Canada

Denyse: First, step with us a moment into Scientific American’s past (a past it repudiates) where, in 1911, it enthusiastically editorialized about “The Science of Breeding Better Men.” How about this for an opening line: “ADA JUKE is known to anthropologists as the ‘mother of criminals.'” Well, how’s that for coming straight to the point? The solution?

The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to [Thomas] Huxley. “We are sorry for you,” he is reported to have said; “we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate.”

Actually, her real name was “Margaret,” and the history was rather more complex than eugenics hysteria allowed for. In Canada, the worry surfaced as a fear that “the British race was ‘becoming small, dark, and emotional'” (p. 26). Maybe that’s code for “like the separatist-minded French-speaking Catholics of Quebec” …
(This is the third and final part of Uncommon Descent’s interview with Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Here’s Part I and here’s Part II.) Read More ›

Canada’s National Post tears into the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ “investigations” of Christian universities: The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) — which describes itself as Canada’s “national voice for academic staff” — says it has investigated four small Christian colleges and universities in the past 18 months because it wants parents to know what kind of institutions their sons and daughters might attend. In other words, we are told, there is nothing nefarious in the 65,000-member union’s action. It is merely performing a valuable public service.This is disingenuous nonsense. The CAUT is on a thinly disguised anti-Christian witch hunt. There is no other way to describe it. [ … ] The investigations were instigated entirely by CAUT executive Read More ›

In “Professors group accused of anti-religious bullying”, Charles Lewis reports (National Post, Feb. 8, 2011) on the underbelly of the Canadian Union of University Teachers:

A group of academics has launched a campaign defending Canadian Christian universities against what it terms anti-religious bullying by the country’s leading university teachers’ federation.”What we have here is an academic union ganging up on these smaller Christian universities, and I thought it was high time that people from the public universities take a stand,” said Paul Allen, an associate professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal.

The protest is a direct response to reports that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued against Trinity Western University in British Columbia more than a year ago, Crandall University in New Brunswick in July and Winnipeg’s Canadian Mennonite University in October.

“It bothered me that this is anti-religious ideology masked as supposedly an academic freedom issue,” said Mr. Allen, who has started a petition to warn about CAUT’s actions. “This was an opportunity in the current [secular climate] to go after religion.”

The petition, which now has 140 signatures, said the investigations are unwarranted and invasive.

Mr. Allen and many others who signed the petition are members of CAUT, which has 65,000 members. Academics at the schools that were investigated are not members.

In each case the investigation concluded that true freedom was being denied to academics because of the requirement to sign a statement of Christian faith. CAUT believes that by agreeing to terms of Christian principles, academics will be hemmed in by a narrow set of doctrine. The association was also worried about the future employment of academics who might sign a document but later change their personal beliefs.

At Trinity Western, for example, teachers must acknowledge there is one God, the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that Christ is God incarnate.

However, there were no complaints about any of the targeted schools before the probes were launched and none has made a secret of its requirements for hiring.

Read more here:

Okay, you want to live in the world of the Darwinists and their Christian supporters, you’d better get ready for stuff like this.

Of course there were no complaints! But that doesn’t matter, you see. Read More ›

Robin Lloyd explains in “Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure” (Jan 18, 2011),

Blogging and other Web activities have allowed members of many marginalized communities to open previously locked media doors. But women still rely more on back channels and ask for less help than men do in the digital realm. This tendency and other issues of concern for women bloggers were discussed Sunday at the ScienceOnline2011 conference in Durham, N.C., primarily in a session called “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name.”

Huh?

Experiences varied among attendees on whether blogging under a real name did indeed present perils. Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and blogger at Deep-Sea News says she has never had a negative experience. But stories surfaced regarding inappropriate comments by male readers. And one attendee voiced concerns about being emailed by a reader who said he was near her campus and about to stop by her office. Christie Wilcox (@NerdyChristie), a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who blogs at Observations of Nerd, said she only received nasty comments when she blogged on the science of make-up—and the anger came from women. Tribalism takes many forms.

Well, if you have dealt with minor Darwinists, as I have, and are not one of their companions, you get to hear how some of them talk about women. But God or nature or the guardian angel of marriages – or somebody or other anyway – invented a back browser button and a delete key.

I guess the big time Darwinists approve of all that stuff. I’ve never heard of them telling those dudes to smarten up, or slide their keesters to the low class boozehole down the road. I once had a problem with a guy who professed support for ID who behaved like that, but I heard vaguely that he had his can kicked six ways to Sunday over it. Nothing to do with me.

Actually, we had a problem with Darwinmouth here in Canada, but Read More ›

Alarmed at a science paper that questions Darwin, Steve Newton advises us at the Huffington Post that Darwin was not wrong when he argued that competition was the driving force of evolution. The article suggested that large-scale changes in ecology played a bigger role. Of course, they did. … When an ice sheet covered much of Canada for thousands of years, it would not have mattered whether the preglacial creatures (mammoth, mastodon, ground sloth, saber-tooth cat, horse, camel, etc.) competed or not. When the ice melted, they were just gone. Bison, beavers, wolves, maples, and such were the big noise. How? Why? We don’t know yet. One thing that sure isn’t helping is Darwinism. For a lot more No! It Read More ›

Apparently, Canadian Marci McDonald’s Random House anti-Christian book is a commercial flop. Go here, here, and here for intelligent-design related “marcis” = obvious errors such as claiming that proud Presbyterian Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial , had become a Catholic. At some point, truth needs evidence, not conspiracy thinking. It’s about time that some of this stuff started to just plain flop. The thinking public deserves better.  [Note 1: I don’t know  how to comment on Sal Cordova’s useful quotation from Ez Levant because, for some reason, this post is not allowing comments. Too bad, because there was a useful one demonstrating the tank in ratings of “The Armageddon Factor”.   Essentially, there is no Armageddon factor in Canada.  Read More ›