PZ on UC disallowing creationist science classes from counting towards admission requirements:
This is something we have to deal with at universities all the time. We get transfer students, too, and we have to evaluate how their prior classwork corresponds to our requirements—after all, if they transfer to this university, and are planning to get a degree from this university, we're not going to give the degree to them because they met the standards of some other random university. Every year we get several students who want transfer credit from a community college or some other institution, and we review their class syllabus, look at the textbook used, ask whether it was a lab course or not, etc., and make decisions about whether it's good enough for UMM.
Looking at those excerpts, there's no way we'd accept a course taught with that book here. If this lawsuit isn't laughed out of court, I know what I'm going to have to do: set up a mail-order university in my basement, offer courses in Advanced Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics taught out of comic books, and tell people all they have to do is give me $200, I give them 100 credits in basic and upper level biology courses, and then they transfer to UC Berkeley, take a few basket-weaving courses, and graduate with a prestigious Berkeley biology degree. They have to accept any ol' trashy transfer credits, after all.
And, via PZ, Daniel Dennett on the mechanism that makes this all possible:
the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.
I'll be saying much more on this later...
