creationism
tfk | April 1, 2008Billy Dembski complains about Dinesh D’Souza's handling of ID, then adds:
I encourage anyone who has personal contact with him to provide him with better information. A point of leverage is that D’Souza presumably wants Christians, many of whom support ID, to buy his book.
To be clear, then, Dembski's position is that D'Souza ought to abandon a carefully considered intellectual position in order to boost his book sales. (Note that I no more endorse the notion that D'Souza's position is carefully considered than I endorse the idea that it is intellectual.)
To rephrase, Dembski thinks that…
tfk | April 1, 2008Mike Dunford has a great rundown of the ruling in ASCI v. Stearns, a lawsuit in which Christian schools attempted to force the University of California system to rework its admissions standards to accommodate some atrocious textbooks. The court dismissed all of the motions for summary judgment by the schools, and granted the UC system's request for partial summary judgment. A trial will sort out whether the decision not to give credit for courses was properly rooted in UC policy. Claims that the policy itself is biased were tossed out, along with a range of claimed violations of religious…
pharyngula | April 1, 2008The Institute for Creation Research has just published a fairly typical article for them: it's the usual laundry list of amazing biological structures that cry out "Jaaayzuusss!" to the faithful. In this case, they pick on squid. You see, squid have wonderfully complex specializations to control pigment granules in their skins; these are so lovely and so intricate that — and this is the major leap of ignorance they demand of their readers — they couldn't possibly have arisen by natural mechanisms, and must have been specially placed there by a loving god. As an extra special bonus, some squid…
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2008
I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of this below the fold. I'll stick with those in which Jews were killed or which led up to justifying such killings. I have of course had to correct the Darwinian fake history, which I have done with strikeouts and italic insertions so you all can see how perfidious these Darwinian revisionists are.
38CE: Thousands of Jews were killed in Alexandria, under Darwin…
tfk | March 31, 2008I haven't written a lot here about Expelled: No Intelligence. It'll be a crappy movie, and all the PR in the world won't change that. All the whining about PZ Myers, and criticism of his desire to see the movie he's featured in won't make the movie any better. Plus, I'm helping develop NCSE's response to Expelled, and I don't want to tip our hand.
That said, I will predict that Mike Huckabee's endorsement will not save the movie. By all accounts it is boring, and everything I've seen from the producers and writers has been laced through with inaccuracies. I doubt the movie is any better…
tfk | March 31, 2008The York Daily Record (known for its coverage of the Dover ID trial) interviews Barack Obama:
Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design. What's your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?
A: "I'm a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there's a difference between science and faith. That doesn't make…
mikethemadbiologist | March 31, 2008In my entire tenure at ScienceBlogs, I've never called out other ScienceBloglings, even if I have posted responses to them. But ScienceBloglings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet are slowly morphing into unwitting concern trolls regarding the creationist controversy.
With regards to Richard Dawkins, as I've said before, I think he's a wash. On the one hand, he seems utterly ignorant of the U.S. political landscape (or worse, he just doesn't care) when fighting what is a political battle (the creationist controversy). On the other hand, he makes people like me who are not Christian and who do…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2008A while back, when Michael Egnor was prattling on about evolution and antibiotic resistance, I described how Egnor didn't comprehend the difference between artificial selection and natural selection. In a related post, ScienceBlogling PZ, in debunking the 'TEH DARWINISMZ KREATED HITLER!!' canard, puts Darwin's seminal contribution in context:
There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight.
If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.
It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out--and many…
pharyngula | March 29, 2008Sometimes, people wonder if criticizing creationists brings more attention to them than they deserve — it's a weird dynamic on the web, where we measure popularity by traffic (unfortunately), so referencing the bad guys sends them traffic, which seems to increase their apparent popularity. There's no way around it, because that's the way it works.
So we've always got people urging stasis — don't raise a ruckus, keep mum, hush, don't draw more attention to the crappy, crazy creationists — and they mean well, but they're wrong. I say we need to be loud and tell everyone about them. We need to…
pharyngula | March 28, 2008I have to make this really, really simple for the "Hitler was an evolutionist" dimwits.
There is a central, incredibly obvious fact in Darwin's insight.
If members of a population die or are killed off, they will leave no descendants for subsequent generations.
