creationism
pharyngula | June 7, 2007The latest USA Today/Gallup poll probably is valid, unfortunately — it's not far off from my impressions. 44% of Americans think evolution is probably or definitely false, and two thirds think a god created human beings in the last ten thousand years. Those two numbers don't quite fit together well — those who think a god created humans recently should also consider evolution false — but we can safely say that about half the country is ignorant or deluded about science, anyway.
We will now, of course, all close our eyes and pretend that religion has nothing at all to do with this catastrophic…
evolvingthoughts | June 7, 2007
Schadenfreude , n. Pleasure found in the misfortunes of Answers in Genesis, who employed a pornography actor to play Adam. Well, at least it makes sense - didn't Adam and Eve fall because they had sex? I'm sure some Baptist told me that once...
pharyngula | June 7, 2007I'm rather peeved and disappointed, too. The Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division posts a rebuke of bad bloggers and scientists who are mean to their shills, and there's a link in there to Pharyngula…and I thought for sure it would be whining about something I said.
But no. The link is directly to one of Scott's comments.
Poor guy. Now he's going to have Casey Luskin squeaking at him. The rest of you are going to have to work at catching up by hurting the DI's feelings badly enough that they point at you and cry. (You're going to have to really work to beat me out, though—they have…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2007I like much of Matt Yglesias' writing. But he still doesn't appreciate how science and evolution affect public policy issues. As many of you know, three out of ten Republican presidential candidates stated that they don't believe in evolution at one of the presidential debates. Yglesias comments on Huckabee's response:
I see that Jamie Kirchick didn't care for the reply at all: "Sorry, but if someone believes in fairy tales, I think that's pretty relevant to their qualifications as president." But why? The core of Huckabee's answer is here:
It's interesting that that question would even…
pharyngula | June 7, 2007On Edge, Jerry Coyne has a response to Sam Brownback's dissent from evolution. These are excellent questions, and I'd like to see them answered!
Senator Brownback, along with his two dissenting colleagues, really should be forced to answer a rather more embarrassing question: who is responsible for their being so misinformed? Where did they learn the so-called "problems" with evolution: at their mothers' knees, or in Sunday school? Or perhaps from reading books; and, if so, what books, and who recommended them? Doesn't a public servant have a responsibility to stay informed across a wide…
pharyngula | June 7, 2007The various ID blogs are all atwitter over the new textbook the Discovery Institute is going to be peddling, Explore Evolution. I've seen a copy, but I'm not going to give an extensive review just yet. I will say that it's taking a slightly different tack to avoid the court challenges. It does not mention gods anywhere, of course, but it goes further: it doesn't mention Intelligent Design, either. The book is entirely about finding fault with evolution, under the pretext of presenting the position of evolutionary biology (sort of) together with a critique. The biology part is shallow, useless…
pharyngula | June 6, 2007While we're waiting for the Panda's Thumb server to come back up, with some new material on Behe's new book, I'll recommend Blake Stacey's dissection of the malaria mutants. This little fable that Behe summarized about the frequency of chloroquine-resistant mutations in the malaria parasite is the centerpiece of his book, and the important odds of 1 in 1020 was the yardstick by which he measured evolution — it was the magic number, the limit to evolution, the likelihood that a fairly simple set of mutations could occur … and the whole story is bogus. The book has been out for only about a…
pharyngula | June 6, 2007It's an article titled "I love teaching evolution"…on the Chalcedon foundation page, in column on homeschooling, beneath a quote and a picture of crazy ol' R.J. Rushdooney.
Evolution is a topic that repeatedly enters into our curriculum the same way that sin is a topic that gets covered in depth. How am I adequately educating my child if I fail to cover in detail the lies and deceptions that are prevalent in our humanistic culture? The Christian homeschooling parent must be prepared to understand, articulate, and refute the preposterous claims that currently serve as explanations for the…
pharyngula | June 6, 2007I passed on listening to the Democratic debates, so you can sure as heck bet I skipped the recent Republican debate. Just as well, too; the candidates got pressed on that evolution question again, and wouldn't you know it, it simply triggered an avalanche of idiocy, with Mike Huckabee leading the way. Just look at these quotes.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth," said Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister. "A person either believes that God created the process or believes that it was an accident and that it just happened all on its own."
