Definition of Gish Gallop

So the technique known as Gish Gallop is a common creationist tactic used to confuse an argument by throwing out so much information that if the person they are arguing against tries to refute it all they will be spending hours doing it. The technique may have been made famous but Dr. Duane Gish but I think Eric Hovind, yes the son of Kent Hovind, has perfected it.



Everything he said in lesss than a minute I could refute but it would take me several days. Now that is just inpressive.

To college or not to college?

So as someone currently pursuing a masters degree you can probably guess where I stand on the question in the title, college then more college then more college etc. So when I came across this article advocating not going to college I read through what he had to say and thought oh man I have to say something. Now most of what needs to be said has been said over and over again in the comments on the article itself but I still had to have my 2 cents, this is the Internet after all we are all allowed to our 2 cents.

I will address each of his points one at a time.

1. More than 60% of people entering college take more than four years to graduate. So whatever you think your kids are going to cost you to go to college, add 20% to 100%.

He is right that most people take longer than 4 years to finish but that is because most 18 year olds don't know what they want to do when they grow up

"It's taking me more than four years basically because when I arrived here I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I floated between a couple of different majors and then tried for bilingual education. I love it and it's my dream job," Howerter said. "Now I just want to get my bachelor's as quickly as possible, and get my teaching certificates through a master's program."

What you major in is typically a life long decision and something that should be thought out carefully but most colleges want you to decide right away. While this might be a flaw in the system some schools are making a change and not letting you decide until after your first or second year so you have taken your core area classes and know what might interest you before you decide on a major. You also have to consider that an increasing of jobs now require, or would prefer, you to have a masters degree. This is college that also has to be added on but often times, especially in the sciences, a lot of this extra schooling is assisted by the University.

2. The cost of the average college tuition has gone up nine-fold since 1976 versus seven-fold for health care and three-fold for inflation.

A good reason for this is found by doing a quick google search for funding for universities. Universities are dependent on states for some of their funding and as this has decreased the cost has to be passed on to someone, not saying it is right but a university is a business after all. You want to slow the rate of tuition increase ask your state and federal representatives to increase funding to your state universities.

3. The differential in lifetime income between a college graduate and a non-college graduate over a 45 year career is approximately $800,000 (read on).

I can not speak for this number for sure but he doesn't cite a source so I have no idea where he got it from.

4. If I put that $200,000 that I would've spent per child to cover tuition costs, living expenses, books, etc. into bonds yielding just 3% (any muni bonds) and let it compound for 49 years (adding back in the 4 years of college), I get $851,000. So my kids can avoid college and still end up with the same amount in the worst case.

I really have no idea where that $200,000 amount came from. The college board states:

For the 2009-10 academic year, average tuition and fees range from $2,544 at public two-year colleges and $5,930 at public baccalaureate colleges, to $32,349 at private doctorate-granting universities. The average published price at private baccalaureate colleges is $24,040; at for-profit institutions it is $14,174.

Even if you take the largest number in there you end up with less than $130,000 over 4 years and if the student were to stick around for another year you end up with just over $161,000. And note that none of those numbers include financial aid etc. To see the college boards full report go here.

5. If smart, motivated, ambitious kids (the type of kids who get the most out of college) avoided college I'm sure the differential would be a lot less than $800,000 and may even be negative (i.e. they would make more if they avoided college and started going into the business world earlier).

And yet they already tend to anyway, see Bill Gates etc. The people who get the most out of college are the middle of the road kids. They have a good head on their shoulders but are not quite ready to go out and take over the world yet and in all likelihood will fill the jobs in middle management that they would not have gotten without college. There is also more to college than just getting a book education. This is where most students learn to live away from home, learn to interact with people from many different areas, and other skills that will benefit them not just in their chosen career path but throughout life in general.

6. The average debt burden of a college graduate is $23,000. Up from $13,000 10 years ago. Students with professional degrees can see their debt burden go higher than $200,000. Total student borrowing has topped $75,000,000,000. It's too much for young adults just starting their careers.

This isn't a reason not to go to college so much as a reason to reform the system and get more money to higher education. Also isn't this article about people sending their kids to school and the way it seemed earlier is that the parents were paying?

7. Alternatives to spending $200,000 per kid so they can waste four years of their lives:

Yes apparently college is a waste of four years of your life all you college graduates/college students out there.

Give them $20,000 to start one to five businesses. Most businesses fail but that's ok. The education from the process lasts a lifetime and the network you build when you start a business will lead to many future jobs and possibilities.

A third of new businesses fail within the first two years and half within the first 5 (source). And in many cases this is with people who know how to run a business having their business fail. I do not know if having an 18 year old without a college education in charge of a business is really going to pull in many investors who tend to still be wary of people over 25 with a college degree.

