creationism
pharyngula | June 4, 2007
Michael Lemonick has an excellent reply to Sam Brownback's recent attempt to weasel away from creationism.
What he ended up doing was demonstrating that he doesn't really know much about science. If, writes the senator, "evolution means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence then I reject it."
How curious. Does this mean that the senator also rejects the laws of gravity? Last I heard, they reflected that same view of the world. No scientist I've ever run into, nor even any senator, thinks that things fall to…
pharyngula | June 3, 2007What a delightful and well deserved development! The Australian sister organization to Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis is hammering him with a nasty lawsuit.
The Brisbane-based Creation Ministries International has filed a lawsuit in Queensland's Supreme Court against Mr Ham and his Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis ministry seeking damages and accusing him of deceptive conduct in his dealings with the Australian organisation.
The suit focuses on a dispute over the Australian organisation's production of a creationist magazine, sold in the US to more than 35,000 subscribers, and has led to…
clock | June 3, 2007Two ancient posts of mine, Why Creationists Need To Be Creationists and Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology are getting heavy traffic right now from Stumbleupon and Reddit. I posted a comment there trying to get people to come and see the much more recent update: More than just Resistance to Science, from which I'd like to promote a recent comment by Tree:
Thank you for drawing attention to the importance of understanding Phatic Language. While I was raised in a very formal family and as a youngster had an intuitive grasp that the purpose of protocol and etiquette is…
pharyngula | June 2, 2007Just in case you had any doubts about how the Intelligent Design creationists would react to the denial of Gonzalez's tenure, here's how Uncommon Descent illustrated it:
I like the little sign above his head: he's being burned at the stake because he "believes in God"! I assure you that the fact that someone goes to church does not play any role in tenure decisions, nor does the penalty for failure to get tenure involve immolation, or even singeing. The reality is that Guillermo Gonzalez is being politely shown the door because he "believes in pernicious pseudoscience," and more…
pharyngula | June 2, 2007The president of Iowa State University has rejected Guillermo Gonzalez's appeal for tenure, citing the fact that "he simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect." That, alas, is the result I expected, and that everyone involved should have expected.
Now, if we expected a rational, productive response from the DI (not that I do), we should see them put down the hammers and nails and peel the poor fellow off the cross they've put him on. It's time for Gonzalez to focus on the future and try to recover from the PR debacle his "friends" at the DI have put him through.
pharyngula | June 2, 2007Time for another edition of "I get email"! Below the fold you'll find a comprehensive example of the kind of exhortation I get all the time—this one is a long list of assertions that god is right, science is wrong, all transmitted in short sentences that aren't in any particular order.
No, I didn't reply to this one. He's got 41 numbered points that he claims refute evolution, everything from "male nipples arouse women" to claims that Jupiter couldn't form because gasses expand, and then there's Pascal's wager and lots of bible quotes. It's a very silly list, don't strain yourself over it.…
evolvingthoughts | June 1, 2007
So in chapter 2, we shift stories. Now we have a story that is far older than the first chapter, and is regarded by scholars as the "Yahwist" creation story, and it focuses primarily on humans. The story is far more familiar than the first chapter is (the first few sentences notwithstanding), so we can be pretty brief.
Here, the deity is referred to as "YHWH Elohim", and is translated in English as "LORD God". YHWH is the ancient name for a Phoenician deity of the inhabitants of Canaan. We don't know exactly how it was pronounced, but problably it is said as "Yahweh". In the Canaanite…
pharyngula | June 1, 2007Now it'sEngland.
The Rev Jan Ainsworth, who is responsible for more than 4,600 CofE schools, said intelligent design could form part of discussions in science lessons under the heading of history of science.
pharyngula | June 1, 2007They're popping up everywhere, and now in
New Zealand:
A Trust which teaches schoolchildren about evolutionary and creationist views of the universe wants to build a $30 million dinosaur park and museum, probably on the Coromandel Peninsula.
The Dinosaurs Aotearoa Museum Trust is working with Wellington's Weta Workshop, which created characters for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, to create life-sized dinosaurs in a 40ha theme park.
