Here at BA Central, I have my hands full trying to battle the Forces of Darkness: those who would spin, fold, and mutilate reality for their own gain. They may be motivated by greed, or power, or ignorance, or ideology, but the thing they all have in common is, they’re wrong. They come in many flavors: homeopaths, psychics, creationists, antivaxxers… and yes, sadly, far too many politicians.

And I can rail against them time and again, my arsenal filled with the facts from an entire Universe at my disposal, yet make hardly a dent in their armor.

Sometimes, though, a small dose of satire penetrates right through that shielding and pierces the very heart of antiscience. Thank you, The Daily Show, for fighting this good fight:

A few nights ago, my wife went outside for a moment, only to come running back in a minute later, grabbing me. "Phil, come out here, you have to see this!"

So I went out, and she pointed out this lovely lady to me:

I recognized it right away: a katydid, though that’s a fairly generic name. I think that’s actually an example of Microcentrum retinerve, or the Lesser Angle-winged Katydid (though it’s possibly Microcentrum rhombifolium; it’s hard to tell in these pictures^*). They’re pretty common in North America, though usually not this far west from what I can tell. It was roughly 5 – 7 cm long, and quite pretty. I suspect this one is female because there are no brown spots near the tops of the wings, which males have (I wondered briefly if it may have been a nymph, but this late in the season that seems unlikely). I would’ve checked for an ovipositor, but c’mon, have some respect.

Check out those wings: they look amazingly like plant leaves, which is of course why my wife was so excited. The obvious conclusion is that long ago, the insects like this that had greenish wings with vein-like structures were harder to spot by predatory birds, and were able to pass this characteristic down to their kids (ones that were easier to see got eaten, and didn’t get a chance to reproduce as much). Little by little, bit by bit, every time one insect’s wings looked a bit more leafy than its siblings it would tend to live longer, and reproduce more. Over thousands, millions, of generations of katydids we get this: an insect that would be incredibly difficult to see from the air. Natural selection at work, my friends. Some people would even call this evolution. I know I would.

A very cool thing to see, and a fun example of how wonderful and subtle nature can be.

But sometimes subtlety is overrated. Wouldn’t it have been cooler to see one like this?

[If you like pix of insects, my Hive Overmind co-blogger Ed Yong just coincidentally mentioned the blog Myrmecos by Alex Wild, which has stunning photography.]

^* And duh, of course I had to look those names up online. I’m an astronomer, not a bugologist.

So, last night was another debate among the Republican candidates for President. While Ron Paul appears to have done quite well, at least according to an MSNBC poll, it was Rick Perry who is grabbing headlines.

Of course, that’s because what he said was outrageously awful. About climate science, he said, "…just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell." That analogy is so ridiculous it’s hard to know where to start; but a good place might be to simply say that Galileo had the advantage of being right. Just because a tiny fraction of people claim global warming isn’t real, or that humans aren’t responsible, doesn’t make them correct. Especially when going up against the overwhelming evidence compiled by a consensus of 97% of scientists who study climate as their career.

Also, the religiously conservative Perry should be a bit more circumspect on his analogies. It wasn’t scientists who were fighting Galileo, it was religious conservatives.

Bismillah, no!

Jon Huntsman, as expected, stood up for science, as Sheril Kirshenbaum points out on her new Culture of Science blog. And while I disagree with Huntsman on a number of social and government issues, it’s nice to know one of the Republican candidates is willing to at least dip his toe in reality. But how messed up is it that supporting actual evidence-based research is considered political suicide in the GOP?

If you’re curious about where the other candidates stand on issues of global warming and evolution, Luke Scientiæ has compiled an overview. I’ve looked it over and that article falls into line with what I’ve read elsewhere as well. It’s not a pretty picture; with the exception of Huntsman essentially all the currently viable candidates have gone out of their way to deny basic science such as evolution. That includes Ron Paul.

As Tom Chivers wrote for The Telegraph about this cohort of antiscience candidates:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, as the old saw goes. Nothing: not anatomy, not biochemistry, certainly not genetics. Not species distribution or death or the immune system or sex. Nothing. It’s like trying to explain the behaviour of football players without acknowledging the existence of a game of football.

As I’ve pointed out before, the same is true for climate science. It’s de rigeur for Republican candidates to deny global warming, and it’s even worse for Tea Partiers. That’s not surprising as the noise machine rattles on; a recent study that did not link cosmic rays to global warming is being touted as saying exactly the opposite (you can find links to more about that on Greg Laden’s blog). Heck, a paper that got lots of play in the global warming denial sphere was so flawed a journal editor resigned over it, saying it should not have been published. But that won’t even slow things down.

As we get closer to the Republican nomination — yegads, still a year off — expect to see the noise ratcheted up and the rhetoric to get even more heated. This is going to be a very long process, and given what I saw last night, an embarrassing one.

With the seeming onslaught of attacks on reality coming from all over the country, I hate to add to the bad news… but I will because the bad news shows just how silly antiscience legislators can be, and there’s also some good news to go along with it. So that’s nice. And I’ll end with an article that shows us why those of us in the reality-based community have such a hard time pushing back against nonsense.

The Good:

A couple of years ago Louisiana passed a law designed to destroy good science, allowing teachers to use creationist materials in the classroom, despite this being a clear violation of the US Constitution. So why is this good news? Because a bill has been filed to repeal that awful law. Even cooler, this bill came about because of efforts by a high school student in Baton Rouge named Zack Kopplin, who has been working with the Louisiana Coalition for Science.

In high school I was busy goofing off with my friends. Zack Kopplin is busy taking on the entire Louisiana State legislature.

Good on him! And while it’s still in the early stages of this fight, it shows that grassroots efforts can get things done.

The Bad:

(more…)

A bill clearly intended to promote and protect antiscience passed in the Tennessee State House yesterday, by a vote of 70 – 23.

Let that sink in. 70 to 23.

The bill is another in a long series of creationist (and broadened into other antiscience topics) wedge bills designed to weaken the teaching of real science in public schools. The summary makes that clear:

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

On the surface this sounds like legit science; after all, science thrives on understanding the weaknesses in ideas so they can be improved. But if you read that last part, conservative antiscience rears its head: the two specific cases mentioned are evolution and global warming.

That doesn’t sound like real science is the motivation behind this bill — and reading quotes by its supporters confirms it. What this really means is that if a teacher wants to declare the Earth is 6000 years old (or make some other clearly wrong ideologically-based claim), that teacher cannot be stopped.

Similar antiscience bills (usually given the Orwellian title of "academic freedom bills") have been created in Oklahoma (though defeated, barely), Mississippi, and in Louisiana, where creationist and part-time exorcist Governor Bobby Jindal signed it into state law.

So this bill passed the House, but it still has to pass the Tennessee Senate. They have their own version up for vote targeted for April 20. If you live in Tennessee, I urge you to go to the NCSE website, read up on this, and then write your local representative.

Because if this bill passes into law, then…

I suspect the science in this may be a bit off, but it’s cool, and honestly, more than a little creepy.

If you like this — that is, if it doesn’t completely freak you out like it did me — then check out Cyriak’s blog and website which is loaded with such things. DO NOT MISS The Wall of Shatner. Very, very seriously funny and weird and freaky and messed up.

Tip o’ the finger (hahahah! Get it?) to Arthur Taylor.

Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney has an interesting discussion about why science is still so massively under attack right now, even though Bush’s anti-science regime is gone, and Obama promised to restore science to its rightful place.

Chris notes things have changed. In an interview he did he notes that before, it was a top-down attack, orchestrated by the White House. Now, we’re seeing more of a bottom-up effort to suppress science. I agree, though I’ll add that a lot of Congresscritters are pushing hard against science; I could easily name a half-dozen Senators and Representatives who are virulently antiscience. But we are seeing it at all levels, from school boards up to state legislatures (and Attorneys General) up to Congress.

There are too many attacks to even list coherently, ranging from climate science to evolution and stem cell research. It’s the same old list, in fact, but a lot of the names have changed since 2008. With this election today, I certainly hope things get better, but if anyone from the Tea Party is elected it certainly won’t help.

I implore everyone reading this to find out where your candidates stand on important issues. Not just taxes and health care and all that (which has become so polarized it’s obvious where people are just by what party they claim as their own) but also on science topics. I am hardly a single-issue voter, but where someone stands on things like global warming and the teaching of creationism is pretty important to me, too.