creationism
pharyngula | September 21, 2007Oh, no. Another one. Yet another kook is inspired by Ken Ham's example and plans to open a "museum" … in the Wisconsin Dells. The Dells, if you don't know it, is a family resort area, rather cheesy (ha! In Wisconsin! I made a funny), and crammed with waterparks and waterskiing shows and carnival rides and bowling alleys and little stage shows—a creationist "museum" will fit right in.
The guy who has collected a hodge-podge of creationist exhibits, Bill Mielke, exhibits the typical rhetorical coherence of his breed.
"What we're doing is those that say it's scientific, is to say it's not…
pharyngula | September 21, 2007How do the Irish keep track of them all? They have more than two political parties, and yet they only have two middle fingers to raise up and wave at them. All I can say, though, is that if I were living in Northern Ireland, I wouldn't be voting for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which narrows the field a little. Look at the tripe they're pushing on the schools now:
A DUP proposal that Lisburn Council should write to local secondary and grammar schools encouraging them to teach alternative theories to evolution is set to face stiff opposition when it is debated next week.
That sure…
pharyngula | September 21, 2007This game looks like it is way too much fun.
IF ID WAS MEDICINE
I could tell you you were sick, because you *look* sick. We'd have some fantastic metric for sickness that no-one has ever used and our "sick or healthy" filter would just be a concept.... that didn't work. I could maybe tell you you were sick, because you look sick but could make no comment about the disease causing the sickness, how it makes you sick or how to cure you. Real medicine would be a dogmatic religious belief, though.
Everyone can play! Pick your own analogy!
mikethemadbiologist | September 21, 2007Let no one say I won't call out liberals when they're idiots about evolution. From the archives:
About a week about Matt Yglesias had a post about evolution where he wrote (italics mine):
Last but not least, nothing whatsoever of practical importance hinges on whether or not life on earth originated as a result of intelligent design. The theory is exceedingly silly pseudo-science, but it doesn't actually threaten anything. There is, moreoever, no reason to think it's especially crucial for the average citizen to have an accurate grasp of state-of-the-art biological theory. Most people don't…
evolvingthoughts | September 20, 2007
Jason Rosenhouse, of Evolutionblog, has posted a rather snarky review of a book review by the historian and philosopher Ian Hacking that was published in The Nation. Jason titled his comment "How not to defend evolution". Here's my take on it.
Jason thinks that Hacking was pretentious, that he was not careful in his use of language, and that he was wordy. The essay was 4600 words long. Jason's response is 1520 words of part one of a two parter. Hmm...
The problem as I see it lies in the attitude of the sciences (and yes, I include mathematics amongst that tribe) to the humanities, and…
pharyngula | September 20, 2007A few people in this thread were suggesting we needed a creationist bingo card — Skeptico obliged earlier this month.
You need a couple of randomized versions of this, but you'll still have the problem that people all over the auditorium will be shouting "Bingo!" five minutes into the talk, and by the end, you'll have to give everyone a prize.
pharyngula | September 19, 2007Got a creationist coming to your town or school? A commenter from Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education left an excellent summary of how to counter these travelin' frauds effectively. The key is simple: recruit. Get the information out. Don't let them come in and babble unopposed or with an audience imported from the local fundie churches — get informed people there, and the creationists will crumple easily.
Notice that this isn't about suppressing their information (or even expelling them) — it's shining the light of open public criticism on their shenanigans.
A little more…
pharyngula | September 19, 2007ERV has put up her account of Dembski's nightmare evening, in which he got grilled and mocked by the students in the Q&A. It sounds like it was great fun — for everyone else, at least — but this part really irks me.
Finally, the Creationists had had enough. Somebody had to stand up for Jesus.
"Im just so disappointed in OU students and how closed minded they are!!!"
Dembski made it perfectly clear at that point that the attacks against me were no accidental oversight. Dembski used this Creationist as an opportunity to attack the students that were exposing him as a fool: "Well dont be so…
pharyngula | September 18, 2007I've just come back from my introductory biology classroom in which I've been trying hard to convince students of an important historical fact: the scientists, especially the geologists, who came up with the idea that the earth was old were working in a Christian tradition, and they came up with their ideas because they needed to explain the evidence, not because they were driven by theological considerations or because they had been bribed by the Evil Atheist Conspiracy. Sometimes you just have to put them in the shoes of a geologist in 1850 to get them to see the true motives. Then I…
pharyngula | September 18, 2007Here's a hot prospect for the Discovery Institute: Fred Sigworth, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale. Snap him up, quick! He'll fit in perfectly! He gave a talk to the Yale Christian Fellowship which sounds like it was hilarious.
