Bora Zivkovik

[AronRa]

I challenged to name one evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution over creationism. He went to Creation.com and came back with this quote

"it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students. ...You cannot bludgeon kids with truth (or insult their religion, i.e., their parents and friends) and hope they will smile and believe you. Yes, NOMA is wrong, but is a good first tool for gaining trust. You have to bring them over to your side, gain their trust, and then hold their hands and help them step by step. And on that slow journey, which will be painful for many of them, it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students."
--Bora Zivkovic, a science teacher and blogger at Scientific American

I've never heard of Bora Zivkovic. I didn't find a link on Creation.com to see the original article in full context, which isn't at all surprising. Their links only route back to their own articles. So I can't be sure what Zivkovik really said or endorsed here or to what extent. I can't find anything online other than creationists proudly touting this quote. I can't even tell whether Zivkovic is an evolutionary scientist. Wikipedia only seems to know about a footballer by that name, and the only articles I can find have to do with an issue of sexual harassment. I did find a site complaining about Zivkovik for other issues of questionable ethics in science, but I can't find enough to confirm whether this mined-quote meets my criteria or not.

Y'all are some bright peeps in this forum. Can you show me where the original article is? And exactly what Zivkovic's resume` credentials are?

 

[Rumraket]

Well, according to the creation.com article, we're dealing with a "science teacher" and "blogger". To teach science you don't have to have a degree, just know the curriculum. To blog you don't have to know shit at all or be in any position of authority. This idiot could be teaching evolution to elementary schoolers for all we know. I'm sure there are people who believe in evolution who are also dishonest people, and this Zivkovik could very well be such a person.

Having some random teacher somewhere be sorta kinda dishonest (which is a bad thing, I would certainly agree) is not quite the same as having actual scientists lie about the state of research.

If this is the best they have, it's nothing. In comparison, how many outright lies and provable deceptions can we show from creationists? I've literally lost count. Basically any article on AIG will contain at least one form of lie, or misrepresentation, or misleading half-truth, or deceptive rhetorical device. We have demonstrated cases of creationist debaters outright lying in their debates, being corrected by the scienist they were debating, accepting the correction and thanking the scientist for "catching the error", then going back to repeating the lie a few weeks later in a new debate with another scientist.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Bora Zivkovic was a blog editor for SciAm who resigned over a sexual harassment issue. I note that he has some papers in the physiology literature, and he's done various studies in the pineal gland in quail.

As for the quote, I don't think there's actually anything objectionable there in reality. It's a reflection of what Terry Pratchett called 'lies to children'. When we start children off teaching them physics, we teach them classical mechanics first, including Newtonian gravity. We know that Newtonian gravity is wrong, but it's easy to grasp, and forms a platform from which understanding general relativity is considerably easier than if we went straight at it without the grounding of a simpler model.

It's a fairly well-accepted function of pedagogy in education. I remember a story an physicist mate told me years ago about his route through education in which, at every stage of his education, his lecturers would tell him something along the lines of 'right, forget everything you think you know about physics, because we're going to tell you how it really is'.

In all honesty, I don't think this quote even remotely meets your criterion of lying in the promotion of evolution, it's merely a recognition of the fact that educators sometimes have barriers to learning that they have to find ways of overcoming. Some of these barriers will be in the form of having no foundational framework upon which to place the models in order to understand them, others in the form of biases that preclude acceptance unless some method of circumventing biases can be found.

He certainly didn't lie about evolution in there, he simply didn't disabuse them of their preconceptions, and used NOMA to do so. NOMA is indeed complete bollocks (and Gould himself acknowledged this) but, as he says, if thinking of science and religion as pertaining to different magisteria means that barriers to learning aren't put up, I see no problem with it.

 

[Rumraket]

All true, but I guess it comes down to what exactly is meant by "some inaccuracies". How many are "some", and how innacurate? People on either end of the creation-evolution debacle will interpret that to mean either something rather innocuous, or exceedingly grotesque lies. I can imagine a creationist thinking it means the person will basically just make up anything as if it was established fact, while that is probably very far from the case. I don't know this person, but the rest of what he says is absolutely true.

There is the principle of charity and all that.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Indoodle.

 

[Aelyn]

He was a prominent blogger on ScienceBlogs, "prominent" as in I'd never heard of him but when he left everybody talked about it (he was also one of a series of defections from that network in 2010 around the Pepsigate scandal, which IIRC was something about ads masquerading as real content or "promoted posts" or something). You can certainly find more info on him with those search terms.


