creationism
clock | May 22, 2007You may have heard that Ken Ham is opening his freak show circus Museum of Creation "Science" in Cincinnati on May 28th. There will be protesters picketing. Hopefully there will also be people who will come in and laugh out loud at each exhibited piece. I also hope that the media coverage will be funny - and that is where we in the blogosphere can help.
Archy has all the information about it and has suggested a one-day carnival (an apt name for the thing, for once) of sorts which will appear on May 27th on Pharyngula.
So, write something and send the Permalink to PZ or blogswarm it by…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007As if you need any more motivation to contribute to the Creation Museum carnival, it turns out that these kinds of criticisms rankle Ken Ham. DefCon blog issued a press release accusing them of peddling lies, and Ham fired back with an indignant "Well! I never!" response. The funniest bit is where he tries to defend creationism by claiming that many famous scientists were creationists—and some of them were even contemporaries of Darwin. Then he lists a whole gang of famous scientists who mostly preceded Darwin, and were in disciplines in which they never had to consider biological evolution.…
pharyngula | May 21, 2007Hey, gang…it seems that highlighting that pointless petition to Free Kent Hovind has stirred up some enmity. The organizer of the petition has noticed us. Apparently, Satan's clever scheme to destroy goodness in the world involves getting a bunch of internet nerds to wiggle their fingers and type their names into a text box.
Blaspheming Heathens challenge us to a duel!
The Devil himself is inspiring non-believers to destroy our efforts.
I apologize for the vandalism that occured on the petition this morning. It appears our petition and prayers have driven another brigade of Satan's army…
pharyngula | May 21, 2007John McKay of archy has noted that Ken Ham's fabulously low-rent sideshow attraction of pseudoscience (AKA his Creation "Science" "Museum") opens next week, and has asked if there is going to be any coordinated response in the blogosphere — some kind of mini-carnival or something. I say, why not? Let's!
It's short notice, but I'll organize it, and you all just have to contribute to it. The museum's opening day is 28 May, so we should aim to have a one-stop page full of links to commentary the day before, on 27 May. If you've written something recently, or would like to put something together…
pharyngula | May 21, 2007Now this is a situation about which I have mixed feelings: fans of creationism are lobbying to free a certain convicted felon and dishonest sleazebag with a petition to Free Kent Hovind. To counter that, another group has started a petition to Keep Kent Hovind in Jail.
Since the "Free Kent Hovind" petition has many more signatures (and read the comments; they're comparing this con artist to Jesus), I signed the one to lock him away. I really hope, though, that the judicial system simply ignores both pleas and judges him on the evidence.
pharyngula | May 21, 2007David Hone, the mastermind behind the Ask a Biologist site, forwarded this cute cartoon from Fritz at b3ta. I think I could be persuaded to jump on the "Teach the Controversy" bandwagon in this one specific respect.
Let's also see sermons on the lack of teleology, the cruelty and waste of nature, and the details of paleontology and molecular biology that make bible stories look like flimsy jokes.
pharyngula | May 21, 2007I was interviewed on a website over a month ago, and unfortunately John A. Davison and his infected polyp, VMartin, took over the comments there and went on and on in their ridiculous way.
They're still going at it. Even more absurdly, the droning duo are bragging on ISCID, in an awesome example of pretentious self-delusion:
658 comments and going strong again. Are there any brave souls here that are willing to join Martin and myself in this incredible demonstration that there are still those who believe that life in all its manifestations was an accident? Are Martin and myself the only ones…
pharyngula | May 19, 2007That's not news, I know—you can find Mark Twain complaining about them, too. One of the big problems is that any idiot who may well lack any experience in education, or even any interest in education beyond destroying it, can run for school board and actually get elected. Case in point: Ken Willard, one of the Kansas rubes who tried to get Intelligent Design creationism into the curriculum, has just upped the ante and decided to run for the national presidency of the association of state boards of education. It's incredible—he's an insurance executive with no competence and no qualifications…
pharyngula | May 18, 2007The Alliance for Science sponsored an essay contest—students were asked to submit an essay on the theme, "Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?"