An accident? That's the only…
pharyngula | June 6, 2007Speaking of unqualified dimwits trying to pass themselves off as competent scientist, take a look at this affidavit Kent Hovind filed in 2005. It's Hovind's history as Hovind himself sees it.
In his literature and in his talks, one of the subjects Hovind always brings up as part of his qualifications is his history as a high school science teacher. If I made a list of the most important jobs in America, I'd put teaching science in high school way up near the top, so that's always been a discombobulating and disquieting claim from the man. When you read his history, though, you'll discover…
razib | June 6, 2007Earlier, I have implied that anti-scientific sensibilities will survive the "death of organized religion," because they preceded the rise of such supernatural peddling institutions. Of the two Korean states, the Republic of South Korea, where 40% of the population are theists is the God intoxicated half. At least on paper. North Korea is an atheistic Communist culture, but I've stated to friends many a time in reality it is basically a "god-kingdom," more akin to Pharonic Egypt than a modern nation-state, except with the capacity for totalitarianism. Many of the social and psychological…
pharyngula | June 6, 2007Looking for a job? Want to travel, meet people, promote good … uh, "science"? Then here's your chance: the Creation "Museum" is hiring! They really, really want someone with a doctorate in geology to work with them and use their degree to lend them a little credibility (don't worry, it won't help them at all—but after you've worked there a while, your degree won't have any credibility, so you'll be able to use it as toilet paper).
To apply, they want a "resume" and a few other things that I don't remember ever having to submit when I was on the job market.
Salvation testimony
Creation…
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2007
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science.
[Part 1; Part 2]
There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based on data to draw conclusions about the laws of nature. Thick books described this in detail, and they are still worth reading, in particular a book by W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, published in the 1870s. But induction, as anyone who has studied Hume knows, is problematic. You simply…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
The Fall. What can we say about the Fall that hasn't been said many times before? Well, if all you read is the text, quite a lot.
The Serpent is interesting, for a start. He talks, and so he's a magical creature. He has a human-like personality, for he is "crafty" (although I really prefer the old term "subtle", for it makes him sound like a lawyer). He talks about YHWH Elohim only as "Elohim", for a start - I don't know what meaning there is in that. It's not that the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) had become sacred, for it is spread through Genesis and you'd expect it to be elided by the Redactor…
pharyngula | June 5, 2007Nick Matzke has dug into the literature on evolution of chloroquinone resistance in a comment so substantial it ought to be a post on the Panda's Thumb. This magic number of 1 in 1020 as the probability that a specific two-amino acid change could evolve that Behe uses as his linchpin metric for evolvability throughout his book turns out to not actually describe the probability of a pair of mutually dependent mutations…
So it looks like resistance actually occurs by the gradual accumulation of several mutations, and that what you are seeing in the wild is not a few rare double-mutation events…
pharyngula | June 5, 2007Let me add a quick addendum to the previous post. People aren't appreciating yet how hard-core a designist Behe actually is; one comment mentions that "apparently God is directly responsible for the creation of drug-resistant malaria."
No. The Designer, who must have godlike powers, specifically created malaria itself. The drug resistance is the one thing that evolved.
Here's something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts. C-Eve's children died in…
pharyngula | June 5, 2007I peeked.
I was reading Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, and I was several chapters into it. All he seemed to be saying was that evolution has limits, limits, limits, and those limits are so restrictive that you can't get from there to here, and he was repeating it over and over, in this tediously chipper narrative voice. Behe insisted that he accepted common descent, though, and acknowledged all this evidence that, for instance, chimpanzees and humans are related by common descent, while saying that it was impossible for them to have evolved naturally from one to the other. So…
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
It is also likely that if God re-issued Genesis 2, he'd do it as a comic strip like this.
Oops I forgot to link it... fixed now.
pharyngula | June 5, 2007I want you all to know that I finished Michael Behe's drecky The Edge of Evolution, and that I really will have a review up soon. Although, actually, I suppose I could put up a review right now:
Sucks.
But you probably want details, don't you? So give me a little time to whittle this thing into shape. The book is awful throughout, and I'm more than a little embarrassed for Behe, who has just committed a whole pile of common creationist errors. Inane errors. Some errors so stupid I have to believe he's intentionally trying to fool someone.