creationism
pharyngula | January 24, 2008This is a good opinion piece in the Charlotte Observer by an Englishman residing in the city. He states right up front that he likes the city and sees a great deal of promise for the future in it, but he has one reservation: the region's religiosity.
To a foreigner like myself, it's disturbing that a majority of Americans don't believe in something as fundamental as evolution (in a CBS/New York Times poll, 55 percent said God created humans in their current form). This erosion of belief in science and rationality is especially troubling for a prosperous region such as ours. American action is…
pharyngula | January 24, 2008It's a lot cheaper than making a movie and trying to persuade all those scientists to shut up.
Let's be fair — somebody used a little photoshop on me, too. But really, my head isn't that small, I'm not quite that chunky, and I'd never use a gun.
pharyngula | January 24, 2008Uh-oh. The word is out. Being an atheist evolutionist means all the porn you could want and being surrounded by big bags of money.
Good thing he left off the orgies. If people know about the orgies, we'd never get any peace.
tfk | January 23, 2008Mike has some astute observations about the Disco. Inst.'s Dissent from Darwinism List. Noting that Rob Crowther claims:
Signers of the Dissent List have signed the list because it is their professional opinion that the evidence is lacking for the claims for the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Period. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Mike proceeds to point out that most of the signers have no professional basis for such an assessment. This is a fair and important point, but it misses an even fairer and more important point: the barrier…
pharyngula | January 23, 2008When I decide to take a break from the mad scramble of organizing my classes, I really shouldn't follow a whim and take a peek at Uncommon Descent. The lead article has this astonishing opening paragraph.
Remember the dark days of vestigal organs? You know, back when there was a list of 180 vestigal organs? Or remember the days of junk DNA - when repetitive DNA, large regions of non-protein-coding DNA, and all sorts of mobile DNA were assumed to be non-functional simply because the investigators had assumed Darwinism rather than design?
I'm half a century old. I remember a lot of things, but…
tfk | January 22, 2008Tony Campolo, generally considered a member of the Christian Left, writes a staggeringly wrong essay on evolution. After rightly dismissing typical creationist complaints that evolutionary "theories contradict their literal biblical belief that creation occurred in six 24-hour days," Campolo jumps onto the Coral Ridge/Disco. Inst. bandwagon, claiming that the "real dangers of Darwinism," lie in "the ethical implications of Darwin's original writings."
After which we get the typical half-literate practice of judging Darwin's 500+ page opus based on a single phrase in the subtitle: "Favored…
pharyngula | January 22, 2008… try Denyse O'Leary sometime. She's now written a list of predictions from ID, and I don't think she understands the meaning of the word "prediction" in a scientific context. Eight of the nine are variants on the theme, "there will be no natural explanations for X," which, try as we might, reveals that our demands for positive, productive explanations from the ID crowd go unheard, and they'd rather just whine that they don't understand something, so we must not, either.
The one exception: she doesn't believe the eco-doomsayers who predict that we will destroy all life on the planet. She…
pharyngula | January 22, 2008Ray Comfort has a blog, and one of his entries claims that the Bible is a science text, and that it is better than science. His style of argument is to first list a "fact" from the Bible (usually something that is completely open to interpretation, and he chooses to interpret it as being in conformity with modern science); then he mentions a corresponding fact derived from modern science, that always agrees with the Bible; then he lists something from "science then," which is dead wrong.
It's so clueless it hurts to read it.
First fundamental error: science isn't a loose collection of facts,…
pharyngula | January 22, 2008Minnesota is going to be revising their science standards this year. Last time we went through this, it was a circus, with our education commissioner (the notorious Cheri Pearson Yecke) trying to pack the review committees with creationists and doing last minute swaps of committee-approved drafts with drafts edited by creationists. We had John Calvert show up at hearings, along with a few other home-grown kooks, including a guy with a replica of a giant leg bone that he claimed proved there were giants in the earth in those days.
This time around, though, we have guidelines that will limit…
gregladen | January 21, 2008For your amusement, a selection from the public comments on the fight over science standards in Florida.