The winners have been announced, and first prize has gone to Gregory Simonian. Read the whole collection, including the entries from Merve Fejzula, Shobha Topgi, and Linda Zhou — it seems a few high school students are far smarter than the entire gang of evolution deniers at the Discovery Institute.
pharyngula | May 18, 2007Now that they're quite irate about Guillermo Gonzalez failing to get tenure, the gang at the Discovery Institute seems to have forgotten Bill Dembski's radical plan for dealing with biologists.
If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn't get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new "Department of Biological Engineering"; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the…
pharyngula | May 18, 2007Among the multitudes who have now seen Flock of Dodos was a woman who recognized one of the faces on the screen, and she wrote Randy Olson with a little anecdote that you might find amusing, and a little bit sweet and charming.
Just watched the film, congratulations to Randy Olson for a well documented
documentary of a topic that deserves greater coverage.
Dr. Mike Behe was the first guy I ever dated, at the tender age of 13. We were
bright kids, and Mike tutored me in math. My dad took us on our 'dates.' I ended up
in technology, and he took the bio-science route. When my mom called me last…
pharyngula | May 18, 2007Have you Floridians been pining away for a museum like Ken Ham's? OK, no, you haven't, not in the slightest, but you're getting one anyway. The Gospel Fossil man is coming to lie to your children!
"To find a fossil, I'm finding, often times, especially if it's a dinosaur fossil, a victim of God's judgment," Baird said. "And I may be the first one to ever see the remains since it was buried in the flood."
Baird, also known as the Gospel Fossil man, said he came up with the idea of "Gospel fossils" 14 years ago after watching Jurassic Park.
"I was tired of the world getting all the attention…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2007Let's leave aside decency and morality and try to forget that Romney eliminated funding for a gay teen suicide hotline to curry favor with the theopolitical Right. Let's not plumb the dark, foul abyss that is Mitt Romney's soul. Let's not ask how morally decrepit one would have to be to attempt to gain political office through the suicide of a child. Let's talk about evolution: Romney's not half bad.
Here's what Romney said:
"I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe," Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. "And I believe evolution is most likely the process he…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:
My Father had never admired…
pharyngula | May 15, 2007This is a fascinating diagram from a zoology text of the 1930s—it's an illustration of the effects of reproduction rate on the frequency of subsets of the population, and the author was using it to justify eugenics. Up into the 1960s, he was advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded to improve the human race.
Why, this guy must have been one of those evil Darwinists of the kind Michael Egnor, D. James Kennedy and the Discovery Institute deplore, and whose amoral ruthlessness those worthies have blamed on the teachings of evolution! Surprise: these sentiments were expressed by William…
pharyngula | May 15, 2007Oh, no — DaveScot can't find Gonzalez's article that he published in 2001 on the Scientific American website! It's a CONSPIRACY! The Darwinist Establishment is suppressing his publications and rewriting history!
Uh, wait … no, it was a "technical glitch" that also made a couple of other articles inaccessible, and the editors aren't at all interested in losing the Gonzalez, Brownlee, and Ward article.
It's particularly ironic that the gang at Uncommon Descent, which has a reputation for hiding their
gaffes in the amazing UD memory hole after they've been exposed, should accuse Scientific…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2007
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of Europe, Locke then did a bad thing which continues to echo today. He wrote:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in…
mikethemadbiologist | May 14, 2007By way of Oliver Willis, I stumbled across these outtakes from the movie Flock of Dodos. I will never stop being amazed by the disingenuousness of the ID movement:
pharyngula | May 14, 2007Avidor has a video of an exchange between a defender of science (DFL) and creationist coward (R). It's amusing. Kate Knuth (DFL) asks a simple question—whether Tom Emmer (R) believes the earth is thousands of years old, or billions of years old—and Emmer runs away from the question. First he babbles about how he has a different science than she does, and then he justs asks her whether she's an evolutionist.
It's just weird. They know enough to realize that they sound awfully silly when they claim the earth is ten thousand years old, but they don't know enough to think that maybe they're wrong.
pharyngula | May 14, 2007Les Lane has a summary of Gonzalez's unfortunate tenure situation. To nudge your memory, Guillermo Gonzalez is the Discovery Institute fellow who was working as an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University; he was recently denied tenure there and is protesting the decision.
It's an awkward position, but very common — academia isn't an easy career to break into. It also doesn't help that Gonzalez fails to understand the process.
"I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," he said.
It doesn't work that way. There aren't a series of merit badges or box top…