creationism
pharyngula | July 12, 2007Paul Nelson isn't happy that I explained that W. Ford Doolittle is not denying common descent when he says there was a large and diverse pool of organisms swapping genes at the base of the tree of life, and he presents a very revealing counter-argument:
Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates:
All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor.
I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life,…
pharyngula | July 11, 2007Recall those threats made against evolutionary biologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder? You can read the text of some of them at the Panda's Thumb now. This is clearly the work of a deranged Christian cultist and creationist kook. We at the Panda's Thumb also know who the author was, since he didn't conceal his identity in the letters, and have tracked down his website, and yeah, he's one of those wacky creationists and a fervent convert to Christianity from Judaism (we are not linking to that information until the police or other sources confirm it).
The most genuinely…
pharyngula | July 10, 2007Honestly, it's unusual for biologists to be the target of hate — except when they work on cute furry animals — so the news that religious kooks are slipping threatening notes into evolutionary biology labs isn't too specifically worrying.
University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.
The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not…
pharyngula | July 10, 2007I got a request from Alonzo Fyfe for any written material to counter Intelligent Design creationism that is geared for the younger set, 12-14 years old. I figure there are enough people reading this that some might have suggestions.
Along the same lines, I've long thought that a collection of little pamphlets written for people with short attention spans and no background would be useful tools for both promoting biology and atheism — anyone heard of such things? Or are we all long-winded, pretentious babblers?
pharyngula | July 9, 2007click!
I've also always wondered if those creationists who deny the power of chance think that victory or defeat in the church bingo games are predestined.
pharyngula | July 7, 2007Aww, the creationists are criticizing me. It would be so darned hurtful if they actually had valid complaints, but as usual, it's all half-truths, misrepresentation, and selective quoting … and projection. It's amusing how their complaints are more accurately reflected back at them.
Poor pathetic Michael Egnor is accusing Orac and me of lacking credibility and resorting to ad hominem in dealing with marketing master Pat Sullivan — he even quotes my criticism of Sullivan, in which I pointed out that he was wrong in substance and was misrepresenting Behe's and Miller's books. It isn't ad…
pharyngula | July 7, 2007A scientist, Charles L. Rulon, debated an ID creationist, and here are the opening remarks he gave to justify joining in the debate. He first gave a list of reasons to not debate, which I'll summarize in my own words here:
It pits oratory against science in a venue where you'll be judged on your rhetoric.
It gives publicity to creationists.
Creationists can generate more lies more quickly than you can refute.
Debates artificially give equal time to two sides, falsely elevating creationist trivia to equality with scientific substance.
The debates are often used to recruit members to…
pharyngula | July 5, 2007Be careful, Nathan Zamprogno. The background research behind compiling a list of all the insane things Kent Hovind believes can be very hazardous to your mental health.
Reading the list can be very entertaining, though, so thank you for the sacrifice of some of your psychological stability.
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2007I've always thought if the evolutionary biologists who invented the term macroevolution--any evolutionary change at or above the level of species--knew the mischief that the creationists would do with it, they would have 'uninvented' the term right then and there.
I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but this post by ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford where he discusses a creationist who misuses macroevolution finally gave me the much needed kick in the assreason to do so. Creationists--some anyway--have built a cottage industry out of claiming that while they might accept '…
pharyngula | July 4, 2007Eamon Knight finds an irritating debate (you can listen to the podcast) between a real evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, and a theologian and a philosopher, and … Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute. The first three are all pro-evolution (although I found the theologian to be annoyingly apologetic for religion, naturally enough; Denis Lamoureux is a weird and obnoxious kind of Christian who seems to use science as a tool to proselytize) and Nelson fulfills the stereotype: he opens the debate with a quotemine and gross misrepresentation. He claims that W. Ford Doolittle rejects common…
pharyngula | July 2, 2007The National Education Association is having their annual meeting in Philadelphia right now, and guess who's there?
Answers in Genesis!
It's rather like finding the Mafia has a booth at the police convention, but there they are, with lots of pictures, proudly peddling creationist dogma that is not legal to teach in public schools, and which can get school districts embroiled in expensive lawsuits, to teachers. This has been going on for years — there is a retired teacher who rents the booth, and AiG 'donates' huge quantities of freebies, so they don't have an "official" presence, but they…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2007ScienceBlogling Chris, responding to comments on a post he wrote about what he views as misplaced blogging priorities, writes:
....we can talk about what I do outside of the blogosphere to promote the non-scientific causes that are important to me. And cutting off your response before it ushers from your snarky fingers, a person who writes 9-10 rants a day on their blog, often responding to long articles elsewhere in cyberspace, and who has a day job (especially one in academia) is not, I guarantee you, doing a damn thing offline to promote any of the causes I mentioned or any like them.…
pharyngula | June 30, 2007I have to go catch a plane to Seattle, so I'll leave you all with a little exercise. This random bit of creationist email just sailed in over the transom—it's simple and to the point, and isn't even afflicted with the usual random font stylings I get. It's still just as kooky in its substance, though. Can you spot the logical error? Can you explain it plainly and simply?
Entropy tells us that each system in nature tries to find its state of least energy, or simply rest. Nature contains a lot of structures we could define as having order like a snowflake. But his are just states of…
pharyngula | June 29, 2007A rather unsavory character, Dr Johannes Lerle, was jailed in Germany for violating their laws against neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial. I discussed this earlier this week, and as
Gerard Harbison and Andrew Brown have recently pointed out, he was not a very nice man at all…a bit of a kook, really.
Dr Lerle is an unabashed and deeply anti-semitic holocaust denier. He takes the view that the only good Jew is a Christian convert. All others are children of the devil: "Jews" with scare quotes round them, to distinguish them from Christians. Those "Jews", his website explains, control the world's…
pharyngula | June 29, 2007You may recall that I'd mentioned how Cheri Yecke was hiring a company called "reputationdefender" to expunge unflattering references from the net. One of her targets was Wesley Elsberry, who had reported that she was in favor of allowing local school districts to elect to teach creationism (this is not permissible in Minnesota). She claims that's false; unfortunately for her, Wesley has found a video recording of her at that time proposing exactly that. Ooops. So Yecke is trying to get her own words removed from the net? How interesting.
In a related issue, I'd mocked the whole premise of "…
mikethemadbiologist | June 28, 2007...and the psychological brickwalls they run into. With all of the talk about the Creationist Museum, I thought it would be worth discussing a museum that is trying to teach evolution. In the June 2007 issue of Evolution*, Diamond and Evans describe some of the responses to a revamped evolution exhibit, "Explore Evolution", at the Nebraska State Museum.
The authors conducted a survey of visitors to the Nebraska State Museum, asking them seven questions about the exhibit, with the goal of determining what cognitive biases existed among museumgoers (note: I've snipped the references):…
pharyngula | June 27, 2007At least one metaphorical wolf, that is: Richard Dawkins reviews The Edge of Evolution (behind the NYT Select paywall, sorry). Again, he focuses on the argument from improbability that is at the heart of Behe's book, and he comes up with a clear counter-example: if Behe were right, the modifications achieved by plant and animal domestication would be impossible.
If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural…
pharyngula | June 27, 2007Another review of Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution, has been published, this time in Nature and by Ken Miller. This one focuses on Behe's central claim, that he has identified a probabilistic limit to what evolution can do that means no differences above roughly the genus level (and in many cases, the species level) can be generated by natural mechanisms. This is his CCC metric, or the probability of evolving something equivalent to the "chloroquine complexity cluster", which he claims is the odds of evolving two specific amino acid changes in a protein. It's a number he pegs at 1 in 1020,…
pharyngula | June 27, 2007In the Index to Creationist Claims, there is an entry to an old argument from Walt Brown:
Claim CE302:
The sun has 99 percent of the mass of the solar system, but less than 1 percent of the angular momentum. It is spinning too slowly to have formed naturally.
Source:
Brown, Walt, 1995. In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 19.
Response:
Among solar-type stars, there is a strong correlation between age and rotation rate; the younger stars spin more rapidly (Baliunas et al. 1995). This implies some kind of braking…