creationism
pharyngula | September 2, 2007(Note addendum to this post: the infamous Uncommon Descent memory hole is in operation.)
A while back, Bill Dembski was bragging about how he was going to be snuffling about Baylor University, affiliating himself with an ID research lab there. It was a strange situation: a serious lab working on ID problems? OK, we've been asking them to do this for a long time. But then to associate itself with a weirdo like Dembski? One step forward, ten steps back.
Here’s a fun interview with my friend and colleague Robert Marks. I hope you catch from the interview the ambitiousness of the lab and how it…
pharyngula | September 2, 2007Hey, residents of the North Mason School District on Hood Canal in Washington state! Don't put John Campbell on your school board!
You may be wondering who he is and why we should care. John Campbell is better known by his full name, John Angus Campbell, and he's a professional stealth creationist. He has long been a fellow of the Discovery Institute, and his specialty is something now called "framing" — he tries to weasel himself into positions where he praises Darwin fulsomely, calling him a master rhetorician, gushing over the guy to such a degree that you begin to wonder what's wrong with…
evolvingthoughts | September 1, 2007
I have decided that I am sick and tired of the antievolutionists. When I got into this game about 15 years or more ago, I thought that if we just argued and presented information about what evolution really is, and what it means for modern thinking, people would move away from attacking evolution in order to bolster their religious agendas.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Information isn't what makes people change their minds. Experience is, and generally nobody has much experience of the facts of biology that underwrite evolution. The so-called "deficit model" of the public understanding of…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007The Kentucky Park Service has a problem. People are going to the Creation "Museum", getting their heads filled up with idiocy, and then they go to the state parks and pester the rangers with stupid assertions. The parks department had a great idea: let's send the rangers to the museum to find out what exactly they're facing. I approve! You should know the enemy well if you're going to out-argue him, and this is one of the few legitimate reasons for visiting that pile of dreck in Petersburg.
Only…they're going to hobble themselves, tie one hand behind their back, and wear a blindfold in this…
pharyngula | September 1, 2007Yowza. Vox Day tried to pull his usual ahistorical, illiterate, ignorant schtick, blaming Nazis and Communists on ol' Chuck Darwin, and Ed Darrell completely eviscerated him. I mean, it's like all that's left of Day is a few tattered scraps of skin hanging from a stick, drying in the wind.
Vox Day is a rather cheap and easy target, I know, but still … it's frightening to see. It's so thorough.
pharyngula | September 1, 2007ERV is probably right. No one reads Uncommon Descent.
I've noticed this before, and others have written to me about it. A link on any of the blogs of the creationist flavor, including UD, probably the most "popular" of the ID bunch, brings negligible traffic. I've been linked to with outrage and disparagement several times by UD and Evolution News and Views (remember Egnor?), and noticed no uptick in traffic, and they don't even show up in the few times I've looked at the referrals on sitemeter (although, to be honest, those aren't very useful anymore—getting to see the last 100 visitors…
pharyngula | August 30, 2007When I see Jonathan Wells' name on anything, I know I'm in for some furious gnashing of the teeth because of the man's infuriating tendency to blatantly lie with every sentence. That's the case with his recent baseless criticisms of the peppered moth story; Mike Dunford takes care of him this time around.
pharyngula | August 29, 2007The second part of the DI's interview with Ruloff, producer of the movie Expelled, is now available. He's claiming now that there will be no hacking and chopping of the interview footage, which is, of course, complete nonsense. I was interviewed for something close to two hours; we know that that will be extensively cut for the movie, and I fully expect my part will be notably brief. The question is one of what context will be removed to make their point.
But OK, since he promises that the movie will make no distortions, here's the challenge: send me a copy of the unedited footage. Likewise,…
pharyngula | August 29, 2007Over at the Sandwalk, Larry has a video of Berlinski pompously denouncing the idea that "cows evolved into whales". As everyone is pointing out, it's ludicrous because cows didn't evolve into whales — but what struck me is the supercilious arrogance of this mathematician as he plucked numbers out of his ass.
First he claims that he has a quantitative approach to measuring the magnitude of the nonexistent transition of cow to whale:
We have some crude way of assessing quantitatively, not qualitatively but quantitatively, the scope of the project of transformation
Oh, really? This could be…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2007
Oh honestly. Christianity Today reports the travel of the Australopithecine fossil "Lucy" to the US with the closing paragraph:
It should be interesting to see what the interest in Lucy is, given that according to opinion polls roughly half of the American public has expressed serious reservations about the theory of evolution, which nonetheless has enjoyed almost unquestioned hegemony in academia and the mainstream media. Perhaps one explanation for the throngs at the Creation Museum is that there are so few politically correct alternatives for people who question the evolutionary…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007I wrote to Mark Mathis about his movie, Expelled, which I was told was going to be called Crossroads. Here is the entirety of my message:
Hey, I just learned today that the actual film is now called
"Expelled", that it features Ben Stein, and that it's really a gung-
ho pro-creationism/anti-science film. I would have agreed to be
interviewed even if you'd been honest with me about the subject —
I'm not reticent about my opinions — so I don't understand why you
felt you had to conceal your intent. Care to explain yourself? Was
this the movie you planned from the beginning?
