts in a dusty old textbook. It is a process, and it's always happening. Science is not about universal truths; it's about always finding new and better ways of describing the world around us. It's about one person getting an idea and presenting it to the community so that everyone can take potshots at it (or contribute, as the case may be). Science is moving faster than ever, things change. 100 years from now, what is thought of as the "theory of evolution" will doubtless bear little resemblence to what we know now. But the core ideas will still be there, because they work.
A couple of book recommendations: Anything by Richard Dawkins, but especially The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. Anything by Steven Pinker but especially The Blank Slate. And if the idea of "contrived dualism" strikes you as an interesting way of looking at evolution vs. ID, allow me to recommend Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry by Vine Deloria, Jr., who as a Native American has a unique persective on the whole argument. Well worth the read. Of course I don't agree with everything said in all these books, but that goes without saying.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
All hail Ursula!
Wow, this post is almost like "the third in a series", as this interview with Ursula Le Guin touches on both of my last two topics. Her comments on CS Lewis is part of my problem with him, I think, but not all of it, so I'm still in a stew (and as I've blogged before, I can't let these things go until I understand why they bug be. It's a thing.). And of course she talks about gender in sci-fi because that's what she does. A weird coincidence, I've read all her fantasy and nonfiction books, but I've not yet read her sci-fi. Just last week I spent my entire birthday Barnes and Noble gift certificate on Le Guin sci-fi novels, so that's a situation that's about to change. The closing quote in the interview is quite lovely, so I'm going to paste it here:
Le Guin, whose fantasies are partly about the artist as magician, learning to temper power with responsibility and talent with humility, says she wrestles with the temptation to moralise. "Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it," she says. "To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible."
Which is part of what I meant about having a conversation with a book. The writer shouldn't tell you what everything means; some of it should be left to the reader to supply. The cool thing about that is your book becomes a different experience to different readers. And if your James Joyce, people can tell you what your novel means to them and then you can start saying that was always what you meant, even if it wasn't (yes, he actually did this. Don't you just love Joyce?)
And there is one more bit of Good Ursula news. I'm very excited about this one. Earthsea and Studio Ghibli are two of my favorite things.
But I haven't dug into those Le Guin books yet because I've been plowing through the stack of unread books that has been piling up in my office. I have three different "Best of" short story collections covering science fiction, fantasy, and fantasy/horror. The sci-fi one is mostly reminding me why I largely don't like sci-fi. Is it just me or is sci-fi short fiction overwhelmingly cynical, dark, and depressing? I don't need everything to end with "and they lived happily ever after", but some variation from opening with "the world sucks" and ending with "and the world still sucks" or "the world sucks harder" would be appreciated.
In general, my optimistic Pollyanna nature is better suited to fantasy. In that vein, I'm halfway through "The Year's Best Fantasy 5". Strange coincidence again, I suppose, but the Neil Gaiman story in here is a take-off from the Chronicles of Narnia called "The Problem with Susan", which I really liked but I'm sure the purists will absolutely hate. It's thoroughly pagan, and as a reader who always despised Susan's final fate, I found this Gaiman story particularly sweet. Now I have closure.
But the best I've read so far by a long shot has been "The End of the World as We Know It" by Dale Bailey, which manages to summarize not only what I hate about end of the world stories like The Stand or zombie movies, but also what I hate about women-only utopias like Herland or Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" I mean, I know I'm in the minority of my gender in not preferring the company of other women, but honestly those ideas of how great the world would be if there were no men just really blow. Honestly.
And I never got why King readers always site The Stand as the best thing he's done. I'm not saying it sucks. I'm not even saying that I didn't like it (I've read the original twice, and the uncut version once). I'm just saying Bag of Bones and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon were both much better. I'm just saying; and these things are subjective, so no, I'm not looking for an argument.
And speaking of my eccentric tastes, my new a-ha CD finally arrived. They've fallen so far out of favor I've had to acquire their last three releases as very expensive imports, and I've only managed to track down their solo work on eBay. This new one, called Analogue came with a live DVD which sadly I can't play since it's European code and my DVD players are all North America only. Bummer. But the music is good, or rather just exactly my thing. Most discs I buy I'll like one or two tracks right away but it takes me awhile to warm up to the other cuts. That's never been the case with a-ha; I always like all the tracks. It's just so perfectly me, I can't explain it. All I can say is, judging their work because you're familiar with "Take on Me" from 1984 is like someone who's never heard the Beatle's later work saying it must suck because they don't like "Love Me Do". I'm comparing evolutionary paths here not musical styles, by the way. Later a-ha bares as little resemblence to "Take on Me" as later Beatles does to "Love Me Do". And a-ha is exactly my sort of thing, that's all I'm saying. REM used to be another band where I loved all the tracks at first listen, but the last few releases from them have been really hard to get through. They're such downers. They really need to get their drummer back; I think he contributed more to the team than was apparent at the time. I don't care what you have to offer him, get Bill Berry back!
Le Guin, whose fantasies are partly about the artist as magician, learning to temper power with responsibility and talent with humility, says she wrestles with the temptation to moralise. "Sometimes one's very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it," she says. "To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible."
Which is part of what I meant about having a conversation with a book. The writer shouldn't tell you what everything means; some of it should be left to the reader to supply. The cool thing about that is your book becomes a different experience to different readers. And if your James Joyce, people can tell you what your novel means to them and then you can start saying that was always what you meant, even if it wasn't (yes, he actually did this. Don't you just love Joyce?)
And there is one more bit of Good Ursula news. I'm very excited about this one. Earthsea and Studio Ghibli are two of my favorite things.
But I haven't dug into those Le Guin books yet because I've been plowing through the stack of unread books that has been piling up in my office. I have three different "Best of" short story collections covering science fiction, fantasy, and fantasy/horror. The sci-fi one is mostly reminding me why I largely don't like sci-fi. Is it just me or is sci-fi short fiction overwhelmingly cynical, dark, and depressing? I don't need everything to end with "and they lived happily ever after", but some variation from opening with "the world sucks" and ending with "and the world still sucks" or "the world sucks harder" would be appreciated.
In general, my optimistic Pollyanna nature is better suited to fantasy. In that vein, I'm halfway through "The Year's Best Fantasy 5". Strange coincidence again, I suppose, but the Neil Gaiman story in here is a take-off from the Chronicles of Narnia called "The Problem with Susan", which I really liked but I'm sure the purists will absolutely hate. It's thoroughly pagan, and as a reader who always despised Susan's final fate, I found this Gaiman story particularly sweet. Now I have closure.
But the best I've read so far by a long shot has been "The End of the World as We Know It" by Dale Bailey, which manages to summarize not only what I hate about end of the world stories like The Stand or zombie movies, but also what I hate about women-only utopias like Herland or Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" I mean, I know I'm in the minority of my gender in not preferring the company of other women, but honestly those ideas of how great the world would be if there were no men just really blow. Honestly.
And I never got why King readers always site The Stand as the best thing he's done. I'm not saying it sucks. I'm not even saying that I didn't like it (I've read the original twice, and the uncut version once). I'm just saying Bag of Bones and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon were both much better. I'm just saying; and these things are subjective, so no, I'm not looking for an argument.
And speaking of my eccentric tastes, my new a-ha CD finally arrived. They've fallen so far out of favor I've had to acquire their last three releases as very expensive imports, and I've only managed to track down their solo work on eBay. This new one, called Analogue came with a live DVD which sadly I can't play since it's European code and my DVD players are all North America only. Bummer. But the music is good, or rather just exactly my thing. Most discs I buy I'll like one or two tracks right away but it takes me awhile to warm up to the other cuts. That's never been the case with a-ha; I always like all the tracks. It's just so perfectly me, I can't explain it. All I can say is, judging their work because you're familiar with "Take on Me" from 1984 is like someone who's never heard the Beatle's later work saying it must suck because they don't like "Love Me Do". I'm comparing evolutionary paths here not musical styles, by the way. Later a-ha bares as little resemblence to "Take on Me" as later Beatles does to "Love Me Do". And a-ha is exactly my sort of thing, that's all I'm saying. REM used to be another band where I loved all the tracks at first listen, but the last few releases from them have been really hard to get through. They're such downers. They really need to get their drummer back; I think he contributed more to the team than was apparent at the time. I don't care what you have to offer him, get Bill Berry back!
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Women in Sci-Fi
I found an interesting article on Strange Horizons about one woman's reaction to Star Wars. My first response was, "Down, girl. It's just a movie." I admit I chuckled at the line The Jedi mumble Taoist-derived platitudes to prove that they're on the side of Light but they are really a fusion of a rapture cult and a multinational corporation.
Further down she talks about the role of women in the Star Wars saga, which is to say it's ludicrously minimal. I've ranted on this before, if you remember. And if you have the DVD for Episode III, take a look at the deleted scenes. All the woman scenes were cut (reducing Padme to a woman who brushes her hair and cries). I'm not that big of a Star Wars geek; I've never gotten into the roleplaying games or the novels, so my info is based purely on what's in the movies. So based on Return of the Jedi, I always thought that Padme had given birth, hid Luke on Tattoine as he was the only child Anakin knew about, and took Leia to Alderan where she then formed the Rebel Alliance. I liked the idea of this woman doing everything she could to overthrow her own husband (almost a Shakespearean tragedy). I figured she died when Leia was about five.
But apparently I was wrong. She did of a broken heart. God, that was stupid. Not to mention really hard to explain to children, and believe me they ask. The whole birth scene drove me nuts. Poor Padme lying flat on her back, surrounded by machines. Obiwan is standing there, but he's not even holding her hand, let alone offering her any sort of support. Then again with that metal thing over her pelvis it's hard to see what's going on. Maybe she was getting a C-section.
But I digress. The part of this article where the woman really had me was when she pointed out that there was only one woman per trilogy. You never see Padme or Leia interact with other women. Interesting. This is true of pretty much all the sci-fi/fantasy films I grew up on. There was always only one woman. That might explain why the only groups I feel comfortable in myself are groups where I am the only woman. And a group of all women? Forget about it!
Not that I blame George Lucas for my lack of social skills. And that is really an old school paradigm. Look at The Matrix. Granted Trinity largely exists to be the love interest, but some of the women of Zion had scenes together with no men in sight (granted, they were talking about the men...). And two of them even fought side-by-side defending the ship harbor (or whatever they called it).
And for those who object to the entire existance of this article, I'm going to end with a Joss Whedon quote:
"I think it’s always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it’s successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why. ‘Buffy,’ on the other hand is, I hope, not idiotic. We think very carefully about what we’re trying to say emotionally, politically, and even philosophically while we’re writing it. The process of breaking a story involves the writers and myself, so a lot of different influences, prejudices, and ideas get rolled up into it. So it really is, apart from being a big pop culture phenom, something that is deeply layered textually episode by episode. I do believe that there is plenty to study and there are plenty of things going on in it, as there are in me that I am completely unaware of. People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There’s nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing. So, like that, I think ‘Buffy’ should be analyzed, broken down, and possibly banned."
Further down she talks about the role of women in the Star Wars saga, which is to say it's ludicrously minimal. I've ranted on this before, if you remember. And if you have the DVD for Episode III, take a look at the deleted scenes. All the woman scenes were cut (reducing Padme to a woman who brushes her hair and cries). I'm not that big of a Star Wars geek; I've never gotten into the roleplaying games or the novels, so my info is based purely on what's in the movies. So based on Return of the Jedi, I always thought that Padme had given birth, hid Luke on Tattoine as he was the only child Anakin knew about, and took Leia to Alderan where she then formed the Rebel Alliance. I liked the idea of this woman doing everything she could to overthrow her own husband (almost a Shakespearean tragedy). I figured she died when Leia was about five.
But apparently I was wrong. She did of a broken heart. God, that was stupid. Not to mention really hard to explain to children, and believe me they ask. The whole birth scene drove me nuts. Poor Padme lying flat on her back, surrounded by machines. Obiwan is standing there, but he's not even holding her hand, let alone offering her any sort of support. Then again with that metal thing over her pelvis it's hard to see what's going on. Maybe she was getting a C-section.
But I digress. The part of this article where the woman really had me was when she pointed out that there was only one woman per trilogy. You never see Padme or Leia interact with other women. Interesting. This is true of pretty much all the sci-fi/fantasy films I grew up on. There was always only one woman. That might explain why the only groups I feel comfortable in myself are groups where I am the only woman. And a group of all women? Forget about it!
Not that I blame George Lucas for my lack of social skills. And that is really an old school paradigm. Look at The Matrix. Granted Trinity largely exists to be the love interest, but some of the women of Zion had scenes together with no men in sight (granted, they were talking about the men...). And two of them even fought side-by-side defending the ship harbor (or whatever they called it).
And for those who object to the entire existance of this article, I'm going to end with a Joss Whedon quote:
"I think it’s always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it’s successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why. ‘Buffy,’ on the other hand is, I hope, not idiotic. We think very carefully about what we’re trying to say emotionally, politically, and even philosophically while we’re writing it. The process of breaking a story involves the writers and myself, so a lot of different influences, prejudices, and ideas get rolled up into it. So it really is, apart from being a big pop culture phenom, something that is deeply layered textually episode by episode. I do believe that there is plenty to study and there are plenty of things going on in it, as there are in me that I am completely unaware of. People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There’s nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing. So, like that, I think ‘Buffy’ should be analyzed, broken down, and possibly banned."
Monday, December 05, 2005
Can I forgive C. S. Lewis?
When did I know I wanted to be a fantasy writer? The first time I laid hands on The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I must have been only five at the time - too young to read it anway - when I found an old copy in my grandmother's laundry room amid an assortment of library books and textbooks that uncles had taken from school and never returned. I remember turning the pages, making up stories to fit the illustrations. (There was an anatomy book in the mix that was quite cool too, but that's a story for a different day).
When I was old enough to read, TLTWTW had the distinction of being the book I re-read the most. It probably still is. Most of my early work had the same plot - kids find magic doorway into alternate universe.
But I distinctly remember the day when I was in the fifth grade when I friend of mine from a religious family told me what TLTWTW was really all about. I had no idea; we seldom went to church. Now in the fifth grade I had no idea what an allegory was, but as my friend explained how Aslan was really Jesus, etc., etc. I felt deeply betrayed. It was like this writer whom I had trusted so completely had been tricking me all along. It was like I accepted an invitation to dinner, looking forward to good food and conversation, and arrived to find my host had really invited me over to pitch his Amway products. Well, shortly after that I discovered the Hobbit, and then LOTR, and then Dragonlance. And I never went back to Narnia.
Now my own son is approaching the age where he could read these books. And I still have them all, mass market paperbacks with all the illustrations from the hardcovers. And the upcoming movie has definitely peaked his interest. I've tried reading them again, to catch some of that old magic again, but I just can't get into it like I did. I can easily see where he is demonizing Muslims and aetheists.
I've been doing compare and contrast in my head. How is Lewis intolerable to me when other books are not? The fact that Tolkein was a staunch Catholic permeates all of LOTR, yet there is no overt religion in it. More interestingly (for me anyway) is how LeGuin's taoist beliefs permeate the Earthsea books, and yet nothing is overt there either. I think it's just the allegorical style that I can't stand. I like to think of reading a book as having a sort of dialogue with the writer, we both bring something to the transaction. But an allegory is more like a school lecture.
Well anyway, there are my half-formed ideas. I have to go make dinner. But there's an interesting article about C. S. Lewis here that's definitely worth a read.
When I was old enough to read, TLTWTW had the distinction of being the book I re-read the most. It probably still is. Most of my early work had the same plot - kids find magic doorway into alternate universe.
But I distinctly remember the day when I was in the fifth grade when I friend of mine from a religious family told me what TLTWTW was really all about. I had no idea; we seldom went to church. Now in the fifth grade I had no idea what an allegory was, but as my friend explained how Aslan was really Jesus, etc., etc. I felt deeply betrayed. It was like this writer whom I had trusted so completely had been tricking me all along. It was like I accepted an invitation to dinner, looking forward to good food and conversation, and arrived to find my host had really invited me over to pitch his Amway products. Well, shortly after that I discovered the Hobbit, and then LOTR, and then Dragonlance. And I never went back to Narnia.
Now my own son is approaching the age where he could read these books. And I still have them all, mass market paperbacks with all the illustrations from the hardcovers. And the upcoming movie has definitely peaked his interest. I've tried reading them again, to catch some of that old magic again, but I just can't get into it like I did. I can easily see where he is demonizing Muslims and aetheists.
I've been doing compare and contrast in my head. How is Lewis intolerable to me when other books are not? The fact that Tolkein was a staunch Catholic permeates all of LOTR, yet there is no overt religion in it. More interestingly (for me anyway) is how LeGuin's taoist beliefs permeate the Earthsea books, and yet nothing is overt there either. I think it's just the allegorical style that I can't stand. I like to think of reading a book as having a sort of dialogue with the writer, we both bring something to the transaction. But an allegory is more like a school lecture.
Well anyway, there are my half-formed ideas. I have to go make dinner. But there's an interesting article about C. S. Lewis here that's definitely worth a read.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Fortune's Fool
OK, Blogger is doing weird things with the formatting on this one but I think I got it working now. Just pretend all the paragraphs have indents, OK? Here it is, Fortune's Fool, my little superhero tale. Please see my previous post for the caveats.
FORTUNE’S FOOL
I came in low, skimming over the waves close enough to feel the spray on my face. I followed the sharp upsweep of the breakers beating against the spindle-like station, hovered for a moment over the deck, then gently floated down until my toes touched the concrete. I had done this times without count, but this was the first time I had done it in sneakers.
The massive, bat-like wings only I could see folded back into my body as I opened the sliding glass door and stepped into my former home, secret headquarters of the Strange Trio.
I know. Lame name for a bunch of superheroes. That’s not why I left, but it might as well have been.
The words “Why am I doing this?” had been repeating themselves in my head all day. They had harmony and counterpoint now. They were practically a Gregorian choir: Cur hic facio.
The sitting room was empty, but I could hear someone banging around in the kitchen. From the doorway I watched my old roommate Faye spreading mashed potatoes over a shepherd’s pie. I had half-turned to leave – Faye was not the first person here I wanted to talk to –when Faye lifted the casserole to carry it to the oven, saw me standing there, and dropped it with a crash.
“Mol?” Her hands were at her mouth, her eyes quivering, and all the old loathing came back just like that. “Mol? Is it really you?”
“If I were a doppelganger, would I say no?”
“But I… we all thought you were dead!”
“Yeah. That had been the whole idea.”
Faye pulled herself together enough to realize she had shepherd’s pie all over her shoes. Apparently her “latent telepathic gifts” had never manifested or I wouldn’t have been able to surprise her like that.
“Allow me,” I said, unable to resist the temptation to show off. It wasn’t an effort, it was more a relaxation of effort, letting go of some of the hold I had over my demon, but letting him out just enough to do my bidding before binding him back within my consciousness.
When I was done Faye once more held a casserole dish in her hands.
“You can’t eat that,” I warned. “My control isn’t that good. I’m sure it’s full of glass. Easier to clean up, though.”
“My god, Mol,” she said. “You’ve changed.” She gaped at me for an uncomfortably long minute before chucking the casserole in the trash. “Your visit, the timing of it, I don’t want to say ‘fortuitous’…”
“Boss Man called me. In my head. That old trick.”
“What?”
“Well, apparently he knew I wasn’t dead.”
“No, Mol, you don’t understand. The Boss is in a coma. He has been for days. Not even I could reach him!”
“It figures it was something like that,” I said. I had woken this morning with a splitting headache and a desperate need to be here, clearing an implanted impulse. It had Boss Man’s fingerprints all over it, so to speak. But there was really only one skill I had that the others couldn’t at least simulate. I knew why the Boss Man had called me. He needed to die.
“I didn’t think he was still in there,” Faye was saying. “I…” Her eyes were quivering again and I held back a sigh of impatience, but I needn’t have bothered. Being an empath, she felt it anyway. I had to get out of that kitchen.
“Maybe I should just see him and go,” I said.
“You are such an ingrate!”
“Excuse me?”
“That man did everything for you! He took you out of that asylum, made you whole again. He was like a father to you, to all of us.”
“I have no father,” I said.
“Heartless bitch.” Faye never swore. The words sounded weird just coming out of her mouth. Like it was a foreign language she had learned phonetically.
“You’re the empath, you should know,” I said and finally made my escape to the elevator. I pushed the button for sublevel 8, where the infirmary was.
How could the Boss Man ask me to do this after what he nearly did to me all those years ago? What he would have done if I hadn’t faked my death in a fight on an atoll and run away?
And how could I do it? Because I was, wasn’t I? Faye was right. He was as much of a father as I would ever know.
A strange young man was standing in the hallway outside of the infirmary watching me approach.
“Hi!” he said, putting out a hand in a gesture I’m sure he intended to be friendly but I found aggressive in the extreme. I don’t touch people. It’s generally assumed this is because of my superpower, but really I just don’t like it. Realizing I wasn’t going to take his hand, he wiped his hands on his jeans and thrust it back in his pocket. “You must be Darkfire.”
“God, no.” Worse than the Strange Trio. “It’s just Mol.”
“I’m Gary then,” he said, thrusting that hand out again. I stepped back and his cheeks flushed. “Oh, sorry. Faye told me once… I just forgot.”
“Did Faye tell you I was here?”
“Yes, but I also saw you come in on radar. Or at least I figured it was you. You’re not wearing your… but I guess you wouldn’t be, would you?”
“My uniform is at the bottom of the ocean. I always assumed I had a microchip implanted somewhere too, but I wasn’t about to start digging around for it.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea! Brian lost his helmet in this fight once and he disappeared on all my scopes. But with an embedded chip…”
“Gary?” I interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Who are you?”
“Oh! I supposed you wouldn’t know. I’m your replacement in the Trio. Boss Man found me after you left.”
“What do you do?”
“I invent stuff. I have a Super Suit. It’s armor-plated with guns and rockets and it flies!” I thought he was going to wet himself just talking about it. I managed a smile that I hoped didn’t look too forced.
“Where’s Brian?” I asked.
“He’s in there with the Boss Man,” Gary said.
“Go get Faye. She’s going to want to be here when I do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Just go get Faye.”
Boss Man was in the room that was the ICU of our little infirmary. I had spent a few days here once myself, recovering from injuries from one of our save-the-world fights. Brian had nodded off in a chair pulled up to the bedside. He looked bad, drawn and pale, almost as bad as the Boss Man himself.
Or so I thought until I got a good look at the Boss Man. The robust, meaty Italian I had known was just skin and bones now, and the skin hung in loose folds. All of his thick, steel-gray hair had gone.
I stood over him, my fingertips trailing over the sheets, not quite touching his spindly arm. “I don’t think I can do this,” I said, barely more than a whisper but enough to wake Brian.
“Mol? Is it you?” he asked, still half-asleep by the sound of his voice.
“That seems to be the question of the day. Yes, it is I.”
“The Boss Man called you.”
“Yes.”
Brian nodded and turned his face away. I looked down at the Boss Man, giving Brian the moment he needed.
“What happened? A fight?”
“No,” he said, getting up from the chair and moving to the far side of the room. “Some sort of degenerative neurological thing. Even the Boss Man didn’t really know. He ran lots of tests, even consulted with real doctors, but they all came up blank. His theory was that his own mental powers were turning in on themselves.”
“How long has he been like this?”
“More than a month. I tried…” His voice hitched. “Don’t tell Faye, but I tried to overdose him with morphine last week. It didn’t work, obviously. I couldn’t bear to just pull his…” He broke off again.
“Well, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To use the power he always hated.”
“What are you talking about?”
Before I could answer Gary returned with Faye. Her eyes were red but she was stoically calm.
“The gang’s all here,” I said with a sigh. “No point in delaying the inevitable.”
I took one of the Boss Man’s cold bony hands in mine then leaned over him to kiss his still lips.
I braced myself against the sensation that would surely follow. But it was as useless as bracing yourself against a coming tidal wave. Nothing you could do was going to keep yourself from being swept hundreds of feet inland if you were lucky, out to sea if you were unlucky.
The Boss Man’s soul washed over me, nothing like water. I wasn’t big enough to contain it, if you see what I mean. I heard myself cry out as I fell back. I tried for the chair Brian had left at the bedside but missed, landing hard on the cold floor.
Then he was gone. But he had left something behind. That had never happened before. But being that he had been the most advanced telepath on the planet, I should not have been surprised. He had focused all his consciousness on a single thought so that when his soul had passed through me to the next place, the thought had been left behind.
And now I was crying. God. But I could still blame him, couldn’t I? He should have told me.
Faye was in full waterworks mode now, providing the perfect cover for me to slip away. I took the elevator up to the Boss Man’s private quarters and headed to his study where he kept his computer with his personal files. I had only been here once before, but nothing had changed in five years. Not even the password on the computer.
I read his notes on my file for a second time, but the context was different now. It didn’t say what I thought it had said. He hadn’t been trying to take my demon from me, to leave me bereft as a “normal girl”. The “cure” he had spoken of was not going to strip me of my powers, it was going to give me better control over my powers.
“He wasn’t as sure of it as it sounds there,” Brian said from behind me. I hadn’t even heard him come in the room. “If he had been, he would have sent us to find you. I mean, it seems he knew all along that you weren’t dead.”
“He talked to you about me?”
“Once or twice. He said you have an extra gland in your brain that gives you your powers, but it’s pressing on other parts of your brain, affecting their behavior. You perceive mental images as real ones. He compared it to someone with night terrors. Their dreams are getting funneled through the memory part of the brain as if they had actually happened in a way that doesn’t happen in a normal brain, whatever that is.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your ‘demon’ is just your way of perceiving your powers. You’re not actually possessed by an alien entity. It’s all just you.”
“And he was going to take that perception away.”
“He was going to try to. Then you would perceive your powers as just powers, like mine or Faye’s. Without the guilt or sense of impending doom.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I had lived with this being inside of me for as far back as I could remember. It had controlled me, with violent results, until I was twelve. Until Boss Man had found me and taken me away. He had helped me take the control away from my demon. Now it turns out he had never believed it was a demon.
“I can follow his research. If you like, I could try…”
“No,” I said, switching the computer off. “What difference would it make? I would perceive it as a chemical thing from some mystery gland? That may be reality for you science types, but I kind of prefer the demon myself.”
Brian went with me back up to top level. I could tell he had something he wanted to say, but I very much didn’t want him to say it. We had made it all the way to the sliding glass door before he finally spoke.
“You could stay,” he said, all in a rush.
“I don’t think so.”
“We could use you on the team, especially now that Boss Man is gone.”
“What about Gary?”
“We could be the Strange Quartet.”
“Ugh. No!” I reached for the handle of the door when rain began to fall with a suddenness that only happens in the tropics.
“Now it looks like you have to stay,” Brian said. Something on my face must have given away my suspicions, because he added, “Don’t look at me. I don’t control the weather.”
“And gadget boy downstairs? Did he make a weather control machine?”
“Of course not. Maybe in a couple years, though. That boy is sharp.”
“Say good-bye to Faye for me. I don’t think I could bear to.”
“Sure. Now that you’re no longer dead, maybe you could stop by from time to time?”
“Maybe,” I agreed then stepped out into the downpour, letting my demon wings stretch wide and lift me into the air. I tried to picture it as just a gland in my brain, but to my eyes those wings were still real in all their leathery glory.
On my way back to the mainland, sometime after the rain had stopped, I passed the tiny atoll where I had had my “fatal” battle with the super villain Odric the Odd. I didn’t land, didn’t spare it more than a passing glance.
But back on that atoll was the memory of a girl no more than sixteen, anger coursing through her like liquid heat. Control over her demon was nearly nonexistent. The second-rate villain had been dispatched in record time, his unconscious body lying near the water’s edge. The girl was alone, Brian and Faye miles away chasing down Odric’s villain cohorts. This was the only opportunity to escape. But there was the little matter of tracers. The girl took off her helmet and belt then the rest of her clothes just to be sure. She sunk them all to the bottom of the sea with the strongest push her demon-power could muster. Then, naked as Ishtar going to hell to save her lover/son, she had flown, appropriately enough, off into the sunset.
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