"Being a Christian is good preparation for work as a scientist, and science can help prepare you for being a Christian," he said.
Oh? How does faith help you be a better scientist?
Sigworth said that both religion and science require working with incomplete data…
That's a revelation right there. Science does require working with incomplete…
pharyngula | September 17, 2007We've all heard how the Creation Science Evangelism, Kent Hovind's organization, has been strongarming YouTube to suppress criticisms of his bad science. Well, check this out: now CSE has been caught red-handed revising their licensing. Where before they declared everything free and good to disseminate, now they are retroactively claiming copyright.
I take that as an admission that they can't stand the heat.
tqa | September 16, 2007
I've been continuing to put some time into criticizing Michael Behe's expert report on the creationist texts involved in the California Creationism Case. This is a slow process, partly because I'm also working on other projects and partly because it's difficult to read the Bob Jones "Biology for Christian Schools" text without encountering a range of unpleasant side effects. I've been fighting the increased blood pressure and the nausea, and soldiering on. Along the way, I've encountered some real gems that I thought I'd share with you.
Today, I'm going to give you two quotes: one on…
pharyngula | September 15, 2007Man, everyone is sending me this comic and saying it reminds them of me. I don't know why.
Just for the record, I would never shoot a dog. I know how to use an IV and some barbituates to painlessly euthanize them. But I wouldn't. That's only your theory.
pharyngula | September 15, 2007…don't bother.
A reader sent me a link to his photo set from the BVCSM, and I'm afraid all you'll find there is the Wall O' Text approach to instruction. You know what that is: print out a page from Answers in Genesis, blow it up real big, and slap it on a wall … instant museum!
There is one amusing revelation — creationists sometimes have the wackiest ideas — and it made me laugh.
Did you know that ALL dinosaur footprint fossils found are pointing in the same direction?! This is IRREFUTABLE PROOF of the dinosaurs running from a global flood!
Creation Logic 101: you don't need any! And…
pharyngula | September 14, 2007Oh, that little scamp, Billy Dembski. He's all upset about his shabby treatment at Baylor, and he's displacing his anger into a defense of Robert Marks.
President John Lilley of Baylor appears to have made up his mind that Prof. Robert Marks's Evolutionary Informatics Lab is to have no place at Baylor. There is only one court of appeal now, the Baylor Board of Regents, who can reverse Lilley's decision and even remove Lilley as president. Here is the list of board members. I encourage readers of UD to contact them (respectfully) and share their concerns about this gross violation of academic…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2007
Larry Caldwell, a well-known proponent of antievolutionism, tried and failed to get "the controversy" taught in the school district of his kids' school. He failed, so he sued the school board because he was "discriminated against... for being Christian". The suit was just thrown out.
What bothers me is not that antievolutionists would again try to use the legal system to change the definition and content of science - we have come to expect that in this political battle (and it is nothing else but a political battle. There's no science or even decent philosophy there). What bothers me is…
pharyngula | September 13, 2007Got an hour or so? A BBC special on the Dover trial has made its way to YouTube. See how the rest of the world sees that bizarre episode of American inanity.
Here's the first part.
The other four are below the fold.
pharyngula | September 12, 2007We all know what online petitions are worth, but this is at least a worthy cause: some graduate students have a Petition by Informed Citizens to reclassify non-science books from science categories. The goal is to persuade the Library of Congress to reclassify books about intelligent design creationism into something other than science.
pharyngula | September 11, 2007Larry Caldwell has a history of suing in California courts for creationist causes. Mike Dunford has some material on the latest attempt to claim that leaving out Christian myths was "viewpoint discrimination", and in particular on their interesting choice of a star witness.
The Christian schools hired Dr. Behe (for $20,000) as an expert in "biology and physics." (That second part should make Chad and Rob's heads explode, given that Behe has absolutely no physics experience of any kind.) To earn his fee, Dr. Behe prepared a report that said, basically, that the Christian textbooks are…
pharyngula | September 11, 2007A couple of graduate students have a group called Extant Dodos Productions that uses YouTube to rip into creationist claims. In particular they've used some of Kent Hovind's materials to dissect his arguments. It's a clever idea — they take creationist videos and edit them to insert rebuttals to each argument as they are made.
Apparently, though, Creation Science Evangelism doesn't like the fact that their claims are being popularly weighed, analyzed, and pulverized, and they're now trying to strong-arm Extant Dodos Productions with intimidating letters that say they are infringing on their…