Now I've gotten his…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Scott* has uncovered another slick media effort by creationists: the Seventh Day Adventists are putting on a four-part series called Out of Thin Air to trumpet their fundamentalist lunacy.
What I want to know is … where are the slick media people willing to put together lovely dramatic stories of the scientists — the brave minority fighting uncowed against a wealthy and ignorant majority? Come on, there's a real story here. We do cool stuff! We're passionate! We are probing reality! Our stage is the entire freaking universe! We don't have money for PR, and our support organizations are…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Since I highlighted a new creationist blog yesterday (by the way, the author is now saying it was all a joke), let's mention a new good guy today: Answers in Genesis BUSTED! The author is trying to expose the deceptions of various creationist claims. Good luck at that: they're excreting the garbage faster than anyone can shovel it.
pharyngula | August 28, 2007Want to see some real science? An article in the NY Times summarizes research in the evolution of glucocorticoid receptors. This is really cool stuff, where the investigators do step-by-step changes in the protein structure to determine the likely sequence of evolutionary changes — it really does describe the path of evolutionary history for a set of proteins at the level of amino acids.
Now, if you want to see some junk science, Michael Behe flounders disgracefully to try and dismiss the work. This is a genuine embarrassment: Behe is a biochemist who has done legitimate work in protein…
pharyngula | August 28, 2007And he's so getting spanked for this. He suggests that perhaps Texas isn't doomed after all, because a significant majority of the Texas Board of Education has come out saying that they don't want to remove evolution from the curriculum, and they don't want to include Intelligent Design.
Unfortunately, what he's missing is the fact that this is precisely the new strategy the Discovery Institute wants them to follow. They don't want a repeat of the Dover trial, so they want schools to avoid pushing the button that will trigger one … in the next round of the creation wars, expect the tainted…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007Oh, gosh … this Expelled movie is going to be ghastly. Check out this interview with Walt Ruloff, the executive producer. Ruloff's credentials on this issue are that — get ready for it — he was a software engineer. We get a good feel for the tack the movie is going to take: biologists don't ask interesting and productive questions, they are defined by the Darwinist orthodoxy, and they actively suppress any questioning. It is, of course, a lie from word one.
Intelligent Design is a science stopper. It offers no productive hypotheses, but only carps upon subjects where our knowledge is…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007I knew the creationists were obtuse, but this is going a little far. Denyse O'Leary is twittering about all these paranoid suspicions that Richard Dawkins or I are planning to sue to block the release of that silly creationist movie, Expelled, in a post titled Darwinist threat to sue pro-ID filmmakers? Friend of the studio thinks they have no case. It's a bit bizarre. Neither of us have even made any faint noises to that effect. In my post on the subject, I wondered who funded it, why it was being favored by the DI since it was endorsing the religious nature of ID, and why they had to be…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007It probably is: it has just the right amount of ingrown festering obsessiveness. We've all heard of old earth creationism (creationists who agree the Earth is billions of years old, and make arguments about the "days" of the bible representing long ages) and young earth creationism (the bible is strictly and literally true, and the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in precisely 6 24-hour days). Here's a new one called Biblical Reality:
This "Old Earth" brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate…
pharyngula | August 27, 2007Here, everyone, go have fun with this brand new creationist blog that has a grand total of one post so far … but that post is ripe with hilarious promise. This one is an atheist science denialist (someone was wondering if there were any atheist ID proponents a while back, so here's one). He's got the air of an affronted conspiracy theorist — scientists are all shallow-minded Darwinists — and he also dislikes the taint of religion behind all the arguments of the Intelligent Design creationists.
Nobody is going to like him. Boo hoo.
Now why would someone who doesn't believe in god(s) like the…
pharyngula | August 26, 2007Lots of people have been sending me email to let me know that Coral Ridge Ministry is airing a program linking Darwin to Hitler. In case you missed it, this show, Darwin's Deadly Legacy, was first aired last year, and I reviewed it then, Wilkins eviscerated its premises, and even the Anti-Defamation League got in the act. It's a horrible piece of dishonest dreck, and now I guess it's going to be a yearly television event, like a demented evil version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
This has me thinking — the Christianists will re-air their lies and stinking garbage over and over again, but…