creationism
pharyngula | February 7, 2008Guillermo Gonzalez's appeal of his tenure denial went before the Iowa State University board of regents this morning.
To no one's surprise, his appeal was denied. Seriously, this was a no-brainer; it would have been grounds for suspicion if the board of regents had overruled the opinion of his peers to force Gonzalez on the physics and astronomy department.
Now Dr Gonzalez needs to quit trusting the blandishments of the Discovery Institute and get to work on reconstructing his career. Peter Irons wrote me this morning and asked what odds I'd give on Gonzalez getting tenure; I'd have said they…
gregladen | February 7, 2008... as if you didn't know...
At Panda's Thumb, there
is a guest post by Daniel R. Brooks, FRSC. Brooks is a professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. In June 2007 he attended an apparently secret conference organized by ID advocates and entitled the "Wistar Retrospective Symposium."
This is quite an interesting read, and will make your blood boil. Read it and weep. . Or seethe.
This is part of the reason that the Blogging Peer Reviewed Research people do not need to explain why intelligent design material or Discovery Institute blogs…
tfk | February 7, 2008Guillermo Gonzalez, Privileged Planet author and self-styled ID martyr, lost his last administrative appeal of his tenure denial. He has previously stated that he is looking for other tenure-track jobs, and I'm confident that some Bible college will be glad to take him.
Whether Disco. Inst. and Gonzalez' lawyers will follow up on implied threats to file suit over the tenure denial remain to be seen. Such suits are risky business, since they dramatically reduce the likelihood that you'll get hired for a different job while you're in the process of suing your former employer. Gonzalez hasn't…
pharyngula | February 7, 2008Go read this first rate summary of an ID meeting by one of its unsympathetic attendees. It's genuinely bizarre. The talks by the ID proponents are frankly, complete garbage (not that the account is that blunt), which explains the message everyone got afterwards.
A few days after the meeting ended, we all received an email stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting, and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute's web site (the entire…
pharyngula | February 6, 2008Poor Geoffrey Simmons, so painfully pathetic. He's back on KKMS right now, given an hour where there isn't one of those wretched evolutionists to point out the absurdity of his comments. So far, all he's doing is giving a litany of complexity — the eye is so complex, and the eyes are at the top of your head to give you the best visibility, and they're exactly the right distance apart to give you binocular vision. It's painfully panglossian and naive.
Oh, and he snipes at the 'experts' and claims that the 'Darwinists' don't understand the complexity of childbirth, unlike him, the MD. Good…
gregladen | February 6, 2008The Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting Administration has made a decision in what has come to be known as t"The Luskin situation: A summary, analysis and decision." I believe they made the right decision, but for the wrong reasons. I respect and admire (and participate in) their efforts, but I think they are being nice. This is no time to be nice.
Here's the story. Casey Luskin is a creationist who posted a discussion of a PLoS (peer reviewed) article on the Discover Institute's web site. I don't give a rat's ass what he has to say or what the Discover Institute puts on their…
pharyngula | February 6, 2008Suddenly, lots of people want to debate me. I'm really not that much into the debate business, and I think most of the people who want to battle me don't need a high-level argument about biology — they need a remedial course in elementary science. Especially since most of the challenges are rather like this one:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=47a2cb894dc2340b;act=ST;f=14;t=1274;st=24870
Note that the drooling animals are clamoring for P.Z. Myers and Dembski to have a "debate." What is to debate? Myers is a rabid mad man, completely out of control. His condition…
gregladen | February 6, 2008The nefarious Discovery Institute, the Creation Science think tank, is often secretive about its activities. It has not been entirely clear that they have been involved in the recent fight in Florida over the use of the word "evolution" and the teaching of mainstream, scientifically informed evolutionary biology, in public schools. Going with the interpretation of The Gradebook, the Discover Institute ...
acknowledged on its Evolution News & Views blog today that it provided information to Fred Cutting, the member of the standards-writing committee who recently submitted a minority…
pharyngula | February 5, 2008I'm swamped with teaching labs, writing deadlines, and the DFL caucus — you're all going to caucus, right? — so I'm just going to have to ask you to pretend that Henry Rollins is me for a little while.
pharyngula | February 5, 2008Sure you do. So you might enjoy this webcast series from Scientific American.