It seems he hasn't published much since 2013 (I also recall that sexual harassment thing, could be related) but this is his blog:

https://blog.coturnix.org/

and this seems to be his twitter:

https://twitter.com/boraz?lang=en



I searched his old ScienceBlogs blog for the quote and found the originating article:

http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/08/25/why-teaching-evolution-is-dang/

 

[Grumpy Santa]

Oddly enough the alleged quote doesn't even seem to imply evolution.

 

[Rumraket]

Put in it's full context, there's nothing wrong with anything he says. At all.

 

[leroy]

I challenged to name one evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution over creationism. ?

Well to be fair Aronra doesn't believe in Will, he doesn't believe that humans have the ability to make choices, therefore under his view, it is impossible to lie
therefore it is literally impossible to name one evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution over creationism

 

[Gnug215]

I challenged to name one evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution over creationism. ?

Well to be fair Aronra doesn't believe in Will, he doesn't believe that humans have the ability to make choices, therefore under his view, it is impossible to lie
therefore it is literally impossible to name one evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution over creationism

Modnote:

Leroy...

Fuck off with this free will nonsense in threads where it is IN NO way relevant.

Stop this childish, petulent, irrelevant crap.

This is your final warning.

 

[Rumraket]

What a stupid challenge... then he complains about being quite mined.

Hilarious

It is a very relevant challenge as the continued dishonesty of creationists, but the total lack of dishonesty of professional evolutionary biologists is very telling.

 

[MarsCydonia]

That's because there aren't any professional evolutionary biologists.

I wonder how a creationist would evaluate what makes a biologist a professoinal. Especially one who admitted to lying to children.

 

[MarsCydonia]

Well a) he has to admit evolution is faith.

And that pretty much cancels out the entire spectrum

So he would have to lie and say that evidence does not matter?

Makes sense coming from a creationist, this is indeed their standard of professionalism.

 

[Rumraket]

Kinda ironic as this thread is about bora.... who was an evolutionist who endorsed the idea of lying to children.... Muslims call it taquiyya...

But you're not correct, he didn't endorse the idea of lying to children at all.

Also, you should take your intense fears of muslims up with muslims. I suspect you might benefit from personally getting to know some people who are muslims and becoming friends, we wouldn't want you to be prejudiced against all of 2 billion people on the basis of what only some of them do. Right?

Otherwise I can condemn ALL christians for those crazy ones who used to believe in witches and had them burned at the stake?

 

[Bango Skank]

According to Mohammed muslims are forbidden to take mon believer friends.


If you have Muslim friends they are either a) lying to you or b) ignorant of their leader ..c) apostates.


For a Muslim to have a non Muslim friend... That is harem

Bible also says not to have close relationships with unbelievers.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

According to Mohammed muslims are forbidden to take mon believer friends.


If you have Muslim friends they are either a) lying to you or b) ignorant of their leader ..c) apostates.


For a Muslim to have a non Muslim friend... That is harem

Bible also says not to have close relationships with unbelievers.

Citation needed.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Well a) he has to admit evolution is faith.

No he doesn't because evolution is the direct opposite of faith - it's evidence based.

 

[Sparhafoc]

I don't fear muslims. ... I'm comparing muslims to atheists

Which is silly when Islam is basically just an extension of Christianity which is just an extension of Judaism.

You know... that's why they're all called 'Abrahamic religions'?

Oh wait, of course you don't know what you're talking about.

 

[Sparhafoc]

According to Mohammed muslims are forbidden to take mon believer friends.


If you have Muslim friends they are either a) lying to you or b) ignorant of their leader ..c) apostates.


For a Muslim to have a non Muslim friend... That is harem

Good fucking god. This isn't a thread about your idiot hatred of Muslims, for fuck's sakes.

The degree to which you have trolled here in just 2 days says a lot about your character.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Go ahead .... condemn all Christians.... when you deny Christ you have done so already.

I condemn idiots, regardless of whether they're Christian, Muslim, or non-believers.

Denying a religion does not amount to denying the humanity of the adherents.

However, just for clarity, I both deny whole-heartedly the pap of Christianity, and condemn you as an individual for the bullshit and devious trolling you employ to get some sick and demented kicks out of fucking with strangers on the internet.

If it's your Christian beliefs making you behave this way, then you're a living example of the dangers of fundamentalist thinking as far as I am concerned.