creationism
tfk | October 15, 2007Last month, papers in Louisiana spotted an interesting earmark tacked onto the Senate version of the appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Education. Senator David Vitter (R-LA brothels) had allocated $100,000 for a Dobson-derived group – Lousiana Family Forum. The money was meant to let them "promote better science education."
Who could oppose better science education? It all depends on what, exactly, you mean by "better" and "science." LFF has a long history of pushing creationism in public schools, including drafting a controversial policy in the Ouachita school…
pharyngula | October 15, 2007Here's an interesting essay on why people don't accept evolution: it's not simply a consequence of a conflict between religious teachings and the conclusion of science, but is also a conflict created by the nonintuitive way that evolution works — that a very small selective force operating over long periods of time can generate dramatic outcomes, often with no obvious, linear progression from one point to another. It's well-said, but not an entirely new idea (thermodynamics and information theory seem to often throw people for a loop, and creationists seem utterly baffled by genetic…
pharyngula | October 11, 2007John is right. This is in the running for the dumbest theist argument ever.
The atheist might say, "Well, I can reason just fine, and I don't believe in God." But this is no different than the critic of air saying, "Well, I can breathe just fine, and I don't believe in air." This isn't a rational response. Breathing requires air, not a profession of belief in air. Likewise, logical reasoning requires God, not a profession of belief in Him. Of course the atheist can reason; it's because God has made his mind and given him access to the laws of logic—and that's the point. It's because God…
pharyngula | October 11, 2007Here's a nice collection of anti-creationism cartoons, all in one place. Very handy!
(via Greg Laden)
pharyngula | October 10, 2007November 13, on PBS's Nova: "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial."
I think I'll try to catch that one.
pharyngula | October 10, 2007Prison doesn't seem to be helping Kent Hovind face the facts. He has these blog entries where he writes down these little imaginary conversations with god, who tells poor Kent how wonderful he is and how important his suffering is; in the latest, Hovind insists that he's innocent — of course God agrees — but the real sign of growing insanity is that Satan is now having conversations with him, too.
You have also dared to try to take dinosaurs away from me. I have used dinosaurs for nearly 200 years to teach billions of people that the earth is billions of years old and that God's Word is not…
pharyngula | October 10, 2007The creationists don't have to win their court cases to have an effect: all they have to do is threaten and badger teachers, and they effectively intimidate many into avoiding evolution, or work to make sure qualified science teachers don't get hired at all. It happens here, and now it's happening in the UK.
Teachers in UK schools are avoiding teaching evolution in science classes to avoid conflict with students, especially Muslims, who believe in creationism.
I don't have any sympathy for students or their parents who think an education is a process of affirming what you think you already…
pharyngula | October 10, 2007When you think of Uncommon Descent (something I'm sure we all avoid as much as possible), the weblog of Bill Dembski and friends, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe Intelligent Design advocacy is near the top, but their pyrrhic censorship policies have also got to be up there. At least the reverse is true: if you think about blogs with bad policies on comments, on transparency, on maintenance, with capricious administration and a ruthless dedication to silencing any critics, UD is the premier instance.
Well, somebody had to vent about it. I think it's fine, actually: it's great…
pharyngula | October 8, 2007Good news: the new education commissioner for Florida is not Cheri Yecke. It's someone named Eric Smith, about whom I know nothing, so we'll have to wait and see if they're an improvement.
Ugh. The improvement is only marginal. He's another conservative testing rodent who thinks the answer is privatizing schools.
pharyngula | October 7, 2007As promised, I attended Tom DeRosa's creationism talk this evening, and as expected, it wasn't very informative but it was mildly entertaining. He's a good, enthusiastic speaker — he's just unbelievably wrong. We might have a recording later on; Skatje was taping it, but it was just with our little home digital video recorder, and we don't have any idea what the quality will be like, yet. I'm letting her handle the A/V stuff on this one.
Anyway, it wasn't quite what I expected. I was thinking it might be based on his recent book, Evolution's Fatal Fruit, which blames every social ill of the…
pharyngula | October 7, 2007Moi? Mentioned in the Waco Tribune? Defending a creationist? I knew that remark would come back to bite me. At least the author misspelled my name, so my shame won't spread too far (except, unfortunately, that I seem to be more widely cited as "Meyers" than "Myers"). Anyway, it's a letter by Robert Marks' lawyer, complaining about Baylor's decision to shut down Marks' "evolutionary informatics" web page, and I'm mentioned as supporting him.
In Minnesota, where I live, a well-known biologist and faithful believer in evolution, Professor P.Z. Meyers, has followed what Baylor has done and called…
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2007
I found this interesting and still surprisingly modern essay by David Starr Jordan in 1897, at William Tozier's blog, where he had scanned it from a journal called The Arena. They had some good public discussion journals at the time.
So I took his scan and OCR'd and corrected it, and put it here. It is amazing how well Jordon managed to avoid the usual errors, and correct those that are with us still, so long ago.
The essay is beneath the fold. I left the headers in.
THE ARENA.
Vol. XVIII.AUGUST, 1897.No. 93.
EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.1
BY DR. DAVID STARR…
pharyngula | October 5, 2007Josh talks about the difference between teaching about ID and teaching ID. There is a huge difference that the Discovery Institute does not seem to understand.
I am opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. It's an absurd idea that is unsupported by any evidence — it has not earned a place in the curriculum as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. The propaganda novels that the DI has tried to peddle in the past, Of Pandas and People and their new one, Explore Evolution, do not belong in the classroom. They are badly written, and incompetently push completely false ideas as valid…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2007
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I'd tell you more about his talk, but I can't, for reasons that will become obvious.
He wanted to do the talk as a dadaist performance. How can I help? I enquired. That was my mistake.
Well, he said, I want us to give a simultaneous presentation. What, in turn? I asked. No, at the same time. With music. And Allison (his partner) folding…
pharyngula | October 4, 2007I recently mentioned the way some serious theologians believe in demons and exorcisms. I can't help it; I find these notions ridiculous to an extreme, and the absurdity of serious scholars blaming diseases on demonic possession in the 21st century is something one has to find laughable. I was being hard on Christianity, though. I left out an important exonerating factor for these people.
Some of them believe in angels, too.
Yes, I'm joking when I say this is an exonerating factor. This merely makes them even more silly. But no, you say, they can't possibly argue for demons and angels being…
pharyngula | October 4, 2007The offenses of creationists aren't always blatant: it's the sneaky erosion of science, the quiet omissions, the gradual degradation of good science where they make the most gains, and it's where they get bold and stick their heads out (like Dover) where they get slapped down. We need to be aware of the small stuff, too, because it adds up — like this effort by Dutch evangelicals to edit David Attenborough's documentaries. Some changes have to be made in translations and so forth, and the BBC does allow cuts up to about 5 minutes per hour, but the nasty thing is how targeted the cuts are at…
pharyngula | October 3, 2007Well, lookee here … an announcement in the local Morris paper.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7
TOM DEROSA will be at Morris Evangelical Free Church at 6:30 p.m., to present a creationist's perspective about evolution. DeRosa's presentation is free and open to the public.
I don't think I have any plans for Sunday night. Wouldn't an evening with an old pal of D. James Kennedy and the founder of the Creation Studies Institute be buckets of fun?
You should listen to his testimonial. He claims to be an atheist who was teaching evolution in the public schools (he was teaching physics and chemistry, though —…
pharyngula | October 2, 2007That last creationist email I posted was agonizing in its longwindedness…how about something short and illustrated?
(Mild warning: this sketch might be considered obscene if it weren't so crude and talentless that any relationship to real anatomy is a scurrilous rumor.)
i drew a picher of u and ur bf
awww ur so in luv
I don't often get "artwork" in my email. The last one was a few months ago where the sender pasted my head onto the torso of what looked like a gay porn model engaged in an interesting act — that one really was obscene and I wouldn't consider putting it here, even if my…
pharyngula | October 2, 2007After his recent rampage against the Baylor administration, Bill Dembski now claims to be offering an apology to Baylor…only not really. I don't think he knows what 'apology' means — a statement loaded with reservations like "I mean in no way to mitigate the gravity of Baylor's wrong in censoring the research of Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab" and "I hurt my family and lost about three weeks of productive work by being consumed with anger about the injustice against Robert Marks" is not an apology — it's an opportunity to reiterate your grievances. And closing with the…