@beaglelady beat me to recommending Duff’s video, which I watched when it came out. As a non-scientist, who hasn’t had any general level science classes in dacades, I would (mostly) be part of the target audience for AIG. Duff is a through, patient teacher. His video is long. It probavly isn’t for YOU, but for the person who is leaning toward AIG’s junk and uses words like “compelling” when they are impressed by someAIG obfuscation presented as discovery.
If you have a chance to listen to Duff, while you cleaning out the garage or doing other mundane tasks, you would be in a good position to prescribe the video to the right victim of Traced.
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“The dire state of liberally educated Americans inside the metropoles” is entirely dependent on demography and should concern us all as well.
As broad as it is, your concern is too narrow.
Sigh.
Surely LA, NY and Chicago are safe!?
Hardly, dear optimist. They are actually some of the worst — in places— because intense poverty and violence are concentrated in large areas. Read about their school systems. Or the Census Data. Every place FHA homes loans made home ownership possible is tainted by and still suffers from the results of redlining (and the poverty ghettos that came before FHA). And those loans were in all major population centers. There’s more. The problem is ubiquitous.
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Sorry, I know they are appallingly violent in every sense, but education isn’t plagued with YEC is it?
Oh, I see. No. At least not in the North. I know there’s plenty of pressure from school boards in some places (mostly the South I think) to add in “all perspectives.” Which never, ironically, include indigenous perspectives or those of other religions.
I can check.
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Perspectives? In the teaching of science?!
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The National Center for Science Education tracks threats to science education in the United States. The NCSE was important in defeating Intelligent Design in the well-known case of Kitzmiller et al VS Dover Area School District.
Nova even had a 2-hour special about it:
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Did you watch it?
What kind of students are allowed to say “Too long; didn’t read” about a reading assignment?
Yes on both counts. I teach at Pacific Union College. The church is YEC, although many of us scientists and even many scattered even in the humanities are varying degrees of things from YEC to OEC. I teach my students the real science, and out of necessity some of the arguments against it, and in the end point out to them that science cannot be used to defend YEC. If they choose to believe in a YEC model, it will have to be by faith. So far I have been able to manage this balance, because in spite of it being an SDA school they do want the students well educated in their science.
Which all means that I will not be writing a rebuttal book any time soon, as that would definitely be stepping over the line. Although Adventists don’t pay all that much attention to AiG for the most part, an attack on research supporting the Adam and Noah connection to all humanity would probably be seen as problematic. AiG is one step too far into YEC even for most Adventists, at least those who are educated. Most Adventists, although YEC, believe in a gap model where the universe was created a long time ago, before life on earth.
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That is actually a very good summary of two of the major flaws, although the mutation rate problem is even worse than that. He does justify his higher mutation rate on the basis of mutations in Y-chromosomes between father and son, which is just that kind of error. The per generation mutation rate on an individual basis is obviously higher than the mutation rate on a population level. Many mutations happen in a population and are lost in the shuffle, especially if the population is large. This is a foundational concept in undergraduate population genetics, which he has apparently forgotten.
Conflating phylogenetics and genealogy is equally foundational and an error like this makes him appear to be an amateur. Undergraduate students are prone to this error, for which I provide correction. All things considered, he is an amateur.
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Not yet. I am resistant. 
I need to, because if the review is useful, I am sure I have friends who might eagerly watch it, or at least might watch it and learn something.
Ha! You haven’t been in higher education, or at least not recently. I don’t “allow” any of my students to say that, but a significant and growing portion of my students do not read assigned readings.Many will skim them instead, just looking for the information they need to answer questions posed by me to make sure they read it. Some even fail to read the textbook and will take review sheets and just Google for the answers. These students, of course, do not get very good grades, and some fail. The problem is worse in general study courses than in majors courses, but it is in all courses to some degree.
I have heard from many other educators, and you can read about it in higher education news. TLDR is becoming more and more a problem, so much so, that I have now seen many popsci and self-help books that end each chapter with a condensed summary, sometimes even referred to as TLDR, for those who lack the time to read the whole chapter.
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What schools are we talking about here?
Pretty much everywhere, as far as I can tell. Here is one of many articles I could point you to that show this: Up to 80% of uni students don’t read their assigned readings. Here are 6 helpful tips for teachers
Fortunately the problem has been identified, and the above article suggests strategies to combat the problem, as does the article here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-fall-and-rise-of-reading/
It is a continuing struggle and I keep trying things to fix the problem, with varying levels of success.
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That appears to me to be a sweeping generalization. And there is a difference between saying “TLDR,” which is more or less laziness (like cheating or skipping class), and a genuine problem with reading ability, which can be addressed with prep classes, tutoring, or the like.
Thank you Bryan. What a ghastly situation. My cult, the Armstrongite WCG - two schisms beyond Ellen G. White - way before it deconstructed and reconstructed itself as GCI - originally believed the same. In fact I had a side bet on A&E until 2010, 15 years after the de-reconstruction peak. You’re trapped until retirement. I swim with Evangelicals. I truly virtually never push back. Perhaps the most you can say is that you teach what consensus science says. I doubt any of your interlocutors want to know what that is?
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It is certainly a challenge teaching these days. I have a nephew who teaches at a major state university, and he says it is the same there, with many students not showing up except on test days. He also said hemakes sure if you don’t show, you will not do well on tests, with plenty of tears following. Students seemed eager to get back to face to face classes after Covid restrictions, but have no discipline to follow through. Perhaps the short attention spans cultivated by social media has something to do with it as well.
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There has been a lot of neurological research into how screens, social media, and multimodal texts have led to a different kind of literacy because the neuropathways are not being created in the same way as they were in the past. Students do indeed struggle with prolonged, deep reading more than students of the generation before.
See for example, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age by Maryanne Wolfe
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Yes, we’re told in primary care that the excess of videos makes kids’ minds more prone to ADD, because it’s all spoon fed to them in bite size entertainment. They don’t know how to carry through on reading or other assignments. That’s one reason we are asked to tell parents not to let their kids watch more than a limited amount of TV or screen time per day.
I’m no expert, but the writing I see from people in highschool and college often seems worse than a few decades ago.
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Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it is all just a TLDR problem, because it isn’t. There are well documented and growing deficits in reading ability, so of course that is driving the problem too. What I am saying is that TLDR is becoming a more common excuse given. From my perspective lack of reading skills also plays a part, and I think that is caused to a great extend to a shift in our culture since the electronics age in which people reply more on visual/audio materials for learning and less on reading. For more and more people, reading often involves reading snippets of text online. If elementary and secondary students are not taught to read well and required to read enough those skills will not develop. I don’t know what the solution is, but surveys are showing that a decreasing number of students read assigned texts. So, yes, it’s complicated, I acknowledge that, and it also looks like fixing the problem is equally complicated.
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