Richard Dawkins Speaks to CNN About Scientific Literacy, Morality & Creationism

CNN has a nice in-depth video interview with writer/biologist Richard Dawkins. It's definitely worth your time if you care about scientific literacy.

A few highlights:

On whether or not evolution should be taught to young children:

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution. So I would teach evolution very early in childhood. I don't think it's all that difficult to do. It's a very simple idea. One could do it with the aid of computer games and things like that.

I think it needs serious attention, that children should be taught where they come from, what life is all about, how it started, why it's there, why there's such diversity of it, why it looks designed. These are all things that can easily be explained to a pretty young child. I'd start at the age of about 7 or 8.

There’s only one game in town as far as serious science is concerned. It’s not that there are two different theories. No serious scientist doubts that we are cousins of gorillas, we are cousins of monkeys, we are cousins of snails, we are cousins of earthworms. We have shared ancestors with all animals and all plants. There is no serious scientist who doubts that evolution is a fact.

On the source of morality:

We have very big and complicated brains, and all sorts of things come from those brains, which are loosely and indirectly associated with our biological past. And morality is among them, together with things like philosophy and music and mathematics. Morality, I think, does have roots in our evolutionary past. There are good reasons, Darwinian reasons, why we are good to, altruistic towards, cooperative with, moral in our behavior toward our fellow species members, and indeed toward other species as well, perhaps.

There are evolutionary roots to morality, but they’ve been refined and perfected through thousands of years of human culture. I certainly do not think that we ought to get our morals from religion because if we do that, then we either get them through Scripture – people who think you should get your morals from the Old Testament haven’t read the Old Testament – so we shouldn’t get our morals from there.

Nor should we get our morals from a kind of fear that if we don’t please God he’ll punish us, or a kind of desire to apple polish (to suck up to) a God. There are much more noble reasons for being moral than constantly looking over your shoulder to see whether God approves of what you do.

Where do we get our morals from? We get our morals from a very complicated process of discussion, of law-making, writing, moral philosophy, it’s a complicated cultural process which changes – not just over the centuries, but over the decades. Our moral attitudes today in 2012 are very different form what they would have been 50 or 100 years ago. And even more different from what they would have been 300 years ago or 500 years ago. We don’t believe in slavery now. We treat women as equal to men. All sorts of things have changed in our moral attitudes.

Watch:

CNN Anchor Calls Bill Nye A Kook For Linking Wildfires To Climate Change, Gets Schooled

Science educator Bill Nye is introduced by a CNN anchor as a 'kook.' Nye says that climate change is to blame for the recent spate of wildfires.

Watch:

Rick Perry Doubles Down On Homophobic, Theocratic Ad, Still Doesn't Understand Things

Rick Perry responded to the public reaction to his homophobic theocratic abomination of a political ad in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN.

In the interview, he doubled down on his anti-gay rhetoric, stating that he'd reinstate DADT if elected. He also defended discrimination against gays by the Boy Scouts and Catholic charities.

When pressed by Wolf on the issue of DADT, Perry served up one of his famous 'gut feeling' answers (if you recall, when Perry was asked how he knows abstinence works, he replied that he knows it works, "from my own personal life."

BLITZER: But military commanders tell me, in the past few months since the policy has changed, they’ve had no problems. Including the commandant of the Marine Corps, who was originally opposed.

PERRY: Well, I’m just telling you the members of the military I talked to, when this was being talked about, I didn’t talk to anyone who was for it…

When pressed on the topic of Obama's 'war on religion,' Perry didn't fare much better, and resorted to McCarthy-esque absurdity, ignoring the many instances of Obama publicly embracing religion.

PERRY: We’ve got a federal judge, for instance, in San Antonio that said these kids can’t say an invocation at school. I mean, they say you can’t even use the word “invocation” at their commencement.

BLITZER: Is that President Obama’s war on religion?

PERRY: I’m just giving you some examples of what we’re seeing from the left, of which, I would suggest to you, President Obama is a member of the left and, uh, substantial left of center beliefs, that you can't even have a Christmas party. You can't say a prayer at school.

Rick Perry is ignorant, ladies and gentlemen. He is dumber than a bag of hammers. Sure, we hear the old 'why can't my kids pray to Jesus at their public school' thing from our ignorant uncle on Facebook, but this guy is the Governor of Texas, and a potential (although unlikely, at this point) candidate for the highest office in the country.

PERRY: I ask people, 'Which one of the Ten Commandments do you not like?' I mean, why aren't our children allowed to pray in school? Why can they not celebrate Christmas? Those are, I think, traditional and solid American values that we're seeing trampled upon by this Administration.

Well, Rick, I'll tell you the problem with the ten commandments. Four of them are solely religious edicts that have nothing to do with ethics or law, and three of them are one-dimensional prohibitions that are irrelevant to modern law. So, as a non-religious tax-paying American citizen, I don't care for the enshrinement of religious edicts. That kind of reeks of theocracy. You're not crazy about Sharia Law, so I'd think you'd be able to get your head around this.

Why aren't our children allowed to pray in school? They can pray all they want. Prayer is very much protected in public schools by our Constitution. There are simply some restrictions -- mostly that prayer can't be mandatory, and you can't have 'sanctioned' prayers during school time or school events. Because, see, that would be forcing it on someone who has the right to not be proselytized to as part of a captive public school audience. I am sure that if you imagine a teacher leading the class in an Islamic prayer, you can understand how this might not be cool, Rick.

Why can't they celebrate Christmas at school? Well, first of all, Christmas has in no way been banned in public schools. Again, there are simply rules that are appropriate to follow to avoid alienating students or identifying them with a religion not their own. Because, Rick, aside from the above issues relating to proselytizing, we live in a melting pot. It's not as homogeneous as it was when you were a kid. If you want the kids to celebrate Christmas in school, then maybe we need to provide equal time for other religions. Here you go -- here's an inclusive, interfaith calendar of several dozen holidays and festivals observed by Americans. Good luck getting any actual teaching done.

Here's the Blitzer-Perry video, for those who are interested in killing a few brain cells:

The 'Sissy Boy' Experiment: George Rekers' 'Ex-Gay Therapy'

Via Towleroad:

"In 1970, a five-year-old boy named Kirk Murphy was subjected to an ex-gay experiment. Under the care of Dr Ivor Lovaas and George Rekers, then a doctoral student, of UCLA, he underwent therapy to eliminate supposed effeminate behaviors. In 1974, Lovaas and Rekers jointly published a paper about the boy they renamed "Kraig," heralding his treatment for "childhood cross-gender problems" a success and claiming he had been transformed from a gender-confused homosexual-in-waiting to a healthy, heterosexual young man. On the back of this study, Rekers built a career as an anti-gay activist and a supposed expert in childhood sexual development. He co-founded the Family Research Council and championed reparative therapy to turn gay men straight. In 2003, Kirk, aged 38 years old and gay, committed suicide."

If the name George Rekers doesn't ring a bell, you may recall a particular anti-gay psychologist and Southern Baptist minister who hired a rent-boy to carry his luggage.

The following is the first part in Anderson Cooper's The Sissy Boy Experiment, a devastating look at the "experimental therapy" designed to make feminine boys more masculine.