Another Visit to the Grand Canyon

Does anyone notice a distinct resemblance between Prof. Steve Steve and the as-yet-unnamed baby Panda at the National Zoo?

Methinks Prof. Steve Steve may have a paternity suit on his hands shortly, and bamboo for a growing cub can get pretty expensive. He should get a lawyer.

Seriously, though, who thinks that "Steve Steve" would be a better name for the cub than the uninspiring candidate names that the Zoo has come up with?

I am trying to work out what it says on the T-shirt Dr Scott is wearing. Broken down by age and sex I presume? Prof Steve Steve, any chance of enlightenment?

Ta.

Where can i get one of those project Steve shirts that Malcolm Levin is wearing?

Project Steve T-shirts page.

I'm sure you can forgive Prof. Steve Steve for not answering you himself, but you must know that with all the publicity lately about IDC, he has been much in demand by the press to explain creatioinformatics and other related topics. So I'll just help him out by reporting that the shirt caption is indeed, "Broken down by age and sex", accompanied by a bar chart. It was put out God knows when (>25 years, estimate) by a group of anthropologists who study gerontology (I almost said "gerontological anthropologists" but that would be misleading). I'm not much of a t-shirt wearer, so t-shirts last me a long time. It's light weight, so I take it to the Canyon. It's the sort of shirt one does not casually wear strolling down the street -- unless the street has a lot of reasonably well-educated people who can appreciate the humor.

In Steve Steve's picture of the seminar, if you look carefully you can see Jodi Wilgoren, the author of last Sunday's New York Times article about the Discovery Institute. In talking with her weeks ago when she was doing research for the ID article, I mentioned NCSE's Grand Canyon trip in August. After a flurry of calls to her boss, she got permission to accompany us and write a story. As luck would have it, Tom Vail (author of "Grand Canyon, a Different View") was starting his "Canyon Ministries" raft trip a day earlier than NCSE's. Jodi rode with Vail's group the first half of the week, and then joined our group midway at Phantom Ranch. She truly got a "creationism/evolution" tour of Grand Canyon!

She mentioned that she thinks the story will run this weekend, so PT readers may want to keep an eye out. I don't know the story she will write, but the one I hope she writes will include notice of the homogeneity of the Vail party (doubtless all of them conservative Christians) and the diversity of the NCSE group (which included Christians and ex-Christians, Jews, and nonbelievers of two kinds: some hostile to religion and others who weren't). I'm sure she noticed that Vail's group, as young earth creationsts (YECs) was trying to cram their "scientific" observations of the geology of the canyon (the nautiloids, for example) into a biblical framework, and ignoring the information that didn't fit. Since geology was such a big part of our trip, and probably Vail's as well, it isn't going to be an easy story to write at a public-understanding level.

I think it will be very educational for people to realize that even with all the flurry of news about the newfangled ID movement, there remains a strong YEC movement that continues to reach a very large minority of Americans with the same basic message that antievolutionists have promoted for decades now: you have to choose between evolution and faith, and you will lose big time if you make the wrong choice. Jodi spent a lot of time talking to people like Susan and Jon Epperson and Alan Gishlick, practicing Christians, so hopefully some of their perspectives that science and evolution are not only compatible with their theologies, but that science deepens their religious commitment (and vice versa) will somehow be expressed, and give the public "A Different View", so to speak.

Jodi, btw, was a good sport on the trip, and even braved the jump at the waterfall in Elves Chasm (we have photographs to prove it!) which is more than I can say for moi, who chickened out the first year of our Grand Canyon trips -- and yes, we have photographs to prove it :>( -- and hasn't ventured up there, since.

But Prof Steve Steve had a blast, and so did the rest of us. The Canyon is a fabulous place.

I'd love to come. Perhaps next time.

Or maybe I should try and organise a London HowlerFest over at the Natural History Museum.