creationism
razib | July 23, 2007Most of you could probably guess that my first post on Harun Yahya was meant to highlight what a joke the whole affair was. You see, making fun of Harun Yahya and his fellow travelers is a guiltless pleasure: you get to be snobby and elitist toward those idiotic moronic knuckle-draggers, and, you feel righteous about it because you're on the side of the angels!. How much of a hilarious incident was this? The first segment of Bloggingheads.tv was devoted to it, and the two pundits, neither of whom had a science background, thought it was pretty sneer and smirk worthy. That's what I told…
pharyngula | July 23, 2007I'm busily tied up for the most of the day at the Twin Cities branch of the University of Minnesota — Skatje is taking the new student tour because she plans to transfer here in a year — but I also took advantage of this visit to get my own copy of Haryun Yahya's Atlas of Creation. My thanks to Aaron Barnes, who rescued a copy from a recycling bin here, It's a behemoth!
As everyone has said, it's full of pretty pictures, but the content … well, it leaves much to be desired. It's mostly a collection of pictures of fossils and animals that asserts a non-existent contradiction between them and…
clock | July 21, 2007 Ha! Check out this brand-new blog! Ste is going to bookstores, checking out the Science section and moving pseudo-science, anti-science and nonsense books from it to the New Age section. Just a couple of Behe books in the La Jolla Bookstar, but I bet there will be more egregious miscategorizations in other stores. I wonder if this practice will spread virally to other cities and towns of the world...
(Hat-tip: Reed)
pharyngula | July 20, 2007John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn't want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo.
The struggle between a '…
pharyngula | July 20, 2007The Evolution Sunday project, which tries to recruit clergy to advocate good science at least once a year, has sent out a request for scientific expertise to help them. They're well-meaning, but they need it. Try reading some of their collection of Evolution Sunday sermons, and what you'll find is usually attempts to piggyback the validity of truth by religious revelation on the credibility of evidence-based reasoning.
I personally do not support the Evolution Sunday project — I think it benefits religion far more than it does science in that it lends support to superstition and taints…
pharyngula | July 20, 2007I'd just like some reassurance that there are other targets out there, since
Korn is on the run.
An anti-evolutionary Christian extremist suspected of sending threatening letters to biology professors at the University of Colorado has gone on the lam, according to a staff member familiar with a police investigation into the matter.
Not that I'm panicky or anything, but I am more comfortable knowing he's in Colorado than just somewhere.
OK, just to be on the safe side, I let the local police know that this guy is on the loose, and that he'd sent me some strange email yesterday. It's highly…
pharyngula | July 19, 2007Some guy in Virginia didn't like this op-ed by David Barash, and didn't like being characterised as an "illiterate troglodyte," so he set out to demonstrate that he was an illiterate troglodyte. He wrote a letter that's simply non-stop bogosity.
While it is a fact that Gregor Mendel proved a general theory of evolution in the mid-1850s, there is no scientific evidence that Darwin's theory of evolution is scientifically valid.
I don't blame you if you feel like stopping right there and not going on. It's kind of a show-stopper, isn't it? You can safely assume the writer knows nothing about…
pharyngula | July 19, 2007OK, this is the final straw. The Intelligent Design creationists send out press releases, they peddle textbooks in our classrooms, they publish dishonest books of pseudoscience, and now … and now, they've come out with a popular magazine.
I'd complain some more but I'm afraid they'd kick sand in my face and beat me up.
(via ERV)
pharyngula | July 19, 2007So Nick Anthis also has a copy of the Atlas of Creation, and I don't. I am beginning to suspect that the Muslim creationists are only sending copies to people who are smooth-cheeked and lovely in their online portraits.
Oh, well. From the descriptions of the contents, it sounds like the pictures are pretty, but the story is repetitive: X looks like Y, therefore God made both!
scientificactivist | July 19, 2007Yesterday, I mentioned the Atlas of Creation a book by Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya) sent unsolicited to scientists around the world. My boss also received a copy a few months ago, and yesterday he dug up the enormous volume for me. My first impression was that it was even larger and more glorious than I remembered. With hundreds of pages of full-color photos, this book must have been incredibly expensive to produce and distribute.
