creationism
pharyngula | April 16, 2007The Missouri House of Representatives has passed a bill that would impose new rules on state colleges to "protect diversity" that includes this most interesting clause:
(1) The report required in this subsection shall address the specific measures taken by the institution to ensure and promote intellectual diversity and academic freedom. The report may include steps taken by the institution to:
(a) Conduct a study to assess the current state of intellectual diversity on its campus, including diversity-related criteria used in admissions, scholarship awards, and hiring which shall…
pharyngula | April 15, 2007The BBC has another article on Ken Ham's creationism museum, and guess what they say?
Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day's drive of two-thirds of the US population.
Aaargh, no. Kentucky is way over on the eastern side of the US. It is not within a day's drive of two-thirds of the US population. Is Ham telling everyone this nonsense as a test of how credulous the media might be? Because he's doing a good job of demonstrating that journalists will swallow anything.
At least this time they included the modifier "supposedly". It's progress, I…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2007
A bunch of topics that I can't be stuffed blogging in detail, but are important:
Larry Arnhart and Roger Scruton, both Darwinians (see previous post) and conservatives, justify the existence of religion as a social cohesive force. I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it. That said, we can invert the issue and say that a function of religion is to…
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
For a long time now, I have had troubles with the use of the word "Darwinism". Not just by creationists and antiscience advocates like IDevotees, but by scientists themselves. You routinely see press releases and book titles that declare the death or some fatal illness of Darwinism, which, in every case, their own theoretical or experimental contributions points up. It is time, I think, to lose the word entirely.
The term has a history that is itself confusing and contradictory. Let's consider some of the things it has been used to denote:
1. Transmutation of species
1.1 Gradually (…
pharyngula | April 14, 2007If you missed it when the Bell Museum showed it, you've got another shot now: the Anthropology Club at UMTC is showing Flock of Dodos on Thursday, 19 April.
pharyngula | April 12, 2007This simpering sycophant to John A. Davison has been spamming the site recently, yammering away to get everyone's attention despite the fact that he has been banned. Please do not reply to V.Martin, or anyone who is babbling about Davison — their posts will be deleted as soon as I notice them. This particular irritating fool has not only been morphing his username to get past my filters, but has at least once imitated a regular here, a particularly obnoxious and contemptible strategem that guarantees that I won't ever be lifting the ban.
One reason he has been so frantic is that his hero,…
pharyngula | April 12, 2007When you see a car labeled with creationist slogans parked, don't you expect to see a dozen guys with floppy shoes and big red rubber noses pop out of it?
(I think the fellow in this picture is mocking the car, so don't laugh at him if you see him in public.)
pharyngula | April 12, 2007First the ideologues came for evolution, making it uncomfortable for teachers to teach it, even when it is not only legal, but mandated by state education standards. What will they suppress with indirect social pressure next?
How about those bits of history the fascists and the religious find objectionable?
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.
As I said in the previous…
pharyngula | April 12, 2007Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:
…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.
If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing they would say — we'd be throwing rotten fruit at them and mocking their ignorance of how science works. Nothing is proven, it's all provisional, but we do have an incredible amount of evidence in support of biology. This fellow is also deeply wrong about what we can do in the lab, and is…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Sometimes life hands you nice ironies and wry humour. The same week that the Pope, Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (don't you hate hyphenated names?) announces that he almost accepts evolution as science, Michael Ghiselin, a rather famous evolutionary biologist and author of the 1969 book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method publishes (in the same journal as my latest, preen, preen) a paper entitled - I kid you not - "Is the Pope a Catholic?"
Ghiselin is making a point about set inclusion in the context of the nature of species, so I won't belabour the pun any further, but Ratzinger's new book…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Suppose for a minute that everything the creationists say about evolution were true. Now suppose you had lost your mind... but I repeat myself. What would the history of that ersatz and terrible "science" be?
