Sometimes they are polite requests, but they smell fishy. My dad is a christian who says he would be willing to read a book on evolution that includes a comprehensive list of dig sites and photos of transitional forms. Can you recommend something? I replied. I was not kind.

Do you remember Terry Hurlbut? Of course not. He’s another boring creationist whose schtick is to claim that creationists really are scientists — after all, Isaac Newton was a creationist. He also maintains something called the “Creationist Hall of Fame” which lists a lot of legitimate pre-Darwin thinkers and 20th century crackpots. His “Hall of…

I don’t know whether it’s by design or fortuitous incompetence, but creationists are masters of the fuzzy statement that opens the doors to all kinds of new opportunities for ignorance. Missouri, for instance, just passed a law giving themselves the freedom to pray (a freedom they already had, which is not in peril) and at…

As we all know, now that the trivial and relatively uninteresting business of mere engineering has cleared a hurdle, Mars Curiosity can get to work on the important stuff: finding evidence of biology on Mars. This is where it’s also going to get peculiarly controversial, because some creationists are feeling a bit threatened: there is…

Ken Ham’s boondoggle in Kentucky is still mired in sluggish fundraising, but he still believes they’ll be open in 2014…only now with an incomplete park. They’re now talking about building it up gradually over a decade, starting whenever the can begin construction. Looking at AiG’s numbers, though, I don’t see why they’re at all optimistic.…

The Institute for Creation Research is going on and on again about Haeckel and gill slits. It gets tiresome; I’ve explained so many times that Haeckel’s theory was wrong and he skewed his drawings to fit his model, but that it really is true that human embryos have pharyngeal arches that are modified in a…