Founders Darren and Jackie Bush run a Wellington business called Dinosaurs Rock which runs programmes about dinosaurs and geology for schools, giving…
pharyngula | June 1, 2007The Discovery Institute is so relieved — they finally found a textbook that includes a reworked version of Haeckel's figure. Casey Luskin is very excited. I'm a little disappointed, though: apparently, nobody at the Discovery Institute reads Pharyngula. I posted a quick summary in September of 2003 that went through several textbooks, and showed a couple of examples where redrawn versions of Haeckel's diagram were used. More recently, I posted a fairly exhaustive survey by Patrick Frank of the use of that diagram since 1923, which showed that it was rare, and that the concept of…
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2007And in other news, dog bites man. Would the NY Times have printed an op-ed allowing a flat-earther to explain why he believes the earth is flat? Because that's what they did when they ran Brownback's defense of intelligent design creationism. And there's nothing original in Brownback's op-ed either.
First, Brownback makes this declarative statement:
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature…
evolvingthoughts | May 31, 2007
We're in the third day, and Elohim has made dry land, but no sun or stars or moon. Still, he's keen to see something growing, so he tells the land to produce, by spontaneous generation as it was later known, "seed bearing plants and plants bearing fruit with their proper seed inside". Seed here is crucial - God creates things that reproduce themselves through some innate generative power, but at first they come out of the land. Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram declared that God acted out of a secondary power here - he didn't create these plants directly, but indirectly, by putting a…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007Earlier, I was mildly perturbed that Canada was leading my country in the cheesy science "museum" race; this is, of course, a race to the bottom. Scott Hatfield has come to my rescue, though, and sent in some photos of Carl Baugh's double-wide "Creation Evidence Museum" which is surely one of the tackiest examples of creationist silliness in the country—although, when you get right down to it, Ham's opulent exhibit is just this same thing with buckets of money thrown at it.
You also might be able to find a picture of Scott in here if you've been wondering what he looks like. Hint: he's not…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007
Ha ha, pathetic Canadians.
They've put up their own creation "museum"—just look at it. It's feeble. It's like someone took a cheap suburban ranch-style home and put a sign on it and started charging admission to come take a look at their knick-knack shelf. Ha!
We're #1! Our brand new American creation "museum" is a hundred times larger, a hundred times more expensive, shinier, fancier, a thousand times … the attendance, … even … more … stupidity, with …
…
Awww, crap. The Canadians outdid us again.
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007Sam Brownback has an op-ed in the NY Times today, in which he explains with much straining at gnats why he was one of the Republicans who did not believe in evolution. Short summary: he reveals his own misconceptions about the biology, and mainly pounds the drum on how important Faith and Religion and God are. It will be persuasive to people who are already convinced that God is the most important thing in the universe, right down to what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, but it underscores my conviction that faith is the enemy, the source of many of our problems…such as the promotion…
mikethemadbiologist | May 31, 2007MarkH notes that Luskin is upset about what they perceive as academic discrimination against the proponents of intelligent design creationism. So he asks Luskin a question:
Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that it is never acceptable to discriminate against a professor in a tenure decision based on their ideas?
Actually, I would rephrase the question:
Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that intellectual affirmative action is acceptable?
Given the strong conservative affiliations of the ID movement, it would be great fun to watch them…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007Salon has just published their report on Ken Ham's creation "museum", by author Gordy Slack, who has just released a book on the Dover trial. I haven't read the book, although it was on my list to pick up this summer. No more. This was an awful bit of dreck, and I don't think I could stomach reading a whole book written this way.
It's dead, credulous reporting. Slack simply blandly reports the contents of the "museum," and doesn't offer a single word of criticism, and doesn't even try to evaluate the accuracy of the claims. The protesters outside the gates are briefly mentioned, but otherwise…
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2007I've said before that when you watch ignoramuses and authoritarians trash your country, anger is the appropriate response. driftglass explains why:
The Real Problem is that, in the name of Holy Balance, journalists treat the patently and dangerously delusional adherents of Cult of Dubya as if their opinions were worthy of discussion.
Except what Mr. Ites still dogmatically believes in this Year of Our Lord 2007 -- that we are in Iraq because "What they did on 9/11 is a travesty" -- is not a matter of opinion, any more than a fanatical insistence on the flatness of the Earth, the falseness of…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007We're seeing a lot of news about Ken Ham's creationist lie, this so-called "museum" he has built out in Kentucky. What we're not seeing from our media is any scrutiny of the finances behind the construction, or behind the evangelical boiler room called "Answers in Genesis". Has any editor or reporter considered the possibility that there might be something juicier behind the story than "Preacher pretends church is a museum"? Is anyone—dare I say it—investigating this organization?
Their finances are a matter of public record. Everyone talks about how the museum cost $27 million to build, but…