creationism
pharyngula | February 10, 2007The DI certainly is obsessed. They recorded Olson at a screening of Flock of Dodos, and are now claiming that he backtracked on Haeckel's use in textbooks. It's only backtracking if you accept the DI's false premise that he claimed in the movie that there was absolutely no sign of Haeckel's diagram in biology text—a claim I've already shot down.
If they want to claim he backtracked, they should just quote the movie—you know, the part where he says the diagrams aren't found in the textbooks "other than a mention that once upon a time Haeckel came up with this idea of ontogeny recapitulating…
pharyngula | February 10, 2007The Discovery Institute is stepping up their smear campaign against Randy Olson and Flock of Dodos, and the biggest issue they can find is their continued revivification of Haeckel's biogenetic law. They've put up a bogus complaint that Olson was lying in the movie, a complaint that does not hold up, as I'll show you.
First, though, let's simplify the debate. The Discovery Institute position is that any text that shows Ernst Haeckel's ancient diagram of various embryos is guilty of fraudulently distorting the evidence for evolution. They have accused scientists of a conspiracy of lies, of…
pharyngula | February 9, 2007This is absolutely brilliant. MnCSE has taken advantage of Google's ability to set up custom search filters to create special purpose search engines.
MnCSE Real Science Search Engine: This one explicitly excludes over 300 creationist sites from its results—if you want to search for a general topic of evolutionary interest while cutting out the worst of the crap, this is the one for you.
MnCSE Snow White Search Engine: Quite a bit narrower in scope, this one only returns .edu and .gov sites.
MnCSE "Eat the Apple Dearie" Search Engine: Want a laugh? Searches here return only stuff from…
pharyngula | February 9, 2007Those are two subjects that leave me queasily nauseated, so this time I'll let John Lynch have the honor of poking about in the puke.
clock | February 8, 2007Episode 64 of the Mindcast is up! Karl J. Mogel of the Innoculated Mind blog interviews Phillip Johnson and my SciBling Ed Brayton. The blogpost also contains a number of useful links to information about the Intelligent Design Creationism political movement. You can download the entire episode here.
evolvingthoughts | February 7, 2007
Sahotra Sarkar has published a book on Intelligent Design, that is rather different from other offerings. Sarkar uses the topic as a way to riff off matters of epistemology, the sociology of science and the use of science in society. I haven't seen the published version, but I read an earlier ms copy and on that basis I can recommend it as a more technical and philosophical approach to the topic.
pharyngula | February 7, 2007And it's a dud. They've got two complaints against Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos posted, neither of which are particularly stunning.
They repeat the claim that Haeckel's embryos and all that silly recapitulation theory are still endemic in biology textbooks. It's not true, no matter how much they whine about it. I've gone over a number of these textbooks, and what you typically find at worst is a figure of the Haeckel diagrams for historical interest with an explanation that rejects recapitulation theory; more often what you find are photos or independently redrawn illustrations of the embryos…
pharyngula | February 7, 2007The other day, I shredded Pat Boone for mindlessly parroting the Lady Hope story. You'll have to take a look at the Pat Boone evolution article now, though: mysteriously, that entire paragraph has vanished without acknowledgment. Aren't computers wonderful?
Alas, the rest of the article is still there, and it's still crap. If we take it apart paragraph by paragraph, can we make the whole thing disappear?
pharyngula | February 7, 2007Correcting Jonathan Wells' misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He's been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he's just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he's trying to argue for his abuse of the term "Darwinism", which has steadily become a term of art for the rantings of creationists in addition to its more specific meanings.
Here's his most unpromising start to his letter:
In a recent column ("Churches shouldn't buy into Darwinists' ploys," 1/29), I distinguished between "evolution" as…
clock | February 7, 2007Two years (January 28, 2005) have passed, but I am still not sure what the correct answer to this question is:
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( Image: Sexism and Creationism , thanks All-Knowing Orac)
Previously, I have made a comparison between the challenges facing the reality-based community in politics and the challenges facing the reality-based community in science (some of it perhaps related to the underlying idea of the image above). Not everyone appeared to have liked it, as this guy who is "a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan" wrote this in response. I…
pharyngula | February 7, 2007Carl Zimmer tells us that there are going to be showings of Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos all across the country next week—do you know where your nearest exhibition will be going on? Here it is for us Minnesota people, along with a little rebuttal of a Discovery Institute hissy fit:
SCIENCE ON SCREEN
Bell Museum Auditorium
Thursdays at 7 p.m.
$7; $5 students, seniors and Bell Museum members
Each Thursday, the Bell Museum's Science on Screen program presents topical films focusing on scientific research and related issues, personalities, and controversies.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Flock…
pharyngula | February 6, 2007Smarmy Sal Cordova, the Eddie Haskell of the Intelligent Design movement, is at it again, with a post in which he pretends to be competent at information theory. It is with great delight that I watch Tyler DiPietro and Mark Chu-Carroll hand his ass back to him. I know full well the creationist clowns are utterly ignorant of biology; it's interestingly consistent to see that they also know nothing about astronomy and mathematics, and as the Dover trial showed, they're complete boobs about the law. What exactly are they supposed to be good at again?
evolvingthoughts | February 5, 2007
I just can't escape that damned Demarcation Principle...
A fellow emailed me the other day, asking what I thought about String Theory. Was it science? He was trying to argue with Intelligent Design folk, and they brought String Theory up as a case of science that doesn't have any testable evidence yet. He responded "science is what scientists do", and ask my opinion about that claim...
I responded thus [names removed to protect the innocent]
[Name], you are stepping in deep, very cold, and very dank waters.
In public, when trying to deal with soundbite science, it is worthwhile saying…
pharyngula | February 5, 2007It isn't just biology that creationists like to mangle—watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of "stellar evolution". She trots out the whole menagerie of creationist canards in a bizarre attempt to defend the wacky Walt Brown and dismiss whole chunks of physics and astronomy.
It just goes to show that there's something about the word "evolution" that unhinges these kooks. Everyone does know that biological evolution and stellar evolution are completely unrelated processes that don't share any mechanisms, right?
pharyngula | February 5, 2007Are you a voice talent? Want to participate in an online drama? Sign up for a part in a podcast recreation of parts of the Dover trial. It should be fun, if you're into that kind of thing.
I'm not volunteering, I'm afraid. I can't act, and I'm also afraid that the closest match to my voice would be Michael Behe, and I'd die of mortification.
pharyngula | February 4, 2007Pat Boone has another article on evolution in WingNutDaily. It does not disappoint in its off-the-scale stupidity. Just one paragraph is enough to tell you it's a waste of time.
But in a fascinating book, John Myers' "Voices from the Edge of Eternity," we find the detailed personal account of Lady Hope, of Northfield, England, who visited the aging scientist often at his bedside during his last days. It's too long to recount well here, but she tells of the Bible he was reading constantly and of the worship services that took place regularly in the summerhouse in his garden. She says that when…
pharyngula | February 3, 2007We've been found out. We've been trying to pass as simple, innocent, law-abiding members of society, but insiders have spilled the beans: we evilutionists are actually murderous, deranged terrorists.
Tens of thousands of French schools and universities have received copies of a Turkish book refuting Darwin's theory of evolution and describing it as "the true source of terrorism."
Oh, yeah. Much worse than fundamentalist Islam. And it's more than just a vague accusation: they deliver the specifics.
The book features a photograph of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center with…
evolvingthoughts | February 3, 2007
Some time back I added a little piece of conceptual mapping to the Talk.Origins Archive entitled "So you want to be an anti-Darwinian?" Now Laurent Penet has (I trust faithfully - my French is non-existent, as I found out in Paris) turned it into a French essay, along with Mark Isaak's Bombadier Beetle essay (English version here). It's amazing how much more important my own words look in French. Thanks to Laurent - now I can die happy, having been translated into at least one language other than English (and believe me, translating the contents of my head into English is no small task).
clock | February 3, 2007A-ha! Finally! Now I understand the connection between Creationism and the overall anti-sex sentiment of the Fundamentalists!
New reseaarch shows that E.coli swim upstream due to the Design of their flagellum! And where do they swim from and swim to? Yes, you guessed it right! And you can also watch the movie.
pharyngula | January 31, 2007Don Boys is not happy that Kent Hovind has been sent to jail.
Kent's enemies are painting him as a greedy tax resister when he has said repeatedly that he will pay all the taxes he owes. He could not get any response from the IRS nor did the judge, prosecutor, or anyone else inform him why his ministry was not exempt from taxes as are hundreds of thousands of similar organizations. Therefore, he spends ten years in the Big House. That's where they send killers, traitors, rapists, child molesters, armed robbers, and other Very Bad Guys.
I think that what painted him as a greedy tax resister…