Travel the world. That would be an education that pays many dividends and is much cheaper. Your kids can then go to college with a much more mature view of the world.

Or you could let them graduate from college so they are more mature when they travel the world.

Work. They won't get the best jobs but they can make money, network, get a "hands-on" education, learn the value of money and go to college in their 20s when they can afford it -- and make every dollar worth it. Plus your kids will have a more clear idea of what they want to do in the world.

This is a good idea but if you can afford to send them to college why not help them out. I agree that summer jobs during undergrad were the reason that I made sure I worked hard in school. It is also not likely that they will have saved up enough by the time they are in their 20s to be able to afford college.

Volunteer. Let them see a side of life that is harder and where they can add value. An education like that is invaluable.

Another thing that you could have them do during high school or during their off time from college, they will learn just as much but not have to stop their education in the process.

Do nothing but read. Get the benefits of a college education without paying the $200,000. I'd be happy to support a child that wants to home school a college education.

You cannot home school college, and as I said earlier there is more to college than the degree at the end. Besides I doubt that your 18 year old is going to spend all their time at home reading.

This article tries to make college seem like a financial impossibility but there is plenty of financial aid available out there for those who look for it, yes at times it is in the form of loans but there are plenty of scholarships and grants as well. I had a year off in between my undergraduate and the start of my graduate degree programs and while I was working it was not in a job that payed very well or that was a direct use of my degree. It was still difficult after that year to start up education again. But that does not mean that if you have taken time off you shouldn't go back to school and there are plenty of good reasons to take time off but none of these are good reasons. Sorry for the length of this article but I felt it needed to be done.

Nothing new

So recently a film came out called Darwin: The Voyage That Shook the World and while that may make the video sound like an interesting film but it is apparently by Creation Ministries International and Fathom Media. Yes that's right it's a creationist piece attempting to show how if Darwin knew what we knew now he would not have come up with Evolution. This is nonsense if he knew what we knew now his theory would have been even stronger than it was when he originally wrote it.

eSkeptic Magazine, part of Skeptic magazine, did a feature article on it in this week's issue, if you are not a subscriber to eSkeptic it is free I strongly suggest it (sign up here), discussing the film. They brought in three experts in the field of biology and had them address each of the main claims made in the film. It is a very interesting read and very well done and hopefully should help for in the future when you will probably have many of these claims thrown your way.

What interested me the most about this article was how the claims that the film makes are essentially the same ones that have been made by Creationists for year. Almost all of these have been refuted but they keep using them. It is annoying to address the same claim over and over again but I guess I am not in the demographic that they are targeting.

Creationism on hold, for now

A little over a week ago I wrote a post about Livingston Parish School Board talking about trying to teach creationism in their science classrooms. I ended that post with this:

There is some good that I can see with the school board finally deciding to teach creationism. This will give the ACLU a chance to sue over this bill and to finally get it struck down and prevent other schools from going through the same thing. Lets just hope that is what happens.

Well it turns out that the school board decided not to teach creationism this upcoming year, although they put a group together to study if it is feasible. Why? Well an article published by the Baton Rouge Advocate says this:

A decision to teach creationism could become expensive for the parish school system, said Marjorie Esman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“If they were to do it, they could anticipate that any litigation would result in them not only losing, but having to pay enormous legal fees,” she said. “They would be wasting a huge amount of taxpayer money on a battle they can’t win.”

Livingston Parish School Board President Keith Martin, who acknowledges that the parish school system faces major financial challenges, said the cost of litigation does have to be taken into consideration.

“A lawsuit is something you always have to factor in because of finances of the board,” Martin said.

While this is not the way I would have preferred to have seen this happen I am glad that at least for the next year they will not be teaching creationism in Livingston Parish.

There is one problem, however. They have not completely taken the idea of teaching creationism off of the table for the 2011-2012 school year. As I said earlier they have formed a committee to look at the possible options. The lawyer for the school board does seem to think that teaching creationism is illegal.

Tom Jones, the School Board’s attorney, said a board member brought the issue up when evolution was mentioned as being part of the state’s 2008 Science Education Act.

Jones said his previous research indicated that under the U.S. Constitution public schools can’t teach religion or the religious theory of creationism.

“Without a doubt it’s a constitutional issue,” and state law does not supersede the U.S. Constitution, he said.

Mr. David Tate the person who first brought up the issue of teaching creationism doesn't seem to get it though:

Tate said teaching evolution as a theory is fine, but there are other ideas.

“Creationism is another thought of how things came into being,” he said. “Give every theory due time” in the classroom.