It isn't razzle-dazzle genius. Any idiot can figure that one out — and many idiots have. Farmers have known it for millennia, when they set aside particularly fruitful seed stock or especially robust farm animals for breeding, and eat the rest. Nazis used this elementary logic when they decided to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and…
gregladen | March 28, 2008PZ Myers is not pulling punches with Expelled! and the enigmatically moronic producers of said movie.
pharyngula | March 28, 2008Some of you know that the producers of Expelled had a conference call this afternoon…a carefully controlled, closed environment in which they would spout their nonsense and only take questions by email. I listened to it for a while, and yeah, it was the usual run-around. However, I dialed in a few minutes early, and got to listen to a tiresome five minutes of Leslie and Paul chatting away, during which time they mentioned the secret code (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!) for the two way calls. I know. Sloppy, unprofessional, and stupid, but that's the way they work.
So … I redialed. (DUNH DUNH DUNNNNH!)…
pharyngula | March 28, 2008I'm writing this at an altitude of 37,000 feet, 7 miles up in the air. Now I'm not really afraid of flying — I am entirely confident that I'll be able to post this sometime after I land — but if you think about it, it's grounds for trepidation. This is insanely high, and I'm in this fragile tin can that is reliant on a constant stream of exploding jet fuel to keep from simply falling out of the sky … an event which I and the other passengers would not survive. I don't want to dwell on it, of course, but I have put myself in a potentially lethal situation, and I have to do this regularly as…
esiegel | March 28, 2008There's a movie coming out on Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution, called Expelled, and it's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein (right), a TV/film personality who is an overall intelligent guy (and used to have the TV show Win Ben Stein's Money), and used to be a Nixon speechwriter. Politically, he's quite conservative (for example, immediately following 9/11 he gave a speech where he called abortion "the worst form of terrorism"), but this movie is apparently one of the worst abuses of science since What the Bleep do We Know?! came out.
The movie has an innocuous enough premise: is…
laelaps | March 27, 2008I'm really not that worried about Expelled. Sure, it has resulted in a fair amount of posts here on the blogosphere (and I've done my fair share), but from what I can tell most people have never even heard of the film. Set to come out on April 18th, the film hasn't even shown up on the radar of many movie websites, and from what I've heard about test screenings the film is still undergoing some last minute changes before it slithers onto screens. How many screens? I have no idea, but I wouldn't imagine that it will be that many.
It's expensive to go to the movies these days, the cheapest…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2008
To avoid permanent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Vox Popoli be read only through the StupidVu9000
So Vox Day stumbled across my post about the utility of evolutionary biology (among other things) and he went berserk.
Maybe he came across the link by way of ScienceBlogling PZ, and since there's no love lost between those two, he went nuts by association.
Maybe he read the word "emotional" in the post and became absolutely terrified that his tiny little penis would fall off.
Or maybe he's just a complete fucking moron.
I'll lay out what I meant by "moral":
Creationists…
gregladen | March 26, 2008Anne Coulter sends me emails now and then (she doesn't know who I am ... don't tell her) so I get the inside anorexia, I mean, the inside skinny on some of the moves the hard right wing are making now and then. Astonishingly, very little of this is ever of any interest. But the latest tidbit is somewhat interesting. The righties are creaming in their jeans about the republication (which actually happened last year) of Sebastian Adams' "time line of history."
This document from the 1870s is historically interesting because it is one of the early "time lines" and it does reflect what some…
pharyngula | March 26, 2008Florida did it: their ridiculous "academic freedom" bill that promoted creationism has been approved by their senate committee.
Here's the cast of characters:
Chair: Senator Don Gaetz
(R)
Vice Chair: Senator Frederica
S. Wilson (D)
Senator Larcenia J. Bullard (D)
Senator Lisa Carlton (R)
Senator Ted Deutch (D)
Senator Alex Diaz de la Portilla
(R)
Senator Stephen R. Wise (R)
Floridians, you have a job to do.
Call or write Sen. Ted Deutch and thank him: he's the only one who voted against the bill. Urge him to keep up the fight.
The chair and vice chair of…
pharyngula | March 26, 2008Here are some quick, simple things you can do right now.
The Florida Senate Education committee is meeting this afternoon to consider their bogus "academic freedom" bill. Florida Citizens for Science has a link to a very good analysis of the bill; it basically declares the bill pointless, vague, and self-defeating. You might try calling your Florida representative — the link has a list — and urging them to recognize the Bill Analysis and Fiscal Impact Statement of the Professional Staff of the Education Pre-K-12 Committee, and kill SB 2692.
The New Humanist has an online poll (yeah, we…
pharyngula | March 25, 2008The producers of Expelled have spent a couple of days sweating over damage control, I guess. They've shut down or delayed all the pending screenings of their movie, and now they've issued a remarkably dishonest press release. The mendacity is astonishing in its scope; somebody tell me, is this "framing"?
Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media's upcoming movie Ben Stein's EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the…