In my last post about academia, I was less than pleased with the bureaucratic crap that I had experienced. Since that time, however, things have changed in a more positive direction. After discussing the situation with our department head,it was suggested that I could develop a new course for the summer and, after that, would enter the course catalog as a special topics course that would be available for professors and graduate students in the future.
After being given this task, I, with the help of the good Reverend Linus, have finished developing the first offering under this new special topics course: Popular Culture and Society. If approved by all of the appropriate committees, the course will be an intensive four week course which examines the interaction of popular culture with the five major social institutions: family, government, religion, education, and economic institutions. Here's hoping that the offering we have created gets over the necessary hurdles, and then I'll just need to get enough students to sign up so that the course will make.
I am quickly approaching the end of my time here in the mountains. I will soon walk away with a Master's Degree in hand and I will enter into the next stage of my education somewhere in the lower 48 states --I thought about Alaska but none of the programs offered a PhD, and Hawaii is too expensive. That is, if some of the departmental rules don't help to thwart my success.
Two of the rules in particular. Like the rule that Graduate students cannot teach a course in the department until after we have completed our thesis; or the rule that we cannot teach any course above the 2000 level.
Times are tough, and schools are trying to get their money's worth. I can't help but wonder if these factors will negate all of my other positive traits.
Will this be the factor that gets my application denied in a very close race, or the factor that gets me automatically tossed from the running because it is easy to thin out the herd this way?
I know that I'm not the only person with these concerns as I have discussed these issues with others in the graduate program. I just hope that my worries are just paranoia and not a vision of the future
On November 24th, 2009, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species will have been in publication for 150 years. One hundred-fifty fucking years of scientific advances that keep showing support for the main ideas of evolution, but it's still considered a "controversy" in the United States.
The theory of evolution is apparently so "controversial" in the United States that a biopic about the religious struggles faced by Darwin was unable to find a distributor. A public outcry following the report has apparently spurred a bidding war****.
Here is the thing, there is no fucking controversy. Only a few scientists say that evolution is false, and their motives are often religious. The remaining opposition to the ideas espoused by Darwin*, are largely religious assholes with too much faith and too little brains.
Take, for example, the Dumb and Dumber of Apologetics: Ray Comfort (Banana Man) and Kirk Cameron**. Banana Man and his sidekick are on a new mission to misrepresent evolution through their campaign to pass out copies of On the Origin of the Species with a new introduction penned by Comfort himself.
If you couldn't stomach the trash being spewed by Cameron, it boils down to this: Comfort writes that Darwin was a racist, a sexist, and religious subversive. Wait, there's more. Not only was Darwin an asshole, Comfort then makes the well worn Evolution = Hitler claim. Once Comfort pulls out the traditional talking points attacking the man and his theory, he then attempts to tack on other theories to evolution, falsely claiming they are related.
Comfort attempts to combine the Big Bang with evolution. Now, unless Comfort has a super secret version of On the Origin of the Species, nowhere does Darwin discuss where organisms originated from, he discusses only how they got here and how they will get where ever they are going.
He also attempts to deny evolution due to a lack of transitional fossils. The conditions for fossilization are so selective, that it is just chance that we have any of the fossils we see today. The fact that the man cannot understand, or is purposely ignorant, of these processes should raise a big red flag.
All of these points are not just illustrative of poor science, they're also illustrative of poor thinking. The emphasis on undermining the man instead of the science (other than a few poor attempts) shows that Comfort believes that the world should be a popularity contest, and ignores that fact that the ideas of many unpleasant people may have helped drive scientific endeavors. If Darwin was right, he was right. Even if he was a douchebag of epic proportions, he was right***.
Yet, in a country that falls far below other western countries in the acknowledgment of evolution, it should be no surprise that we grow up to be scientifically illiterate. USA! USA! We're, um, slightly better than Turkey... Yay?
* Why are they still fighting Darwin? Darwin's ideas have been modified to take into account a whole world of new information, such as genetics, which Darwin would not have known about.
** Ray decided he would attempt to push the idea that bananas were created by God to fit perfectly in the hand of humans, ignoring the genetic selection conducted by humans which produced the fruit we see today. Oops. While Comfort spouted this drivel, Kirk Cameron bobbed his head up and down oblivious to how idiotic these claims were, a fake plastic smile plastered on his face. Comfort later apologized for this, but the willful ignorance of statements such as these, show how vacuous the claims against evolution have become.
*** The tales of Darwin's epic doucebaggery may be, in part, a fabrication of fundamentalists. At least one publication has come out challenging the claims of racism which fundamentalists often attempt to pin on Darwin.
**** To be honest, I may not see the film. It is produced by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions. I don't want to give money to a man who used religious gullibility to fund a big screen portrayal of his wet dream of a Jew being tortured for hours on end.
Life becomes so much more beautiful and worthwhile when you realize that we are part of this wonderful series of events and discard the superstition that this world is at our disposal, and of infinite resources, thanks to a magical, benevolent being.