To the citizens of Livingston Parish Mr. Tate is not helping your cause. He is holding you back do not support him in upcoming elections (I don't know when he will be up for reelection sorry) and listen to the experts, if for no other reason than you risk hurting the financial situation of your schools.

State of the Climate

NOAA released their 2009 State of the Climate a few days ago. I have not read the whole document (it is 224 pages), which can be downloaded here, just the press release so I don't feel that I can speak too in depth on it but I figured I would let anyone who wanted to know about it know about it.

NOAA also has a website to answer your questions on what climate change will do to the world (yes the website really is climate.gov). NOAA also has a facebook page if you are interested.

Yes your childhood favorite still exists!

So recently a paper was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that synonymized two species of ceratopsian into one species (Scannella and Horner, 2010). These two species were the world famous Triceratops (photo on left, from Houston Museum of Natural Science, a cast of a Triceratops skull, by author) and a lesser known species known as Torosaurus. Both of these lived at around the same time and in the same area. Scannella and Horner use a large amount of techniques to help determine this but I am not going to go into because the techniques they used I am not an expert on (see here for a better summary).

This synonymization has a lot of people upset that they are losing another icon of their childhood, like Pluto. We all grew up and Triceratops is one of the most famous of all dinosaurs, often depicted in epic battle with everyone else's favorite Tyrannosaurus rex. But as Brian Switek over at Dinosaur Tracking, and David Orr at Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs point out (here and here) the name Triceratops is safe. Why is this? The answer is quite simple, it was named first, Triceratops in 1889 and Torosaurus in 1891. Why does that matter? The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the rules that determine if a name is valid and how to name a new organism, says this for when two species are synonymized:

23.3. Application to Synonymy. The Principle of Priority requires that a taxon formed by bringing together into a single taxon at one rank two or more previously established nominal taxa within the family group, genus group or species group takes as its valid name the name determined in accordance with the Principle of Priority [Art. 23.1] and its Purpose [Art. 23.2], with change of suffix if required in the case of a family-group name [Art. 34].

With the Principle of Priority saying:

23.1. Statement of the Principle of Priority. The valid name of a taxon is the oldest available name applied to it, unless that name has been invalidated or another name is given precedence by any provision of the Code or by any ruling of the Commission. For this reason priority applies to the validity of synonyms [Art. 23.3], to the relative precedence of homonyms [Arts. 53-60], the correctness or otherwise of spellings [Arts. 24, 32], and to the validity of nomenclatural acts (such as acts taken under the Principle of the First Reviser [Art. 24.2] and the fixation of name-bearing types [Arts. 68, 69, 74.1.3, 75.4]).

This is a long way to say that if something is named first it gets to keep the name if we make two creatures into one (very technically written I know). So what this means is that Torosaurus is now Triceratops, as the name of the paper says, so everyone's favorite ceratopsian is safe from getting the Pluto treatment, sorry Pluto we miss you buddy.

Source
Scannella, J.B. and J.R. Horner. 2010. Torosaurus Marsh, 1891, is Triceratops Marsh, 1889 (Ceratopsidae: Chasmosaurinae): synonymy through ontogeny Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30 (4), 1157-1168

And it begins

So I have covered the controversy about the Louisiana State Board of Education allowing the teaching of creationism in the science classrooms (here, here, and video here). This morning I came across this article. The article discusses the fact that the school board in Livingston Parish, LA is considering teaching creationism in science class.

Having lived in Louisiana I am personally surprised that it took 2 years for some school board to decide to take up teaching creationism. There are also plenty of areas that I figured would have tried to teach it before Livingston Parish. But what really got to me was this:

Board Member David Tate quickly responded: “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this School Board believe in creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach creationism?”

Fellow board member Clint Mitchell responded, “I agree … you don’t have to be afraid to point out some of the fallacies with the theory of evolution. Teachers should have the freedom to look at creationism and find a way to get it into the classroom.”

No this isn't the way that classroom policy should be determined just because all of you believe that creationism is correct doesn't mean that it is correct. The way that they are handling this is no better than the way Texas handled the social studies curriculum earlier this year (here, here, and here). While I am perfectly fine with teaching the "fallacies" with evolution filling in these gaps with creationism is not the way science works, just because we don't know the answer right now doesn't mean that we won't in the near future.

There is some good that I can see with the school board finally deciding to teach creationism. This will give the ACLU a chance to sue over this bill and to finally get it struck down and prevent other schools from going through the same thing. Lets just hope that is what happens.

Falsifying Phylogeny

So a complaint that many creationists raise against supporters of evolution is that evolution is a religion because it is not falsifiable. This isn't true and the most common response is all that it would take would be to find a poodle in the Permian (see DonExodus2's response here). Well AronRa (who I have blogged about once before) has posted a new video that puts the response in his typically well vocalized view on the statement.

