creationism
clock | May 6, 2007Three out of ten Republican presidential candidates raised hands in the recent debate indicating they do not believe in evolution. Jason has an excellent round-up of responses (Arianna Huffington rocks!) with some good comments by readers as well. How can you help combat scientific ignorance? If your blog is NOT a science blog, try to do what Mike suggests and link to five science-related posts every week.
There is plenty of stuff here at scienceblogs.com, but you can also use this page when you are looking for science posts, especially the science-related carnivals listed at the very…
pharyngula | May 6, 2007It was as inane as you might have expected. It turns out that
their "proof" of the existence of god was the coke can argument. If you don't know what that argument is, here it is: it begins about 2½ minutes into this, and is over about 3½ minutes in. He could have done it all in one minute!
I'm sorry, but if you're at all convinced by that pathetic argument, please, get help.
Comfort simply asserts that everything that exists had to have a creator. He goes on to build a silly argument: buildings must have a builder, paintings must have a painter, therefore creation must have a creator. We'…
pharyngula | May 5, 2007That recent D'Souza article is a rich vein of lunacy that I have to tap once more. D'Souza has additional tools to woo conservatives in his toolbox: how about the naturalistic fallacy?
But if Christian anxiety is misplaced, conservatives are even further off the mark. That's because Darwin's theory actually supports conservative positions in all kinds of interesting ways. First, Darwin gives a dark and selfish view of human nature, which is why we need a tough foreign policy to deal with bad guys who cannot be talked out of their badness--even if U.N. cocktails are served. In addition, the…
pharyngula | May 5, 2007So the Republicans find themselves confused about science (especially evolution), and are arguing among themselves about how to cope with reality. Perhaps you think this is a promising development—they're at least considering the issues, and their hidebound attachment to fantasy is weakening. Can we someday hope that the Republican Party will once again be the home of pragmatists? Will the political props supporting creationism disappear? Does the fact that only 3 of the Republican candidates raised their hands to deny evolution promise that reason may yet reign?
No. There is another tactic…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2007Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but something Huntington Willard said in that science blogging article published in Cell about how senior scientists have been trained to communicate science got me thinking.
Modern biology (the article was in the biology journal Cell) has made tremendous breakthroughs in the last half century. Yet we have not been that successful in communicating those results to the public. After all, Thursday night, three out of ten Republican candidates for president were not embarrassed to admit that they did not 'believe' in evolution. In fact, it might have…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007I don't want to talk about it — I despise the whole field — but everyone is emailing me about it, and I was even talking to my mother on the phone tonight and she asked me about it (I said I wouldn't watch those weasels unless they were in a crotch-kicking contest). I'll let this thread open up for a free-for-all discussion of the cacophony.
All I've heard so far is that a) they avoided talking about Bush, preferring to measure themselves against Reagan (Reagan was almost as great an incompetent as the current resident, so they're obviously aiming low), and b) when they were asked about…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007I tried to help out the "Darwin is Dead" carnival by promoting it, but to no avail—one of the most patently absurd anti-evolution efforts has apparently met its demise. I'm not sure how anyone could tell, though—it was pretty much brain-dead on arrival.
pharyngula | May 3, 2007The Dallas Observer has published a profile of Roy Abraham Varghese, a wealthy computer and business consultant who funnels money into 'spirituality' nonsense, that is not only so stupid that it pained me to read it, but but was also poorly and confusingly written — the reporter is utterly credulous and gushes over Varghese like the most pathetic fanboy, but then every once in a while tosses in a paragraph that takes a critical stance, but reads as if he has just cribbed an argument "for balance" and stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea of New Agey, fuzzy religious…
pharyngula | May 2, 2007But I thought they were already parodies! The new parody tract, Darwinism: the Devil's Religion, reveals the Unholy Trinity of Science, the Devil, Darwin, and Dawkins.
For the record, I want it known that there isn't a single letter "D" anywhere in my name.
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking, as Australia hasn't seen it yet. But I got sent a review copy, so here are my thoughts, below the fold. It starts on 54 May on PBS, I'm told, so check your local schedules, as they say.
