Law and Magic Blog

The Next Wave

"...[T]he advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters."

Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind

The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that five states have or are considering legislation that would promote "academic freedom" in K-12 education, in order to promote "critical thinking" brought to bear on the presentation of evolution to students in the public schools. The states are Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, and Missouri. Read stories here and here. Such bills are the newest wave of legislation after the court loss by the Discovery Institute and its supporters in Kitzmiller v. Dover, which challenged the teaching of Intelligent Design  (ID) in the Pennsylvania public schools. The plaintiffs won in Kitzmiller, the judge ruling that ID was creationism "in disguise", but voters had already turned the school board members who supported the teaching of ID out of office.

Read more about that case in these books.

• Matthew Chapman, 40 Days and 40 Nights (HarperCollins, 2007).
• Barbara Forrest, Creationism's Trojan Horse (Oxford, 2007).
• Edward Humes, Monkey Girl (HarperCollins, 2007).
• Laurie Lebo, The Devil in Dover (The New Press, 2008).
• Gordy Slack, The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything (Wiley, 2007).

 

Before ID, there was creationism, and the Louisiana case of Edwards v. Aguillard. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the statute involved was unconstitutional because it constituted endorsing religion. "The Act does not further its stated secular purpose of "protecting academic freedom." It does not enhance the freedom of teachers to teach what they choose, and fails to further the goal of "teaching all of the evidence." Forbidding the teaching of evolution when creation science is not also taught undermines the provision of a comprehensive scientific education. Moreover, requiring the teaching of creation science with evolution does not give schoolteachers a flexibility that they did not already possess to supplant the present science curriculum with the presentation of theories, besides evolution, about the origin of life. Furthermore, the contention that the Act furthers a "basic concept of fairness" by requiring the teaching of all of the evidence on the subject is without merit. Indeed, the Act evinces a discriminatory preference for the teaching of creation science and against the teaching of evolution by requiring that curriculum guides be developed and resource services supplied for teaching creationism, but not for teaching evolution, by limiting membership on the resource services panel to "creation scientists," and by forbidding school boards to discriminate against anyone who "chooses to be a creation scientist" or to teach creation science, while failing to protect those who choose to teach other theories or who refuse  to teach creation science. A law intended to maximize the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of science instruction would encourage the teaching of all scientific theories about human origins. Instead, this Act has the distinctly different purpose of discrediting evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism."

And for the granddaddy (as it were) of all evolution trials, check out the Scopes "monkey trial". Doug Linder has a webpage devoted to the case. Inherit the Wind, the play based on the trial, has been filmed several times: with Spencer Tracy and Fredric March playing the attorneys (1960), with Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley (1965), with Jason Robards and Kirk Douglas (1988), and with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott (1999).

 

 

 

Astrologers On the Presidential Campaign of 2008

The astrologers are loose again, predicting the outcome of this year's election. For the insights, see here (they seem to be at a loss, frankly, just like the regular, non-astrological commentators). Want to see how they did in 2004? Here's an article from the summer of that year.

Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom

In a Volokh Conspiracy post, Jonathan Adler addresses those bills that purport to grant academic freedom to high school teachers who wish to present alternatives to the theory of evolution. Citing a Wall Street Journal article on the subject of various bills wending their way through state legislatures, Professor Adler concludes,

Unlike some critics of "Intelligent Design" and other creationist theories, I am not convinced that teaching alternatives to evolution necessarily violates the Establishment Clause. That said, these bills make for horrible public policy, as there is nothing scientific about these "alternatives" to evolution. Encouraging attacks on evolution in high school science classes promotes academic fraud not “academic freedom.” If school boards or state legislatures want public school students to be exposed to competing theories about the origins of life — a question evolutionary theory does not address — they should do it in a world religion or social studies class and leave science alone.

The Uses of Magic and Witchcraft in Competing African Political Regimes

I came across this citation which may be of interest.

Dirk Kohnert, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), has published "Magic and Witchcraft: Implications for Democratization and Poverty--Alleviating Aid in Africa" at 24 World Development 1347 (1996). Here is the abstract.

The belief in occult forces is still deeply rooted in many African societies, regardless of education, religion, and social class of the people concerned. According to many Africans its incidence is even increasing due to social stress and strain caused (among others) by the process of modernization. Most often magic and witchcraft accusations work to the disadvantage of the poor and deprived, but under particular circumstances they become a means of the poor in the struggle against oppression by establishing cults of counter-violence. Magic and witchcraft beliefs have increasingly been instrumentalized for political purposes. Apparently they lend itself to support any kind of political system, whether despotic or democratic. The belief in occult forces has serious implications for development co-operation, too. Firstly, because projects, constituting arenas of strategic groups in their struggle for power and control over project resources, are likely to add further social stress to an already endangered precarious balance of power, which makes witchcraft accusations flourish. And secondly, because witchcraft accusations may serve as indicators of hidden social conflicts, difficult to detect by other methods.

Download the paper from SSRN here.