creationism
oracknows | November 23, 2015As a surgeon and skeptic, I find neurosurgeon turned presidential candidate Ben Carson to be particularly troubling. I realize that I've said this before, but it's hard for me not to revisit his strange case given that the New York Times just ran a rather revealing profile of him over the weekend, part of which included Dr. Carson answering criticism for the really dumb things he's said about vaccines, evolution, and the like. People like Ben Carson are useful examples of how highly intelligent people who are incredibly competent in one area can also demonstrate unbelievable ignorance in…
pharyngula | November 13, 2015
I'm at Skepticon, and while waiting for registration to open this morning, I thought I'd peek in at the Discovery Institute, and their Evolution News & Views site. So much entertainingly idiotic stupidity is on display.
There's Casey Luskin, squeaking away in blithe ignorance about his total lack of awareness of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology (no, really…he gets everything wrong). David Klinghoffer is, of course, indignant about the criminalization of Intelligent Design creationism (writing from his jail cell, no doubt) and announces that Neil deGrasse Tyson is a…
pharyngula | November 6, 2015Ken Ham says something stupid and dishonest again.
https://twitter.com/aigkenham/status/662450677625569280
The fish that forgot to evolve? Here’s the difference between observational and historical science: ow.ly/Ug1wU
If you bother to read the awful article, it includes a standard creationist canard: Coelacanths haven't changed a bit over their long history, and this disproves evolution.
Well, this fish apparently forgot to evolve for 65 million years! You see, the living coelacanth is easily recognizable from the fossils. Despite having supposedly “primitive” features, many of these…
pharyngula | October 21, 2015 Obvs, he did it.
Larry Moran discusses some apologetics from Jonathan McLatchie, in which McLatchie briefly argues for intelligent design. I think the fact that it's in the context of Christian apologetics already gives away the store, but at least he gives a succinct definition of intelligent design:
The study of patterns in nature which bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause
Oh, so it's 19th century natural history? Been there, done that. About two centuries ago and a little less, that was the underlying assumption of natural theology: that studying science was for the purpose of…
pharyngula | October 2, 2015Stop me if you've heard this one before: yet another creationist has disproved evolution. This one has a site called creationdino.blogspot.com -- he thinks dinosaurs are evidence against evolution -- and calls himself "@BeholdBeast" on Twitter, and is actually named David Wilson. He thinks he has an undeniable proof that evolution did not occur. His claim is that there ought to be more fossils of failed mutations than successful ones.
For evolution to be a viable hypothesis, it must have the element of mutation playing a vast and critical role. Mutation is a chaotic - random - process.…
oracknows | September 24, 2015Early in the history of this blog, I had a running gag that I'd use every now and then. Basically, it involved humorously extravagant descriptions of how I wanted to hide my face behind a paper bag in sheer embarrassment at the antics of fellow physicians, particularly fellow surgeons. Over time, the gag evolved to my expressing a mock desire to hide my visage behind a metal Doctor Doom-style mask, again, over sheer embarrassment over the idiocy of my colleagues about a scientific issue, again, usually evolution. Sadly, creationist physicians are a very common source of such embarrassment,…
pharyngula | September 23, 2015The Intelligent Design Creationists are always getting annoyed at the third word in that label -- they're not creationists, they insist, but something completely different. They're scientists, they think. They're just scientists who favor a different explanation for the diversity of life on Earth than those horrible Darwinist notions. But of course, everything about them just affirms that they're simply jumped-up creationists with airs, from their founding by an evangelical Christian, Phillip Johnson, to their crop of fellows like Paul Nelson and William Dembski, who happily profess their…
pharyngula | September 14, 2015
Bill Nye has a new book coming out in November, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World. In it, he's going to write about climate change, among other subjects.
This has Ken Ham annoyed. Don't you know that if you look at everything through the lens of the Bible, you don't have to worry about climate change? He gives a nice succinct summary of his version of climate history.
Originally, the climate was created perfect, but sin changed everything (Genesis 3), and we no longer have a perfect climate. During the global Flood of Noah’s day about 4,350 years ago the climate was…
pharyngula | September 9, 2015
I saw it coming. The octopus genome was sequenced, and one scientist gushed about the differences between cephalopods and vertebrates, calling them "alien", and that became the news. People really need to read the paper before reporting on it, because it emphasizes the relatedness of octopuses to other animals.
But the creationists don't care about facts. They're motivated to lie. The latest: Darwinism Versus the Octopus: An Evolutionary Dilemma.
No, it's really not.
The author, Eric Metaxas, cites his friend, the intelligent design creationist Stephen Meyer, so it's no wonder he gets…
pharyngula | September 8, 2015
Can you bear a little more Ben Carson? Some yahoo going by the name @CARSON4POTUS has been yammering at me on Twitter: he insists that I'm completely wrong, that Carson is not a young earth creationist, and as evidence he dredges up some godawful talk on creationism that Carson gave in 2011. It convinces me that Carson is even stupider than I thought.
