creationism
pharyngula | August 9, 2007Amateurs. The Discovery Institute has already weighed in on the recently discovered hominin fossils, and wouldn't you know it … Casey Luskin squeaks that we must simply disown Homo habilis, and of course he claims that Jonathan Wells has been vindicated in his 'refutation' of a straight line of human descent. And of course he quote mines scientists who say the transitions in human evolution are complex and incompletely understood — as if anthropologists have been claiming to have a complete and perfect answer.
The real irony, though, is that little Casey Luskin, pretentious junior lawyer,…
pharyngula | August 9, 2007Don McLeroy is the new head of the Texas State Board of Education, and if you want to get an idea of what we face, there's a transcript and recording of a talk by McLeroy on the web.
It's awful. It's mostly incoherent babble. He quotes a lot of odd irrelevancies, declares naturalism to be the enemy, compares evolution to the Matrix, and openly admits his advocacy of Intelligent Design creationism as a strategy to advance the goals of himself and his audience, and he says "we are all Biblical literalists, we all believe the Bible to be inerrant". He also quotes Phillip Johnson:
So what do we…
pharyngula | August 8, 2007How unfair that The Unicorn Museum would be compared to Ken Ham's "Museum" — everyone knows creationism is fake, but unicorns, because they are so lovely and sweet and happy and phallic, must be real.
This is very serious. The proprietors want to put up a billboard to compete with the Creation "Museum's", and you can vote and donate. I would love to see unicorns praised over goofy Australian nutcases.
razib | August 7, 2007I mentioned earlier that Google News had kicked ScienceBlogs off their news feed, but left the Discovery Institute's blog. Well, look at what showed up today in my "Google Alerts" for the query "human evolution":
pharyngula | August 7, 2007Melanie Phillips is fulminating against Dawkins for the strangest of reasons. She chews him out for dismissing dowsing, crystal healing, conspiracy theories, reptoids, etc. as charlatanry — not because she believes in any of that nonsense, but because, in essence, it's all Dawkins' fault. You see, once upon a time, everyone was too busy believing in rational religion to dabble in magical thinking, but once science caused the collapse of Christianity, the irrational woo-woo silliness rushed in to take its place.
Whoa. Now there's a twisted chain of thought.
I don't suppose we should wonder…
pharyngula | August 3, 2007Mainly because you don't know what foo camp is all about. Yes, I have arrived in lovely Sunnyvale, safe and sound, ready for my alter ego, Tyler Nerden, to face the google geeks.
While I was hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, what did I miss? I just caught Behe on the Colbert Report, and yowza, what a clown. Einstein's theories were all about putting limits on Newton? And Behe is the guy who's putting limits on Darwin? Can we just say he's an idiot and be done with it now?
And speaking of dismissive one-liners, what the heck is going on here in my own little fever-swamp?…
pharyngula | August 3, 2007Maybe it's news, but at this point all I can say is…who the hell cares what you say, Benny.
pharyngula | August 1, 2007A few years ago, Mel Gabler died, and I put up my response below. Now his wife, Norma Gabler, has also died. Good riddance at last. Those two did an awful amount of harm to American science education by inflicting their ignorant opinions on textbook selection in Texas.
I read this which led to this, where I learned a few months late that Mel Gabler was dead. This Mel Gabler. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but Gabler had a good 89 year run in which he spread poison and ignorance and lies, and made his wretched mark on the textbook industry. He was a dishonest old man who reviewed…
pharyngula | August 1, 2007Here's a representative slice of average Americana: Parade magazine. I don't read it, and I suspect most of you don't either, but we aren't average—we're freaky flaky outliers. If you want to see what ordinary Americans are thinking, though, it's a useful place to look. Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, "Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?"
About a third of the respondents currently answer "yes," which is actually quite a bit better than I feared. The real scary part is the comments, though, and there are a…
pharyngula | August 1, 2007Larry Moran sneers at the creationist habit of stoking their numbers by claiming that M.D.s are "science professionals", and therefore bolster their generic claim that 'growing numbers of scientists are defecting from the Darwinist camp'.
I'll make Larry's sneer even fiercer by pointing out that many of them are dentists.
