Merry Kitzmas! Let's brainstorm for the future!

Hi everyone! Reed Cartwright has done a lot of great work getting PT onto a new server with a new content message. I’m just trying it out, and wishing everyone Merry Kitzmas!

I suspect I am not alone in thinking that, with recent political events, we may see a resurgence of creationism/ID in the news. It’s never gone away of course – the Discovery Institute is still limping along, mostly re-posting old material, or arguments that relying on nothing much beyond intuition and ignorance of the relevant biology. But, in recent years, not many people have been paying attention.

That may change in the near future: we are in a period of conservative political ascendancy, the Supreme Court may well shift, etc. It was just such conditions (the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004) that got the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, excited about ramming through an “intelligent design” policy, with the hope that they could appeal it up to the Supreme Court and thereby open the door for politically-mandated “intelligent design” creationism in schools across the country.

Many of the original PT bloggers who used to be graduate students and the like are now full-time researchers and have a lot less time to blog – although, peoples’ priorities can change if the creationists start making political progress again. However, I think it is valuable to keep PT going, even if new posts are less common. The archive is clearly valuable, and it is handy to have it ready-to-go, for if (when) some science education crisis occurs.

One more thing: we should explore some new ideas for online activism regarding science education. Let’s have a brainstorming thread. My big idea is to have a SciEdWiki or some such, but there may be other ideas. Put your suggestions/ideas here!

Trying a figure in the new system: