creationism
pharyngula | June 15, 2007This is the last day to donate to the "Send Scalzi to the Creation Circus" game. Come on, people: if ever you've read one of his books, you know you want to torment him. Go ahead, get even. (Hmm...appealing to the extremely tiny population that has ever read a Scalzi book may not be the most potent strategy for mustering contributions I've come up with.)
pharyngula | June 13, 2007I mentioned before that there has been a peculiar silence on the ID blogs about Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution. Behe was the one marginally credible biologist on the Discovery Institute team, the guy who got everything rolling with Darwin's Black Box and their old magic mantra of "irreducible complexity," and it's been like an information blackout from Dembski and Luskin and West and Meyer on his latest effort.
Now John Lynch has cataloged the responses. There are some complaints about the critics, but almost no one is trying to defend any of Behe's conclusions.
So far, this…
pharyngula | June 12, 2007Coyne not only dismantles Behe's argument, he gives a nice primer in the basics of evolutionary biology. He also points out that Behe, one of the few biologists in the Intelligent Design camp, has conceded virtually everything to science, and is left clinging to one forlorn hope, that mutations are inadequate to produce the variation that is the fuel of natural selection.
I think he should have titled his book The Edge of Intelligent Design: Behe is hanging from the precipice by one trembling hand, and Coyne and nearly every other biologist in the world is stomping on his fingers.
Whoops, if…
pharyngula | June 12, 2007Wise up, newspapers. You shouldn't publish the drivel the Discovery Institute sends out — it's not news, we've heard the opinion a thousand times before and it's just as hokey, and they're making you look silly. Do you also print without question the latest missives from the Raelians or Gene Ray?
The latest from the failed freakshow in Seattle is an extended whine by David K. DeWolf that touches on their usual themes: "it's not faaaaaaaaaair that you won't let us teach ID in the schoooooools." "It's not faaaaaaaair that Republicans were asked whether they believe in evolution." Yeah, I agree…
pharyngula | June 11, 2007Not that I was ever a fan of Archie comics, but I thought they were a little less inane than this:
You can read the whole thing online, if you want to. Sanctimony really doesn't go well with corn, though.
(via Tikistitch)
pharyngula | June 11, 2007We've got a new Gallup poll on evolution to agonize over. It's nothing but bad news—we are a nation of uneducated morons. Gary chose to weep over the political correlation: look how membership in the Republican party is tied to ignorance about science.
The clear majority of Republicans are screwed up. And you know, I'm not too happy with the Democrats, either. These results tell us that the population across the board is messed up, confused, lied to, and festering in ignorance—it's just that right now the Republican party is a magnet for the stupid.
What's the cause? Look a little more…
pharyngula | June 11, 2007Jason Rosenhouse has an exhaustingly exhaustive report on a lecture by Thomas Woodward, in 4 parts (here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). Woodward has written a book defending ID, and is going around the country giving testimonials to his faith. As is common with these folk, he also did a little prophesying.
Woodward closed by setting the date for the end of Darwinism's reign as the dominant paradigm at ...wait for it...2025. Later he suggested that it might be within ten years that evolution as we know it suffers a decisive failure. And then he predicted a severe nosedive for evolution in the next…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2007
In case you are getting all confused about which creationist organisation ot oppose and why, Duae Quartunciae has an excellent roundup of the present AiG/CMI dispute.
pharyngula | June 10, 2007This one has lots and lots of photos and details—I don't think I'll ever need to visit Ken Ham's folly, to my relief, since I can already see everything that's in there.
The article makes another good point: this museum is going to be a tool to drive apostasy. It's so ridiculous, so cartoonish, that some people are going to go into it mildly supportive of creationism and come out wondering what kind of kooky nonsense they've affiliated themselves with.
pharyngula | June 10, 2007Another morning, another creationist whine out of the blue. Here's another letter, and as usual with these well-thought out rants, I'm an afterthought—it's addressed to Ken Miller, but then the guy figures he might as well clog a few more mailboxes while he's sending it out.
As is traditional, the formatting is exactly as I received it. What is it with kooks and Comic Sans, anyway? And could they possibly trade in a few bold/italic font changes for an occasional paragraph break?
Dear Professor Myers: I’d dearly love to have someone show me where I am wrong in my analysis here.
Dear Professor…
pharyngula | June 9, 2007John Scalzi lives right near the Creation "Museum," and he refuses to go. Good for him, I say — we're going to have to start starving Ken Ham soon. On the other hand, if anyone could mock Ham's Folly effectively, it's Scalzi … it's also so much fun to torment him. So his readers are teaming up to compel him to go.
Here's the deal: Scalzi has a price. If people send him at least $250, which he will turn around and donate to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, he'll suffer through the cheesy dinosaurs and silly lies, and also write an amusingly snarky summary of the visit. If…
pharyngula | June 9, 2007Duae Quartunciae (will he ever settle on a name?) has an excellent historical summary of the Answers in Genesis civil war. There's loads of fun stuff there, including an account of a prior split that involved accusations of witchcraft and "demonic infiltration", Ken Ham's pitiful claim that he is currently under "spiritual attack", and bizarre sleazy shenanigans, largely driven by the nastily ambitious American group led by Ken Ham.
In October of 2005, there was a fateful meeting between AiG-USA and members of the board of the Australian group [now called Creation Ministries Internation, CMI…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2007
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural period. But YHWH (just the single name now) seems to value meat more than crops, for when Abel brings him an offering, YHWH treats it with respect (sha'ah, meaning to gaze upon), but not Cain's. Since YHWH is still around chatting to the folk, he is still a physical deity, so I guess he needs his meat. His greens, not so much.
After Cain does the deed of murdering his brother in jealousy (…
pharyngula | June 8, 2007That Egnor fellow believes that if minds are material, than "all of humanity's notions of moral value and culpability are nonsense"—like most creationists, his arguments collapse into a rather pointless fallacy, the argument from consequences. It's enough for me to just say that if I'm correct, then Egnor is the one who believes his morality is gone, not me. It's a theme running through his latest bloviation, that truth is irrelevant if ideas are a product of the brain, to which I have to say, "so what?"
Anyway, I'm pleased to say that I don't need to waste time with the babbling Egnor, since…
pharyngula | June 8, 2007Wesley has the story, and you can get more details from Toledo TV news story and a Cincinnati Enquirer article — but the silly news is that one of the models for the Creation "Museum's" Adam was a fellow named Eric Linden, who was associated with a site called the Bedroom Acrobat. The "Museum's" video with Linden has been yanked, and Linden himself seems to be rushing to dissociate himself from the naughty web site, claiming now that he only bought the domain name.
I say there is nothing wrong with running a site about sexual activities; Linden should not be ashamed of it; it is disgraceful…
pharyngula | June 8, 2007Answers in Genesis has a new article up whining about their nemesis, the National Center for Science Education. The bad press they've been getting from the science side must be getting to them.
The funniest bit is at the end. Did you know that Eugenie Scott was prophesied in the Bible? She must be a sign of the end times.
mikethemadbiologist | June 8, 2007When you do 'faith-based' science, you have problems when you don't follow the tenets of that 'faith.' From the AP:
The man who plays Adam in a video aired at a Bible-based creationist museum has led a different life outside the Garden of Eden, flaunting his sexual exploits online and modeling for a clothing line that promotes free love.
After learning about his activities Thursday, the Creation Museum in Kentucky pulled the 40-second video in which he appears.
"We are currently investigating the veracity of these serious claims of his participation in projects that don't align with the…
pharyngula | June 8, 2007Behe has written a very bad book, so poorly supported that I don't want to waste a lot of time taking apart every sentence, but I did want to say a few words about chapter 9, where he takes on evo-devo. I waited a bit because I knew that Sean Carroll was writing a review of the book for Science, and I expected he'd go gunning for chapter 9, too—but no, he didn't. I guess he felt as I do, that since Behe's fatally flawed premise was exposed in the first few chapters, there was little point to addressing his incompetent nit-picks later in the book. After all, when the construction crew has…
pharyngula | June 8, 2007The article has nice photos, but is anyone else beginning to feel that the content of the "museum" was thoroughly plumbed on the very first day, and that what's happening now is that we're seeing demonstrations of just how shallow the whole thing is?