(I have nothing against doctors and dentists, of course, and have nothing but respect for their important skills. Most are not scientists, however, and don't think like scientists, and don't even pay much attention to the basic scientific literature. Claiming scientific…
mikethemadbiologist | July 31, 2007Massachusetts, which has one of the highest rates of childhood vaccination, is facing an increase in parents claiming religious exemptions from having to vaccinate their children, even though the number of kindergarteners has decreased. But these exemptions aren't actually religious at all:
Barry Taylor practices naturopathic medicine, and defends these parents' right to choose. "The truth is, it's not about their religion," Taylor said. "It's about their values. And it would be a bit of a white lie to say it's religious."
Proponents of parental choice want Massachusetts to add a…
pharyngula | July 30, 2007If you're interested in the sordid history of bannings at Bill Dembski's prissy little blog, here's a compilation. It's an ugly little story.
If you're interested in the history of bannings here, I keep a public list. It isn't quite so easy to get banned at Pharyngula, although a few are making a strong effort.
pharyngula | July 30, 2007This story is getting a lot of attention suddenly: it's a blog about a biologist reshelving creationist crap in bookstores. It's good stuff … but I thought we all did this. You mean most people don't?
pharyngula | July 29, 2007Has anyone seen a positive review of Behe's book from a science source? Discover Magazine joins the ranks of those that find it awful:
As unpersuasive as Behe's ideas are scientifically, they are even less convincing philosophically. Behe professes agnosticism on whether the designer was a dope, a demon, or a deity, although he seems peculiarly inclined toward the second possibility. His is a strangely impoverished worldview, one that leaves little space for awe, much less for future scientific advance; he never even raises the obvious question of who the designer is and how it works.…
clock | July 27, 2007Last night, Professor Steve Steve took off work a little earlier and went to Oakland to see the offices of the National Center for Science Education, then went to Berkeley for dinner with the NCSE staff and fans at Eugenie Scott's house. Lots of pictures under the fold:
The logo at the back entrance:
The map of Creationist flare-ups:
Professor Steve Steve admires his official courtroom sketch with Judge Jones at the Kitzmiller trial in Dover, PA:
They have cool toys at NCSE, but we could not find the alleged Steve Steve impostor who is supposed to be there, waiting to be challanged to a…
pharyngula | July 26, 2007Comments are still trickling in and I still get email about this article, where I explain why debate is a poor strategy for dealing with creationists. I definitely don't argue that we should avoid engaging the public, but that there are a number of reasons why the debate format doesn't work for resolving conflicts between legitimate science and discredited malarkey. However, I missed one.
Some of you may know that a couple of commenters here resolved to have an off-site written debate on the dependency of the universe's existence on, specifically, the Abrahamic god. The debate is at the…
pharyngula | July 25, 2007How can anyone be surprised at this turn of events? Governor Goodhair of Texas has appointed a flaming, blatant, unashamed creationist and friend of the Discovery Institute, Don McLeroy, to head the Texas State Board of Education. Phil Plait is not amused. But isn't this part of the grand Republican and Texan tradition of promoting gross incompetence? Isn't that how we got GW Bush? This is the state of Terri Leo and Mel Gabler. It's all more of the same.
Texas is going to be soooo interesting in the next year or two. I wonder if this is where the next big court battle is going to occur?…
pharyngula | July 25, 2007The creationist fruit-loop du jour left another comment here in which he tried to taunt me with his proximity ("is Minneapolis-St. Paul close enough to Morris for you?") which wasn't very effective, since his IP address said he was commenting from a community college in North Carolina. And then he replied with more wacky comments:
very good. you know how to analyze an IP address.
you seem to think that i need to personally track you down. but no, its much simpler. i can rely on prayer to motivate the God you hate to destroy the godless heretic He hates.
your name is jewish. thanks for being…
scientificactivist | July 24, 2007If we learned anything from the Atlas of Creation, it's that we can refute any evidence, regardless of how scientifically sound it is, just by putting a red X across it and writing "FALSE". Jeremiah McNichols reflects on this at his blog Think In Pictures... and then he takes it one step further. McNichols is selling merchandise to give you the same powers of refutation as the Atlas's own Harun Yahya. Check it out here. All proceeds go to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), so it's for a good cause.
Besides, who wouldn't want to be able to do this?
Evolution…
pharyngula | July 24, 2007Creationism is only the beginning. Kansas is showing us a whole new way of thinking about everything on the curriculum.