"How is anyone's life improved by believing in evolution?"
"I will not allow you to teach my child this no matter what you put in your curriculum. I stand for Christ and his creation."
"To teach only one theory is communistic."
"This is unacceptable, unless Biblical Creationism is taught alongside evolution."
"I strongly disagree with the term 'evolution' being used in kindergarten or any grade level. I would change the term 'evolution' to a more user friendly term such as 'adaptations…
tfk | January 21, 2008PZ watches a clip from a creationist video game and wonders:
Now here's the question: is this the work of a sincere creationist, or is this the product of the evil atheist conspiracy, made with the intent of making creationists look like talentless, tasteless hacks? I can't tell.
This is an example of Poe's Law: "Without the use of a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to make a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."
pharyngula | January 21, 2008The video clip below is from a game called Noah's Adventures. It's awful—Noah sounds like a drunk with brain damage, the graphics look like a preschooler tried fingerpainting with his feces, and the whole plot is ridiculous.
Now here's the question: is this the work of a sincere creationist, or is this the product of the evil atheist conspiracy, made with the intent of making creationists look like talentless, tasteless hacks? I can't tell.
grrlscientist | January 21, 2008tags: creationism, mastodon skull, Mt Blanco Fossil Museum, fossils
The Mount Blanco creationist "museum" in Crosbyton, Texas managed to raise the funds to save their facility from extinction by selling their 40,000 year old mastodon skull at auction. The skull, named "Lone Star", was estimated to be worth $160,000 and sold for $191,200. The "museum", which claims that humans and dinosaurs co-existed and that the universe, the earth and everything on it were created six thousand years ago, will use these funds to continue spreading lies to the public regarding the nature and origins of life…
pharyngula | January 21, 2008Greg Laden, that romantic evolutionary gastronome has several good posts on the mess in Florida (and, by the way, here's a map if you're having trouble keeping track of all those counties). These are documents produced by the activist creationists down there, and they really reveal how inept and uneducated these wankers are.
First is a letter from Bill Foster, the city council member who has mayoral aspirations despite his lack of a brain. It does drone on, but here are a few choice excerpts.
Throw in the case that there is still no fossil record or evidence to support Darwin, and all you…
gregladen | January 20, 2008Florida State Board of Education (Panda's thumb)
Ignorance By Design: Florida School Board Resolutions (Panda's Thumb)
What's your school board like? (Pharyngula)
Where did those anti-evolution resolutions come from? (Panda's Thumb)
gregladen | January 20, 2008Apropos the fight over excellent science education (as opposed to creationism) in Florida schools, is it OK for a church, which I presume has religious non profit status, to engage actively in an attempt to sway elected officials?
Regarding the State Board of Education meetings to discuss this issue in Florida ...
Also present at the Tampa SBOE meeting was Terry Kemple, member of Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon where he is a leader of the church's Community Issues Committee. Kemple told the Witness his church has been informing its members about the science standards and encouraging…
pharyngula | January 20, 2008The Center for Inquiry in Austin hosted a meeting that asked the question, Will Texas Support 21st Century Science Education? The good news is that the place was packed, and there are a lot of rational, intelligent people in Texas who are fed up with the lunatics running the show and are motivated to do something about it. That's kind of the theme here; we're having a rising grassroots revolution here that's going to throw these rascals out.
But here's the bad news: we've been slacking off, and the raving fundie nitwits have taken a lot of political power.
Here's why the situation for science…
gregladen | January 19, 2008This is Part 1 because there is more than one part. But I'm only going to do one of them, so it is Part 1 of 1. There is more than one "kind" of home schooler, home schooling parent, home schooling family, etc., and thus there are multiple attitudes. But a good chunk of the home schooling population, represented by these excerpts from their own rhetoric, are more than a little annoying, and are the reason why we should always be suspicious of home schooling and home schoolers until we see their credentials.
Home Schooling Is a Good Choice for Christian Parenting
If you want to impart a…