Wonder no more. Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a minion of satanic powers, has written the truth history of evilution, in The Truth: Being a TRUE and IMPARTIAL account of the history of that damnable religion, the great EVIL of DARWINISM, also called EVOLUTIONISM and it's attempts to bring the downfall of all moral and TRUE CHRISTIAN ™ virtue. Based…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect…
clock | April 11, 2007As you know, the last several days saw quite a flurry of blog posts about framing science. I posted my thoughts here and I keep updating my post with links to all the new posts as they show up (except the expected drivel by William Dembski, some minor creaitonists and Lubos Motl). Some of the other bloggers ignored my post, many linked to it without comment, and many linked to it with positive commentary - with two exceptions.
One was Larry Moran (who probably skimmed it quickly, found what he did not like in it with his own frame of mind at the time, and used it as a starting point to…
pharyngula | April 11, 2007I've just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin's pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel's genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn't yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it's a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks…
pharyngula | April 11, 2007The Strange Maps blog (a very interesting browse, if you like peculiar maps) has a map illustrating the state of US evolution education in 2002. It's not surprising; the Fordham Foundation regularly publishes detailed summaries of state science standards, and you can take a look at the data for 2005 and 2006, if you don't mind getting a bit depressed. Now what we need to do, though, is reassess state standards and get everyone up to A+ performance. Florida is about to go through that wringer, under the thumb of the odious Cheri Yecke, who tainted our standards process here in Minnesota last…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007Those rascals at antievolution.org are like the Baker Street Irregulars of the evolutionary forces—they're always doing the legwork to come up with interesting bits of data. Like, for instance, this wonderful example of hypocrisy/inconsistency at Uncommon Descent.
This is what Dembski spat out today, complaining about us manipulative elites (he really deserves a Pastor Ray Mummert Award for it, too):
"Framing," as a colleague of mine pointed out, is the term that UC Berkeley Professor of Linguistics George Lakoff uses to urge Democrats that the public will agree with liberal policies if only…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007I hesitate to mention this, but I seem to be the target of creationist humor. It's not being targeted that I mind, but that the 'humor' is so lame and the photoshopping is so bad. I would have thought that I'd be an excellent subject for lampooning, being easily caricatured and having views outside the mainstream, so why are they so pathetic at it?
Never mind, I looked around the site a little more — it's all that bad, a kind of ham-fisted exaggeration of creationist misconceptions that really only makes the creationists look foolish, on a par with Dembski's clumsy attempts at a joke. Don't…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007The ID creationists are having one of those ludicrous "Darwin vs. Design" conferences, in which they rehash assertions and nonexistent evidence and practice propaganda and rhetoric, at Southern Methodist University this week. They seem a little nonplussed at the opposition they've encountered. Hey, it's Southern Methodist University — it's got a religion in its name! — and it's Texas, aren't they all ignorant bible-thumping yahoos down there who ought to chow down happily on any Design story they spin? No, they aren't, and good, legitimate scientists are on the staff at SMU, and suddenly, the…
pharyngula | April 10, 2007The proper answer to that question is "Who cares?", but just in case you're morbidly curious, Bill Dembski weighs in:
The authors of "Framing Science" (see below), which appeared in Science, are world-renowned scientists and therefore know whereof they speak. Well, not exactly. Matthew Nisbet is a professor of communication and Chris Mooney is a correspondent for the atheist magazine Seed. (Nisbet's blog is also hosted by Seed.) Nisbet and Mooney are both outspoken defenders of Darwinism and critics of ID — which is no doubt why the American Association for the Advancement of Science (…
pharyngula | April 9, 2007Well, I was going to do something with that awful, horrible, ignorant Klinghoffer piece that the Discovery Institute was pushing, but my distracting weekend kept me occupied, and
Pro-Science,
Thoughts in a Haystack, and
Salt on Everything
all demolished it for me. Anything I could say at this point would just be bouncing gibs around.