creationism
pharyngula | September 10, 2007The Minnesota Family Council is a spawn of Dobson (it's got "family" in the title, so you know it's got to be evil), and it's usually one of those organizations that lobbies to get legislative support for their hatred of women and gays. They are not nice people. If you're ever in this state and want to see some splendid examples of calcified brains, this is the group you want to track down.
Anyway, they're starting a new training program: the Minnesota Worldview Leadership Project. It's the weirdest thing. Apparently, it's a seminar and discussion series that is supposed to turn you into an…
pharyngula | September 10, 2007Creationists sure are sneaky little liars, aren't they? Here's an account of a theologian who was suckered by a creationist film crew — now he's on a DVD that mangles his ideas and postures for young earth creationism and biblical literalism.
Dishonesty must be a universal property of creationists.
pharyngula | September 10, 2007Richard Colling is in big trouble. He's a biology instructor who is getting slapped down by his college and his community.
Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from assigning his book. At least one local Nazarene church called for Colling to be fired and threatened to withhold financial support from the college. In a letter to Bowling, ministers in Caro, Mo., expressed "deep concern regarding the teaching of evolutionary theory as a scientifically proven fact,"…
pharyngula | September 10, 2007…but there it is, hosting a major young-earth creationism advocacy site. How humiliating! David A. Plaisted is a computer science professor who has accumulated piles of raving nonsense to support his creationism, and I would think the university would find it a bit of an embarrassment to see one of their faculty flaunting their stupidity in such an awful way, especially now that the Chronicle has picked up on it, and a Duke grad student has rubbed their noses in it.
For example, take a look at his argument that humanity is only 6000 years old. It begins with a partial quote from a paper by…
pharyngula | September 10, 2007So you haven't seen Flock of Dodos yet? It hasn't been shown at a theater near you, and you don't get Showtime? Well, finally, you can just get it on DVD and watch it at home.
clock | September 9, 2007Randy Olson's movie had a very short and limited release. Reed rallied the troops so NCSU library got a copy and there was a public viewing that I could not attend.
But now, everyone can watch it, as Jennifer reports. It is available, for instance, on amazon.com. I'll put it on my wishlist for now, so it is there, ready for me to buy it when I get some money next time.
pharyngula | September 9, 2007I confess that I really don't know much about this fellow, Steven D. Smith. He's a lawyer, and he seems to be firmly in the Intelligent Design creationism camp, and that about exhausts my knowledge of the man.
As Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego, says: "The mainstream science establishment and the courts tell us, in censorious tones that sometimes sound a bit desperate, that intelligent design is just a lot of fundamentalist cant. It's not. We've heard the Darwinist story, and we owe it to ourselves to hear the other side."
I already don't like…
pharyngula | September 9, 2007Whenever I spot some old thread suddenly getting a surge of new comments, I can guess what has happened: a creationist or two has come to visit. That's happening right now on this very short article that mentions the peppered moths; we're up above 200 comments now, and it seems to have very little to do with moths anymore. Instead, we've got a creationist complaining about the absence of transitional species and the Cambrian 'explosion', with a little quote-mining of Richard Dawkins. You commenters are taking care of him ably, but there are just a few things I want to mention, and a few…
pharyngula | September 7, 2007It's been a regular gay social whirl here at Chez Myers; we're having a party tonight, and last night, we had visitors from the Great White North, or "Ottawa" as they quaintly called it: Eamon Knight and Theo Bromine, familiar names to old hands at talk.origins. And they brought Canadian beer! I encourage all Canadians to feel free to swing south and stop by, as long as they follow suit. (It's a beer called Maudite, appropriately enough, and I just got a close look at the label: 8% alcohol! Hide the lampshades, I'm going to be dancing tonight!)
Unfortunately, while they were gawking at the…
pharyngula | September 6, 2007Hey, look, everyone! Canada
has
creationists! Ha ha!
If you look at a map and notice how that big peninsula Toronto is on is protruding into the US, and note that that penetration has been going on for hundreds of years, I guess it's not surprising that they'd catch a nasty disease.
pharyngula | September 6, 2007Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum, has an article on two disease we should worry about, VHSv and EAS.
Personally, I think VHSv is the worst. It's a virus that causes hemorrhagic septicemia in fish; just from the name you know it's bad, involving blood and sepsis. My most horrible experience raising zebrafish was the time hemorrhagic septicemia swept through my colony and I had to euthanize every animal and bleach every last bit of plumbing to eradicate it. This disease has been detected in waters of Wisconsin, and it's definitely not good.