My second impression, though, was that it was also even crazier than I remembered. In the "to the reader" note at the beginning, Oktar…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself "Concerned American-Christian" <geologists4truth@yahoo.com>, and I have a suspicion that it's Krazy Korn himself, since he's so obsessed with the subject.
And of course Korn is free and able to fire off these crazy diatribes—the police aren't sure he constitutes an official threat. I bet the Boulder biology faculty are especially careful to lock their doors at night, and are feeling a little jumpy about sudden loud noises, too.
why did you remove my two comments from…
scientificactivist | July 18, 2007A few months ago, my boss (a professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford) received a strange package in the mail, unsolicited. It contained a rather large and colorful book that was quite stunning in appearance. Inside, though, spread across hundreds of color-illustrated pages, was one man's case for creationism: an absurd, unconvincing, misguided, and fundamentally unscientific argument. We passed the book around in the lab, admired its aesthetic values (and the unimaginable expense surely incurred in producing it), and then forgot about it. My boss is out of the lab for…
razib | July 17, 2007As a follow up to my post mocking Harun Yahya, check out Ali Eteraz's impressive post exploring his possible sources of funding and affiliations. My own immediate instinct was to assume that he was a front for Saudi $$$; Ali points to reasons why this is unlikely. The argument is circumstantial and based on elimination of possibilities, but at least it pushes the ball forward.
pharyngula | July 17, 2007Why me, O Lord, why me?
One of the more recent books sent to me is Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Michael Dowd. I have read it, and I'm feeling biblical.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
Psalm 22:1
I am so not the right person to review this book—it's like asking Satan to review The Secret. The two aren't even on the same wavelength, and the discombobulated reviewer is going to sit there wondering whether this…
pharyngula | July 17, 2007The New York Times is reporting that Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist, has sent a mass mailing of his fancy, glossy, Atlas of Creation to scientists all over the country. It's an 800-page, professional piece of work, even if the contents are garbage. These Islamic creationists must have access to bucketloads of money.
While they said they were unimpressed with the book's content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost. "If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100," said Dr. Miller, an author of conventional biology texts. "The…
razib | July 16, 2007The New York Times has a funny article up, Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World, which recounts the mass distribution (gratis) of Harun Yahya's latest tract, a lavishly illustrated and packaged glossy book which aims to show that evolution didn't occur. This is chuckle worthy:
He said people who had received copies were "just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is.
"If he sees a picture of an old fossil crab or something, he says, 'See, it looks just like a regular crab, there's no evolution,' " Dr. Padian said. "…
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
There has been a bit of a resurgence of science versus religion posts and chatter in various forums* that I inhabit when I'm not working lately. It occurred to me that it might be time to do one of my sermons.
There are basically two popular views of the relation between science and religion. One is the All-Or-Nothing view: science is either entirely subsumed under religion, or totally excluded from it. The other is the view that each has their own special role - Stephen Gould called it the Non-Overlapping Magisterial Authority (NOMA) view. Both are, in my opinion, quite wrong, both…
evolvingthoughts | July 14, 2007
A religious body or faith community that speaks only with only exclamation points but no question marks misses the complexity of creation and the beauty of evolution.
Rabbi Kendall in Stuart, Florida
pharyngula | July 13, 2007Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron's math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show's statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski's got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he's got to make this ridiculous taunt:
Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I'll give 10 to 1 odds that they won't. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that…
pharyngula | July 13, 2007If you've been wondering who the 'non-religious Darwinist' (according to the DI, that is) who sent threatening notes to the University of Colorado at Boulder faculty might have been, wonder no more. The Colorado Daily News has revealed his name: it's Michael Korn.
You can read Korn's website and decide for yourself whether he fits the DI's description of the culprit. Personally, I think the forensic skills of the gang of IDists have failed spectacularly, once again.