I really really really wanted to like this series. Miller is one of my TV heroes, and was famously a member of…
pharyngula | May 1, 2007Remember Utah Republican Don Larsen? He made a speech recently. It sounds like his proposal to blame Satan for illegal immigrants was just the caboose on a whole trainful of crazy — liberals and Mexicans are Satan's minions out to destroy America.
Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.
In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants "hate American people" and "are determined to destroy this…
pharyngula | May 1, 2007Want to publish something? Worried that you don't actually have a lab or an opportunity to do real research? Never fear, the Institute for Creation Research has put out a call for papers, and anyone can get published there! (Well, just about anyone. I doubt that anything I submitted under my name could get published, or that any legitimate scientist could stoop this low.)
High quality papers for the International Journal for Creation Research (IJCR),
sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research, are now invited for submission. IJCR
is a professional peer-reviewed online technical journal…
mikethemadbiologist | April 30, 2007PZ, in response to a Boston Globe article about ID proponent George Gilder, attacks Gilder's idiocy. I've pointed out some of Gilder's stupidity he displayed in a Wired article before, so I won't revisit that intellectually depauperate wasteland again. But while rereading my original post and PZ's response, something struck me: Gilder is the antithesis of education.
In what I called the "Power and Glory" section of Gilder's Wired article, he expounds on the Majestic Mystery of the Phospholipid Bilayer:
Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed…
pharyngula | April 29, 2007I'm off to the Twin Cities again (third time this week!) for a couple of events. Since I'm a cruel, heartless predator who likes to return to the scene of a kill to gloat, though, I thought I'd repost the vicious savagings I gave George Gilder, in The sanctimonious bombast of George Gilder and Gilder: still wailing over his spanking. Gilder, by the way, was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute, and a professional "techno guru" who led many an investor down the path to bankruptcy when the tech bubble collapsed in the 90s. I think he's well on his way to historical oblivion at this point.…
pharyngula | April 29, 2007
Oh, come on, Boston Globe. They tip-toed around, avoiding naming me or the weblog, but I think everyone here can figure out what they're talking about.
Yet even Gilder, seemingly a lightning rod for the socioeconomic controversy of the moment, was blistered by the comments posted on a University of Minnesota biologist's weblog last fall, language so heated Gilder's daughter felt obliged to rush to his defense.
Awww. Poor baby. They could have at least mentioned the site url! Here's the article that made George Gilder cry: The Sanctimonious Bombast of George Gilder. It's too bad they didn't…
pharyngula | April 29, 2007
Yesterday, I was reading a good article in the October 2004 issue of Wired: "The crusade against evolution", by Evan Ratliff. It gives far more column space to the voices of the Discovery Institute than they deserve, but the article consistently comes to the right conclusions, that the Discovery Institute is "using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny." Along the way, the author catches Stephen Meyer red-handed in misrepresenting Carl Woese (by the clever journalistic strategem of calling Carl Woese), and shows how the DI's favorite slogans ("Teach the controversy" and "academic…
pharyngula | April 28, 2007
What else can you say to this story of a Dutch creationist building a model of Noah's ark? The story is titled "New Noah's Ark ready to sail", but I rather doubt that this goofball project in deranged carpentry is capable of going to sea at all, even though it is only one fifth the size of the silly boat described in the Bible; it's actually evidence against the accuracy of the old fable, since it should demonstrate the lack of seaworthiness of the ark.
Also, they're going to fill it with models of animals. No word if they're also going to stock it with massive quantities of manure that need…
pharyngula | April 27, 2007Larry Moran thinks we need more rigorous admission requirements, and Donald Kennedy is not very happy with the state of creationist textbooks.
Kennedy is currently serving as an expert witness for the University of California Regents, who are being sued by a group of Christian schools, students and parents for refusing to allow high school courses taught with creationist textbooks to fulfill the laboratory science requirement for UC admission. After reading several creationist biology texts, Kennedy said he found "few instances in which students are being introduced to science as a process—…