EAS may not be as dramatically gory and…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007People really don't like me very much.
Huh? What did you really mean to say?
Mr Myers
I must say you are certainly a living testimony why we should have an official second language in the United States. Your 1 Sep 07 article "Sometimes, conflict is the only answer" makes about as much sense as the blathering drivel you normally publish on your blogs. Perhaps if you could write it in plain English it would be decipherable.
The last person that sounded almost as intelligent as you was named Jim Jones. He had a few followers that believed what he said and wrote. In fact, they followed him…
pharyngula | September 5, 2007Next time you hear the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument (almost as common as the why-are-there-still-monkeys argument!), remember this rebuttal:
Creationists seeking to argue against evolution often liken the evolution of complex organisms by natural selection to the building of a DC-10 by a hurricane blowing through a junkyard. Their conclusion? Since such an event is staggeringly unlikely, a special sentient hurricane must have built the plane deliberately.
That's going to be handy!
pharyngula | September 4, 2007Especially since some of the creators of these ideas seem to have confused "theory" for "brain fart". The latest example: Zygote Theory!
From the first sentence, you can tell the theory is crap. Anything that makes it's accommodation to the bible a selling point is instantly recognizable as nonsense — the bible is not a scientific text, nor were its authors knowledgeable about biology.
ZYGOTE THEORY explains all the scientific data and fits with the Bible.
A zygote is the first cell of a new individual after a sperm and egg unite. God appears to have done most of His acts of creation of new…
pharyngula | September 4, 2007Gather 'round, children, and dear old Unca Jack will explain to you how the dinosaurs went extinct. It's not how you think. There were no meteors or comets, no egg-eating mammals, no saurian pandemics. It's because so many plants died in the great flood.
And then, you see, since only the dinosaurs were afflicted with this oxygen deficit, God's chosen people could then run around with pointy sticks and kill them all as they tried to hide in the clouds on mountaintops.
Isn't that sweet and heartwarming? God saved the beautiful dinos so they could gasp and choke and suffer while little people…
pharyngula | September 4, 2007The story of the Robert Marks debacle has now made the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education. If the account is accurate, I'm going to do something you'll only rarely see: I'll take the side of the creationist.
The problem is that Baylor was more than a little ham-fisted in intruding on Marks' academic freedom. Marks is promoting this bogus idea of something called "evolutionary informatics", and he admits that he is doing it on his own time (which leaves Dembski, his colleague, dangling without any legitimate connection to Baylor; if Marks is doing it on his own time, what is he doing…
pharyngula | September 4, 2007Uncommon Descent must have noticed ERV's comment that no one reads their site, because now they seem to be frantically chumming the waters with bizarre bait. I'll bite; like a shark, I'm a mindless eating machine, exquisitely sensitive to the thrashing of victims and the scent of blood. And it makes for great street theater!
O'Leary has just put up a bizarre account of Dembski's dismissal from the Baylor engineering department. It is, of course, entirely one-sided and reflects only Dembski's perception of his treatment, but even that is revealing.
Dembski had a prior appointment at Baylor —…
pharyngula | September 3, 2007I knew this was going to happen, but I'm no prophet — it's just what the creationists always do. Frank Pastore follows the lead of our national news media and declares evolution debunked because of recent discoveries in paleontology. You can probably guess which ones.
The first is Chororapithecus, the ten million year old jaw fragment with gorilla-like dentition, which suggests that the split between the gorilla-human lineages might have occurred farther back than was believed. There are reasons to be skeptical — the similarities might be an example of convergence — but even if the discovery…
pharyngula | September 3, 2007Oh, no! Now Tiny Frog is giving ammunition to the producers of Expelled by revealing The Stifling Dominance of Secular Academia! At least biologists aren't being picked on in this case — it's those biased secular theories of physics that are being blamed.
pharyngula | September 2, 2007Check out the pulp edition of the Carnival of the Godless — it's got pulp superheroes narrating the action. I never quite imagined Occam as a ham-fisted bruiser, but OK…
If you prefer a softer approach than those scary godless atheists, there's also a Humanist Symposium available today.
As usual, Revere has a short, clear sermonette. He does make one mistake, though: he compares theology to a chess game in which there are many intricacies, but that the details don't mean anything about how you should govern your life. "Chess" is the wrong answer. It's more like Calvinball. That's right,…