creationism
evolvingthoughts | January 23, 2007
Not Darwin. Not Lamarck. Not the Greeks. A French physicist and mathematician...
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1678-1759) was an interesting man. He devised what we now know as the principle of least action, and showed that the earth was flattened. Some other things he did, however, changed biology forever.
In 1735, the first edition of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae was published. Linneaus put out at least 13 editions of this in his lifetime, and the famous 10th edition was adopted in the 19th century as the "gold standard" - if Linnaeus named a species, that was its name thereafter…
pharyngula | January 23, 2007Some might be surprised to hear that I'm actually in favor of this change in the British school standards:
Teenagers will be asked to debate intelligent design (ID) in their religious education classes and read texts by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins under new government guidelines.
In a move that is likely to spark controversy, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has for the first time recommended that pupils be taught about atheism and creationism in RE classes.
The all-important qualifying phrase is "in their religious education classes". It's not science, so I'll always…
evolvingthoughts | January 22, 2007
PEER have added some clarification over their pre-Christmas release about creationist literature at the NPS bookshops at the Grand Canyon. I interpreted it this way, but their loose wording caused a furor about NPS staff not being able to give the age of the GC. It turns out this was not true.
pharyngula | January 21, 2007Karen Klinzing, a creationist-friendly Republican who lost her run for the Minnesota legislature, has been rewarded by our Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, with a nice cushy job…as Assistant Commissioner of Education.
There's nothing quite so charming as the sight of a conservative hack getting handed a sinecure, and one from which she can work mischief.
(via Lloyletta)
pharyngula | January 19, 2007Shelley the Republican says:
We conservatives have grown accustomed to liberal activist judges perverting justice for their own evil ends. Last year Judge Jones betrayed us all when he passed his verdict in the Dover school-book case. Shortly afterwards, our dear friend Kent was convicted of tax evasion.
U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers will sentence the Hovinds at 9 a.m for the alleged crime of tax evasion. They claim that he and his lovely wife Jo owe the state almost one million dollars in unpaid taxes. A quick review of the case show that the federal court unfairly denied Hovind's…
pharyngula | January 18, 2007I sniped at Jim Drummond for his odd demotion of evolutionary biology the other day — his colleague at the University of Toronto,
Larry Moran, tried to get to the bottom of it.
I contacted Drummond by email to see if he really was an IDiot. Prof. Drummond claims he can't remember exactly what he said because the interview was a long time ago. He says that what he meant was that global warming was just as certain as evolution. When asked if he was a Creationist or a fan of intelligent design, he avoided the question and emphasized the problem of global warming.
The impression I get is that he…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007Steve Reuland follows up on that strangely repeated claim that Ken Ham's creationist museum is within 6 hours of 2/3 of the population of the US. Short answer: NO WAY, DUDE. He did make an interesting suggestion, though.
If you wanted the museum to be close to a lot of people, shifting it to the northeast by a couple of hundred miles would have been the smart thing to do.
Look at a map. A few hundred miles northeast of Cincinnati? It's the perfect location.
Dover, PA.
pharyngula | January 17, 2007Lord J-Bar is much, much more optimistic than I am.
Even considering how clever ID advocates have been, all it takes is knowledge to defeat ID. Once a person understands science, it’s easy to see ID for what it is: theology. Plus, the public needs to know why ID came to be. It doesn’t come any clearer than the Discovery Institute’s document, “The Wedge Strategy” (you can see it here), where they proclaim that the purpose of ID is “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” (“The Wedge Document,” Introduction). Once the public realizes this, ID will no longer be…
pharyngula | January 17, 2007If you're interested in the DVD that that the creationist Truth in Science group sent out to every teacher in Britain, someone has accidentally made it available as a bittorrent file.
pharyngula | January 16, 2007On Saturday and Sunday, 17-18 February, it's the Twin Cities Creation "Science" Association's Science Fair…held that week in honor of Charles Darwin's birthday, I'm sure. Unfortunately, I'm making the drive to Minneapolis twice that week already, so I'm going to have to pass on making a third trip.
Besides, it just makes me sad to see kids told they have to put bible verses on their science projects.
pharyngula | January 16, 2007Last week, the Star Tribune published an article on global warming that included this foolish statement:
"If we compare the debate over the theory of evolution with the debate over the theory of global warming — global warming's a whole lot more certain at the moment," said Jim Drummond, a University of Toronto physics professor and chief investigator for the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change.
I'm sure Dr Drummond is a credible authority on climate, but reading that reminded me that even senior scientists can be pompous asses when speaking well outside their expertise…
clock | January 16, 2007 *N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences
/Downtown Raleigh/
**Thursday, January 18
"Flock of Dodos" screening with filmmaker, Randy Olson
7:00 p.m. Museum Auditorium
Free
*Filmmaker and Evolutionary Ecologist , Dr. Randy Olson, presents his
new film */Flock of Dodos/*: /*The Evolution / Intelligent Design Circus.*/
"Flock of Dodos" is the first feature-length documentary to present both
sides of the Intelligent Design / Evolution clash and tries to make
sense of the issue by visiting Olson's home state of Kansas. The film
digs below the surface of the debate by examining the language being
used by…
pharyngula | January 15, 2007Ken Ham is in the news again, and he knows exactly what he's doing, the cunning little rat.
While foreign media and science critics have mostly come to snigger at exhibits explaining how baby dinosaurs fit on Noah's Ark and Cain married his sister to people the earth, museum spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said the coverage has done nothing but drum up more interest.
"Mocking publicity is free publicity," Looy said. Besides, U.S. media have been more respectful, mindful perhaps of a 2006 Gallup Poll showing almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve, but were created…
pharyngula | January 15, 2007He's singing about theistic evolution, so he must be one of those appeasers…but since he's funny, I'll forgive him.
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2007So those who oppose global warming are using the same strategy as the creationists: teach the 'controversy.'
This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth."
After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film. The movie consists largely of a computer presentation by former Vice President Al Gore recounting…
pharyngula | January 14, 2007Doonesbury hits one out of the park today—don't trust science, it's just too controversial.
I like the definition: situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts. The Discovery Institute ought to etch that on their front door, filigreed in gold.
pharyngula | January 12, 2007Hey, I'm the wild-eyed creationist smasher in this family. So why are all the lame creationists doing their stupid act in my daughter's blog? She's actually getting comments like this, intended to refute evolution:
why is it that nothing today is evolving and why is it (if we did come from apes)that they haven't all turned into humans?
Dogs are not evolving. different kinds of dogs yes but not dogs becoming cats
It's pathetic and creepy how they think they can get their arguments past the 16 year old girl instead of the curmudgeonly old college professor—and she and her friends are still…
pharyngula | January 12, 2007Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I'm sorry, guy, but that's what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.
At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That's because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same…
pharyngula | January 12, 2007And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.
The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He's got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it's a MS Word file that doesn't help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.
It's people like Al Gore, in both the Democratic and Republican parties and any other person on earth (no matter their political affiliation) that continue supporting the liberal…
pharyngula | January 11, 2007Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.
(click for larger image)The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (…