Finally the evolution debate arrives at UNCP

... in form of a three-hour video that a creationist student (I presume) group wants to show next Tuesday in the UC. If I was a creationist, I could come up with a less boring way to indoctrinate people, but since I am not one, I'll use something that is *more* boring: giving you reading material. So get ready for an exciting debate:

Since we're basically revisiting a debate that has been going on for about 150 years, first some historic documents: The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law provides the goodies (and a concise explanation of the different variants of Creationism and Intelligent Design).

Natural History Magazine presents a debate between the two sides of the Intelligent Design-Evolution debate.

The New York Times has a couple of lesson plans on evolution (and some on the debate on Intelligent Design).

Christianity Today has a number of articles sympathetic to Intelligent Design, among them interviews with Rob Moll (a journalist who makes the case for ID) and William Dembsky (one of its main proponents among scientists).

For a different perspective, read Judge Jones's decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the recent Pennsylvania court case on whether Intelligent Design may be taught in public schools.

Last November, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote a widely regarded Washington Post column arguing that faith and science are not in conflict.

And in TCS Daily, Uriah Kriegel argues that Intelligent Design is not a falsifiable theory and therefore not scientific.

And finally (for now), there is an interesting NY Review of Books article by Richard Lewontin on the evolution debates.

Still awake?

More on Project Implicit

(the research project that produced the bias/partisanship study mentioned below) can be found here. You can also request a number of reprints and unpublished papers. And here is an article in the APA's Monitor on Psychology on implicit association tests. And here is a transcript of a Scientific American Frontiers program on unconscious choices that discusses such tests. And the BBC asks, catchily, Are you a racist? ...

Have Republicans "implicit biases against blacks"?

Today's Washington Post reports on a study that claims to show that Republicans are more biased against blacks than Democrats are. Created quite a discussion at Ann Althouse's.

I haven't read the study and I am not a specialist in Political Psychology, so I cannot tell you how reliable those results are. However, three points:

First, the study talks about cognitive bias; that's conceptually different from stereotypes (generalizations about a group of people), prejudice (a pre-judgment of somebody, usually due to stereotyping), and discrimination (differential treatment of different groups of people). What is racism -- bias, stereotype, prejudice, or discrimination? There is no obvious definition.

Second, the main measure used by the study, it seems, is based on word-image association: Racial bias is determined by the type of words respondents associate with black or white faces, and by the speed with which the word associations are given. Biased people associate more negative terms with black faces, and they do this more quickly than others. The test is computerized (of course) and available online. You can try the test yourself at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. The benefit of the test is that it uses automated coding procedures and thereby reduces the impact of the political biases that researchers may have. However, at first sight I find it quite a leap of faith to accept that unthinking responses to faces capture stereotypes or even prejudice. But take a look at the online test and decide for yourself.

Third, the study is based on a quantitative comparison of Republicans and Democrats. Obviously, not all Republicans in the study were more biased than Democrats, and vice versa. So, being a Republican does not automatically mean that one is biased, and being a Democrat doesn't mean that one doesn't have any biases. And maybe the relationship between bias and party is due to some third factor -- region, for example, level of education, and so on.

If I find an online copy of the paper or more information on it, I'll post it.

Pretty good food

Generally speaking, Bob Schieffer's interview with President Bush (on CBS's Face the Nation) was not remarkable (NSA wiretapping was absolutely necessary but could not be discussed in public because terrorists would otherwise guess that there was wiretapping, and similar really new arguments). But specifically speaking, there were some remarkable personal remarks about old foes and new friends: Hillary is "formidable" and Bill is his "new brother." And then there was the following explanation why being president is a good thing (about 18 minutes into the interview; the transcript is here):


Pres. BUSH: (...) I would highly recommend this job for
people.

SCHIEFFER: Mm-hmm. You don't see this as the great white presidency, as
Harry Truman said.

Pres. BUSH: No. It's an inconvenience.

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Pres. BUSH: But I'm a volunteer.

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Pres. BUSH: Nobody made me run for president. Probably me of anybody else
in the modern history knows what I was getting into.

SCHIEFFER: Mm-hmm.

Pres. BUSH: Because I saw a good man here and watched him carefully.

SCHIEFFER: Mm-hmm.

Pres. BUSH: But now I--nobody should feel sorry for me. And I certainly
don't feel sorry for myself. You know, it's an inconvenience that you can't
go to the Wal-Mart or something like that.

SCHIEFFER: Mm-hmm.

Pres. BUSH: On the other hand, the honor and the--is fantastic and the
food's pretty good.