One of the things they mention is the recent "peer-reviewed" "scientific" "journal" from Answers in Genesis (sharply slammed by Larry Moran), and they criticize Nature's coverage, which urges scientists to avoid taking "too strong a stance against the journal" because it would "fuel creationist's claim of scientific bias against religion."
This is what always happens when you go to appeasers for quotes: you get urged to be a coward in dealing with the opposition.
pharyngula | February 5, 2008I appreciate sincere criticism, I really do, and despite all the praise for my recent radio debate, I listened to it and mainly heard a lot of things I could have done better. So I like it when I find someone who also offers suggestions for improvement, but at the same time, I have to disagree with one (just one, the others are good) central point he makes.
However, in the future I would warn PZ against calling his opponent ignorant or berating them in a debate like this. Save that kind of stuff when you're venting to your fellow smart people. Name calling doesn't convince any of the audience…
gregladen | February 4, 2008Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to "weaponise" them. For example the engineered mouse pox virus that turned lethal (Nature. 2001 May 17;411(6835):232-5 see also Nat Genet. 2001 Nov;29(3):253-6) and limits on the sequencing of the 1918 strain of the flu to stop flu from being weaponised (Fed Regist. 2005 Oct 20;70(202):61047-9,). A…
gregladen | February 4, 2008You may remember some time ago a brouhaha erupted when an upper Midwestern Blogger was told he had to erase a post that said something bad (yet truthful) about Cheri Yecke, who was at that time competing for the job of head of Florida Education. The company was a "scrubber" which promised to find bad things on the internet about a client, and get rid of them (the bad things, not the client) for a fee.
My response to the company's efforts to scrub the Yecke is here: Arrrrg. Avast ye 'defenders' ...
Well, not this sort of company has evolved (ha! evolution is real!) from "scrubber" to "…
pharyngula | February 3, 2008This is awesome. A band set a Chick tract to music, and not just any Chick tract, but one of the sickest, creepiest Chick tracts ever.
pharyngula | February 3, 2008Any google experts out there? ERV has been having some difficulties — she keeps getting delisted by google, and then coming back up. Strangely, if you search for ERV, this currently comes up:
Wha…? Go to the link, and that text isn't there. It's as if someone has been whining to google, and their complaint is what's appearing in the search. Maybe someone can explain this to us.
By the way, that text sure sounds like poor pathetic Casey Luskin, the sad little mouse. He's always getting picked on by all those people who are bigger and meaner and smarter than he is; he probably wears a football…
gregladen | February 3, 2008I'd like to point you to an interesting piece on teaching evolution in Florida:
Sometimes, Allyn Sue Baylor doesn't teach evolution in her science class, even though the state requires it. She knows of other teachers who duck the issue, too.
They fear a backlash.
"There are cases when parents have gotten really upset," said Baylor, who teaches at Palm Harbor Middle School in Pinellas County. "It's scary. You can lose your job."
Its an interesting article in the St Pete's times. Here.
Which reminds me to remind you. If you want your public school teachers to teach evolution to your children…
pharyngula | February 3, 2008Do the intelligent citizens of Florida a favor and sign the petition urging better standards for education. More pressure!
pharyngula | February 3, 2008Many of you have already seen the gorgeous video below: it's a spectacularly beautiful animation of the activity in a cell.
I like it, and it's a useful illustration, but … there's something fundamental that it gets completely wrong. So today I'm not going to praise it, I'm going to criticize it. It's a substantial criticism, too, one that means I wouldn't show this video in my classes without spending more time explaining the error than it takes to show it.
Here's the central problem: molecules don't behave that way. What is portrayed is wonderfully precise movement; it looks like the…
gregladen | February 3, 2008With all five school board members believing evolution should not be taught as fact, the School Board of Highlands County on Tuesday will consider a resolution opposing the state's proposed new science standards stance on evolution.
The proposed resolution states, "The board recognizes the importance of providing a thorough and comprehensive science education to all students in Highlands County, which the board believes should include the multiple theories regarding the origins of the universe and life on earth."
[source]
gregladen | February 3, 2008Ed Brayton asks us to sign this online petition "...to keep the pressure on the state Board of Education to adopt the new proposed science standards as they are ..."
Please go do it.