Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Ailuropoda melanoleuca
Photographs by Dan Phelps.
Science Advocate Frank Lovell: A Remembrance
Guest post by Tom Wheeler in remembrance of his friend, Frank Lovell. We extend our sincere condolences to Mr. Wheeler and to Mr. Lovell’s family.
Frank Lovell, an outstanding defender of evolution and promoter of public understanding of science, died on January 26, 2023, from injuries suffered in a fall. He was 79 years old. He is survived by his wife Debbie and children Annie Lovell, Frank Lovell III, Alicia Lovell (Dennis Nalley) and Simon Lovell (Sneha Thapa) (1).
Born in Ashland Kentucky, he served four years in the United States Army. He then studied physical organic chemistry at the University of Louisville and University of Kentucky, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the latter. A 30-year career with General Electric in Louisville followed.
Frank’s anti-creationism efforts began in 1982 with letters to the editor; he estimated that he wrote a couple of dozen letters in the next couple of years (2). In 1983, I had a letter of my own published, critiquing a creationist op-ed. A couple of days later, I received a letter from Frank, praising my letter and including a copy of the letter he had written personally to the creationist. He invited me to join him in fighting creationism. This was the beginning of an extensive collaboration that would continue until I moved away from Louisville in 2006.
Funder of Super Bowl "He Gets Us" ad also funds many groups including AIG and the DI via dark money
The funder of the “He Gets Us” ad broadcast during the Super Bowl also funds many groups including Answers in Genesis and the Discovery Institute via dark money techniques.
Several investigators have recently looked into The Servant Foundation because they funded the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl advertisements for Jesus (for example Americans United and Rebecca Watson, aka Skepchick). Both AU and Skepchick discovered that, in spite of the liberal-sounding nature of the Super Bowl advertising, the Servant Foundation also has donated to numerous fundamentalist Christian Nationalist hate groups. Apparently, the Servant Foundation is a “donor-advised fund” and receives donations for a number of worthy causes as well as cringeworthy hateful groups. Because of loopholes in the tax laws, people can donate to the Servant Foundation and see that their money goes to their favorite extremist groups via a “donor-advised fund” without their identity being revealed; this is basically “dark-money.”
Helicoverpa zea
Creationism crawls back out of the woodwork
We recently learned of an article, Why Creationism May Come Back to Our Schools, by Eugenie Scott, the former director of the National Center for Science Education. The occasion was a talk presented by Dr. Scott to the Humanist Society of Santa Barbara on February 1 and ably reported by Robert Bernstein for Edhat, an online newspaper that covers Santa Barbara County, California.
You may read Mr. Bernstein’s article for yourself; let it suffice to say that Dr. Scott reviews “many decades of cases” regarding the Establishment Clause and discusses why creationism generally fails. Then, she says, we come to the Kennedy case, wherein the Supreme Court overruled lower-court decisions and ruled that an assistant football coach, Joseph Kennedy, will be allowed to pray at the center of the football field with his students. The decision is troubling because the new right-wing Supreme Court has no trouble overruling previously established decisions.
Meanwhile, Jerry Coyne tells us, Montana considers a bill that allows teaching of “scientific facts” but not “scientific theories”. Prof. Coyne is the proprietor of the popular blog Why Evolution Is True and, as they say, has read the bill so you and I do not have to.