Here are a few quotes from it. The numbers in brackets refer to times in this video, which I have not watched, because listening to Carson talk makes me want to sit him down at the kids' table with a coloring book and tell him to leave the…
pharyngula | September 8, 2015
Not that there was a chance in Hell I'd ever vote for him for anything, but now in a rambling and dogmatic monolog, Carson explains how evolution is stupid, and exposes himself as someone who embraces ignorance.
In a Faith & Liberty interview posted last week, potential GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson discussed his rejection of the theory of evolution, arguing that the science of evolution is a sign of humankind’s arrogance and belief that they are so smart that if they can’t explain how God did something, then it didn’t happen, which of course means that they’re God. You don’t…
pharyngula | September 2, 2015 The Upside Down World
I often get requests from students to answer questions about biology -- typically, they've been told to write to a scientist and get a response, and somehow they've picked me. I try to answer them, but due to the number of requests, I usually only give brief answers. Here's an example:
Dear PZ Meyers,
Yeah, I know. Somehow my name is impossible to spell correctly. I'm resigned to it and just let it slide nowadays.
My name is XXXX and I'm a 19-year-old junior in college.
Now this part was a little weird. They're a college junior…but the questions are more like what I…
pharyngula | July 29, 2015
Oh, joy. Deepak Chopra is mad about being called an evolution denialist, and to disprove the accusation, he fires back with a whole long letter full of misconceptions about evolution. As usual, he relies on painting himself as the brave pioneer at the very edge of science, with a hooting mob of regressive scientific dogmatists haranguing him.
…in a recent blog, Valerie Strauss goes beyond catcalls, accusing me of being an evolution denier, which is absolutely false. I work and write with high-level scientists, including physicists, geneticists, and others who believe, as I do, that…
pharyngula | July 28, 2015The Smithsonian has a traveling exhibit based on the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins. It's going to be put up at libraries all across the country (but nowhere in Minnesota!), so lots of people will get a look at some of the evidence for human evolution. Can you guess who is not happy about this? Of course you can. Ken Ham has declared it a propaganda campaign for atheism.
This is nothing but a propaganda campaign attempting to indoctrinate people to believe they are nothing but animals evolved from ape-like ancestors! To the Smithsonian, that’s what it means to be human! And what they are…
pharyngula | July 25, 2015I've only just noticed that I have a fondness for food metaphors when talking about development -- gastrulation is a peculiar way to make a jelly sandwich, neurulation is like rolling up a burrito, and somite formation is a meatball sub. They sort of illustrate the arrangement of the tissues involved, but of course they all have shortcomings…but then explaining how the metaphor doesn't work can be just as informative as the metaphor itself.
For instance, early in its development, the vertebrate embryo consists of two epithelial sheets, the epiblast and hypoblast, pressed against each other…
gregladen | May 26, 2015Did you ever wonder? And if you did wonder, did you Google it? And if you did google it, did you get the results shown above? And if you did, did you click "feedback" and do something like the following?
No? Do so now, please.
This is important. Why? Because we have been hearing rumors lately that Google intends to change the way it produces searches to bias the search results in the direction of more reliable sites. But the number one search result for a key question that a lot of people ask about evolution is a bogus creationist site.
I've never, for one moment, gone along with the idea…
oracknows | May 20, 2015Yesterday was a long day, starting in the operating room and finishing at a dinner reception for our visiting speaker today. As a result, when I arrived home, I was sawing the proverbial logs within five or ten minutes of hitting the couch, more or less without realizing it. I was going to just skip today, making it a rare weekday where I don't provide you, my loyal readers, with a dose of the Insolence, be it Respectful or not-so-Respectful, to which you have become accustomed. But then I saw an article that reminded me of a topic that I haven't revisited for quite a long time. I'm referring…
pharyngula | April 26, 2015
The latest fatuous obsession by Paul Nelson, Philosopher of Biology at the Discovery Institute, is a real corker. He has decided that nematodes could not possibly have evolved, because scientists (real ones, not creationist pseudoscientists) have produced an extremely detailed literature documenting their development; because Brenner, Horvitz, and Sulston (no creationists among them) won the Nobel Prize for their work describing the cell lineages to produce the worm; and because he doesn't understand developmental biology at all. I've got palm impressions in my forehead from smacking myself…
pharyngula | April 11, 2015Ken Ham is such a disappointment. He has this regular series of short radio-style bits of apologetics, and they are dreary and boring. I had hopes for this one, about "Carnivores Before the Fall (Leopard Seals)" -- I expected some juicy stories about what these big, large-fanged predators ate before the Fall. This, for example, is what a leopard seal looks like before it bites your face off. (But don't worry, there are very few examples of them attacking people.)
Big, hungry, sharp-toothed animals — what did they eat if all animals were vegetarians, once upon a time? Let's ask Ken Ham!
(Note…
pharyngula | April 7, 2015
And every year thereafter. He hasn't learned a thing.
Nelson showed up in the comments to the earlier post on Paul Nelson Day, declaring his intent to publish something to clarify the situation later today. By some miracle, he has already managed to post something today, and not in 2031. Unfortunately, it's still complete rubbish and empty rhetoric.
As is customary, he begins with some faux flattery and wheedling and a pretense to acknowledging that his earlier efforts were failures. There is no way to calculate ontogenetic depth. He thought it ought to be easy, but it isn't. Therefore,…