See here since embedding was disabled

Museum Visit #2

Yes I know I said that this one would be on the Museum of Texas Tech University but I haven't actually had the time to go through the museum yet so I will get back to that later.

So I was driving between San Antonio, TX and Baton Rouge, LA earlier this month. This drive is just a trip down I-10 which involves driving through Houston. So since I was driving through, and there was an exhibit that I wanted to see (more on that later), I decided I would stop at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

This is a large museum with many different portions to their exhibit but since I only had a few hours to spare I decided to focus mostly on the paleontology oriented exhibits since that is more what interests me. The main paleontology hall you walk into the standard dinosaur hall. This is what you expect to see dinosaur wise from most, a T-Rex a type of sauropod a Quetzalcoatlus (this is an interesting cast that I will discuss later) and a handful of other dinosaurs, but is still put together very well. Around the outside of this exhibit hall the exhibit shows many different fossils from different time periods and the exhibits tend to make sure to show fossils from the state of Texas.

Continuing around the exhibit you do find some mammals including a cast of an early lemur like primate jaw from Wyoming. There is also a good discussion on the evolution of the horse. Overall this is what you would expect from a mammal exhibit from a major museum, it is interesting but doesn't bring in the crowds.

I walked quickly through the Wiess Energy Hall and then I made it to the second level of the museum and walked through the gem and mineral hall and the malacology exhibit but didn't focus on either of these three due to lack of time but they are worth checking out if you go there. While on the second floor I noticed that the cast of the Quetzalcoatlus had different colored bones. There were some that were a grey to black color and were smooth in texture while there were others that were brown and looked more realistic in their texture. My best guess of what these changes in color mean is that the brown bones are casts that represent what has actually been found of Quetzalcoatlus and the rest is what we might expect to find in the future.

I then went to the exhibit that I really went there to see, the Archaeopteryx: Icon of Evolution exhibit. This is what I really wanted to go see since my current research is on a pterosaur sample that was found in the Solnhofen Limestone of Germany which is where all of these samples are from. The specimens on display here are amazing and you can see soft tissue in everything from the pterosaurs to the insects. The exhibit winds you though tons of fish and other organisms from the limestone and eventually you get to the highlight the Archaeopteryx. The exhibit does a great job of using Archaeopteryx to support the Theory of Evolution. It did such a good job I heard someone leaving clearly frustrated say, "I still don't believe we evolved 'cause of the big bang or anything." I think it put a clear ding in their armor of creationism. If you are in the Houston area go see this exhibit before it leaves town on September 6.

Having a little extra time, and not wanting to continue driving in the rain (it was a waste I got caught driving in the rain anyway), I decided to head into the Butterfly Center. I remember going here when I was a younger kid but they had updated the entrance now. You now get to see other insects before you walk in get the see the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis. They also try to teach kids that bugs aren't bad and they all do stuff that needs to be done so don't be afraid. The exhibit is well put together and the plants have grown since I was last there creating a much more foresty (is this even a word whatever I'm going with it) feel. The butterflies were all over the place which apparently they hadn't been earlier in the day but you can tell they are used to avoiding people they stayed away from anything that moves so you have to be very still to get them to land on you.

I normally wouldn't say anything about the gift shop but I don't think that I have ever been in a museum gift shop that big or one that sold that much fancy stuff, not what you would normally expect.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is a great trip and as I said if you are in Houston before the Archaeopteryx exhibit ends go for sure. Make sure you have some time to spend because there are many different things to see and do here that make the experience worth the trip.

Museum visits page

Well Darn!!!

A few months ago I wrote a quick piece about a potentially venomous dinosaur. I said I would read the paper but didn't get access to it till I was too busy to get around to it. Anyway I wanted it to be true but a new paper (Gianechini et al., 2010) seems to show that Sinornithosaurus probably was not in fact venomous. The authors did have a chance to respond (Gong et al., 2010) but it is questionable on if they have met their burden of proof. Now I haven't read the papers and the way things are going with the papers I need to read I won't reach that want to pile until much later. Anyway Brian Switek over at Dinosaur Tracking has a pretty good write up on both papers and I am sure he has read them so go read his review.

Gianechini, F., Agnolín, F., & Ezcurra, M. (2010). A reassessment of the purported venom delivery system of the bird-like raptor Sinornithosaurus Paläontologische Zeitschrift DOI: 10.1007/s12542-010-0074-9

Gong, E., Martin, L., Burnham, D., & Falk, A. (2010). Evidence for a venomous Sinornithosaurus Paläontologische Zeitschrift DOI: 10.1007/s12542-010-0076-7