creationism
evolvingthoughts | February 17, 2007
I'm late to this party, no doubt, but courtesy of Nobel Intent, here is a number of interviews with scientists and philosophers discussing the Evil Undead Zombies of creationism and intelligent design.
pharyngula | February 17, 2007Contrary to popular myth, I do not sit around instructing my family in the fine points of evolutionary biology, nor do I subject them to tirades against creationists. In fact, I almost never discuss those subjects at home. So why is my daughter giving competent discussions of Intelligent Design creationism? I know it's because her facebook pals have been babbling about creationism, but still…
I wish she'd absorb genetics and developmental biology out of the atmosphere around here, so she could go off and give my lectures for me instead.
pharyngula | February 17, 2007Lately, the Discovery Institute has stuck its neck out in response to the popularity of showings of Randy Olson's movie, Flock of Dodos, which I reviewed a while back. They slapped together some lame critiques packaged on the web as Hoax of Dodos (a clunker of a name; it's especially ironic since the film tries to portray the Institute as good at PR), which mainly seem to be driven by the sloppy delusions of that poor excuse for a developmental biologist, Jonathan Wells. In the past week, I've also put up my responses to the Wells deceptions—as a developmental biologist myself, I get a little…
pharyngula | February 17, 2007I've mentioned before that I get lots of wacky email from creationists. I usually throw it out, but there's this one kook who is persistent and sends me stuff like this:
Control must be taken from the people, and turned over to one individual, Satan!
Anyone with an eye towards God, and God's word, can easily see the events of the Lord's prophecies taking place around us today. The non-believers would have the world believe that mankind is in control of it's own destiny without the benefit of our creator, Yeshua God. These Godless people today are preaching evolution, creation by accident, and…
pharyngula | February 17, 2007Our old pal Kazmer Ujvarosy of the American Chronicle has a long and boring rant against the whole system of peer review. There's nothing really new in it; we know peer review is flawed, and practically every scientist can give you gripes about cronyism and bad reviewers and yadda yadda yadda, but at the same time, no system is ever going to be perfect, and we work within the bounds of what is effective. Ujvarosy, of course, is peeved because creationism doesn't get any respect in the science journals. Changes to the policies of review, however, won't change the fact that Intelligent Design…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2007
As everyone is tired now of hearing, Intelligent Design booster Michael Behe has argued there is an "irreducible complexity" in some biological processes that means they cannot have evolved. The basic logic is pretty simple - if a system needs all its parts, then the lack of any part means it would be nonfunctional. This means, he says, that for it to have evolved, those other parts would be twiddling their thumbs evolutionarily, until all the parts are in place.
The incredibly smart, handsome and active Ian Musgrave has a piece on Panda's Thumb on Behe's key example, the clotting cascade…
pharyngula | February 16, 2007Ah, I'm back home again, and just in time…the snow started falling just as I crossed the Morris city limits.
I was at the Minneapolis screening of Flock of Dodos, and they had a big crowd at the Bell Museum auditorium, including many of the usual suspects in the struggle against creationism in our state. Greg Laden has posted a review, and so has David Wilford (and I agree—this would be an excellent movie to show at a con). Everyone seemed very positive about it.
The discussion afterwards was great, too—movie theaters ought to do this everywhere, setting aside a block of time after a showing…
pharyngula | February 16, 2007Warren Chisum, the Texas legislator who peddled an anti-evolution memo, has, well, ummm, finally read what he was trying to legislate.
On Tuesday, the Pampa Republican distributed a memo written by Georgia GOP Rep. Ben Bridges to Texas House members' mailboxes. The memo advocated that schools stop teaching evolution and contained links to a Web site that warns of international Jewish conspiracies. It also directed readers to the group that created the Web site – the Atlanta-area Fair Education Foundation.
Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was…
clock | February 15, 2007Remember this, and use it next time you are debating religion, politics or pseudoscience:
"....someone wearing nothing but a Peter Gibbons-esque cheerful smile and having nothing but kind words for anyone will always be wrong if he says 2 + 2 = 5, and that if I call him a douchebag on wheels and use terms like "donkey punch" in the course of correcting him, it doesn't change who is right; it just changes the input into the popularity contest...
pharyngula | February 15, 2007
(This is a rather long response to a chapter in Jonathan Wells' dreadful and most unscholarly book, Icons of Evolution)
The story of Haeckel's embryos is different in an important way from that of the other chapters in Jonathan Wells' book. As the other authors show, Wells has distorted ideas that are fundamentally true in order to make his point: all his rhetoric to the contrary, Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil, peppered moths and Darwin's finches do tell us significant things about evolution, four-winged flies do tell us significant things about developmental pathways, and so…
pharyngula | February 15, 2007
We evolutionists had our big day on 12 February, when we celebrated the birthday of Charles Darwin. It seems only fair, then, that the Intelligent Design creationists should also have a special day, when we contemplate their special style of 'science'. I think today, the 15th of February, is an appropriate day.
Today is John Frum Day.
It's a holy day to Cargo Cultists, those Pacific islanders who believed that erecting symbolic runways and effigies of airplanes would summon a return of the cargo, the riches of America. The Intelligent Design creationists have also put up a simulacrum, the…
pharyngula | February 15, 2007The Atheist Experience has Kent Hovind's phone calls from jail online. Hovind is such a pretentious fraud; he compares himself to George Washington and the IRS to the Mafia and Hitler's minions, and insists through it all that he's completely innocent. He also makes the claim that the people persecuting him will get their comeuppance on Judgement Day—that belief must be such a consolation to many petty crooks.
I did feel a little sympathy for his wife, who does express some worry and remorse…and good ol' Kent just barrels over her concerns and tries to tell her what the law is. That tactic…
evolvingthoughts | February 14, 2007
Most of us have seen or heard of those who challenge the age of the Earth, from the undue pressure on the NPS, to the assertions that the Earth is "really" just 6000 or so years old. But how did we arrive at the present figure of 4.55 billion years?
"The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth" (Patrick Wyse Jackson), gives a nice and comprehensive account of the project to date the earth, and the means used to do it, from early modern theological approaches like the famous Ussher's (and Jackson has some corrections to make to Gould's essay on the topic), through to the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 14, 2007I know, I know: dog bites man. Anyway, I received this note from a colleague who attended a Seattle screening of Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos:
...There were lots of ID folk in the audience, since the Discovery Institute is here in Seattle. So we had some pretty antagonistic questions. But what was really amazing is that Discovery Institute folks secretly tape recorded the whole event and posted a podcast with edited segments to their website, taking Randy's comments out of context and making it look as if he was retracting the claims in his film.
Talk about slimy tactics! I've never…
pharyngula | February 14, 2007Sad to say, I'm discovering that some people got the wrong message from my talk last night. Something went awry, I'm not sure what, because they took home exactly the opposite idea from what I intended. I'll try summarize what I meant to say here.
I was supposed to talk about creationist misconceptions about evolution, so I started with a couple of real questions I've received in my email.
One was the extremely common "if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys" question. What I said about it was that if you've got any knowledge of biology at all, it seems trivial and rather stupid,…
pharyngula | February 12, 2007What's the matter with New Scientist? Check out Ian Musgrave's smackdown of Douglas Axe and the Biologic Institute is good stuff.
If Douglas Axe and his co-signers are so badly misinformed about something as basic and well known as the relations between engineers, computer designers and biologists, can we trust their judgment on any research that comes out of this Institute?
The DI claims to be supporting real research…so why is what little emerges from them so bad?
evolvingthoughts | February 11, 2007
Another stupid piece by DIsco, in which David Klinghofer tries to blame Darwin for eugenics, totally overlooking the fact that the mediate source is animal husbandry, which predates Darwin by several thousand years, and that the immediate source is genetics, not evolution. I think that we should immediately teach the doctrine of signatures (in which natal traits are formed by the parents looking at similar objects, like the "striped and speckled sheep" in Genesis, which were mated before peeled branches) rather than genetics, because of the bad consequences of people misusing that science…
pharyngula | February 11, 2007This is a sad story of compartmentalization carried to an extreme: a Ph.D. student in the geosciences who is also young earth creationist. This is a tricky subject: religion is not a litmus test for awarding a degree, but supposedly depth and breadth of knowledge is. I say that you cannot legitimately earn an advanced degree in geology and at the same time hold a belief contrary to all the evidence, and that the only way you can accomplish it is by basically lying to yourself and your committee throughout the process—and look at this…the student agrees.
Asked whether it was intellectually…
pharyngula | February 11, 2007Today is Evolution Sunday. It's that day when participating ministers will say a few supportive words about evolution from their pulpits, or as I prefer to think of it, when a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid beliefs and expand their pretense to intellectual authority by co-opting a few slogans.
As you might guess, I'm not exactly against the event, but I definitely do not support it. I'm sure a few readers are going to complain that I should be praising these efforts to get people to take baby steps in the…
pharyngula | February 10, 2007In the comments, Art Hunt passes along a short analysis from Patrick Frank of the instances of Haeckel's work in a number of biology texts from 1923 to 1997. Even the oldest was critical of Haeckelian recapitulation, and only a minority used Haeckel's figure at all.
I looked at 15 books in total. Where Haeckel's drawings appeared, that fact is noted. Where comment on Haeckel or his law is given, I have quoted the text faithfully, or in one case summarized, to give the flavor of the commentary.
Of the 15 books, only 5 show Haeckel's drawings, two in whole, three in part.
Of those 5, only…