creationism
pharyngula | December 30, 2006Jason pitches into that twit, Peter Hitchens—you may recall that I dealt with the same column a while back, but that level of stupid does support double-teaming to counter it, I think.
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2006You might not know this, but, due to pressure from Republicans beholden to batshit lunatic creationists theological conservatives, park rangers at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to discuss how old the Grand Canyon is. Really. I'm not making this up. From PEER:
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than…
pharyngula | December 30, 2006At this point, it's safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due…
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2006
Brent Rasmussen, at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, has a nice smackdown of the atheism-intolerance of Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and Distinguished Scholar of the City University of New York, with which I agree totally.
But in the course of it, Brent shows a taxonomy of the so-called "weak" versus "strong" atheism that is so common on the internet, but which is what I dispute. More below the fold...
Here is Brent's taxonomy in a diagram:
My problem lies in the primacy of the questions that are asked, to which these axes are…
pharyngula | December 29, 2006Crap. Lippard misread the report: it was a 6 month form. There has been no net decline in revenues to that creationist junk organization, and I was wrong. There have been no promising developments in a decline in grassroots support for creationism.
I've always had a low regard for settling creationism by court cases, since they don't do a thing to address popular support. Here is far better news, though, and unless there's some remarkable explanation for it, it's the most promising sign of real progress I've seen yet: revenues for Answers in Genesis dropped from $10 million in 2004 to $5…
pharyngula | December 29, 2006Hey, everyone, you're being asked for some help. A certain someone is going to be giving a talk to Hugh Ross's group, Reasons to Believe, and he wants a list of common creations fallacies and good rebuttals. Remember, RtB is an old earth creationist group, so stuff about a 6000 year old earth is inappropriate.
Please consider taking the time to post a thread on your blog asking readers to submit their nominations for most common/most egregious fallacies or misunderstandings along with suggestions on how to combat them. You can mention me or not, as you think it would be appropriate/helpful…
pharyngula | December 29, 2006I was just asked to confirm something. A reader, TheFallibleFiend, noticed that DaveScot at Uncommon Descent had claimed that he had heard the "Tree of Life Exploding" because an examination of an ultraconserved genetic element in humans had found that "the closest match was to DNA from the coelacanth". The reader then checked the Nature article, and discovered that it didn't seem to say anything of the kind. He tried to point this discrepancy out in a comment, but it never showed up (oooh, surprise!).
Our bewildered reader wonders if he could be misinterpreting the article—he's not a…
mikethemadbiologist | December 29, 2006After reading this article about Democratic consultant Mara Vanderslice whose speciality is outreach to "theological conservatives", my head was about to explode. Thankfully, digby points out that courting social conservatives will make the Democratic Party, well, more conservative--or as a relative put it, "There's always a quid pro quo." And Jonathan Singer explodes the myth that it was social conservatives who elected Democrats (maybe if Vanderslice were a little less faith-based and a little more reality-based, she would understand what a control group is). But this statement by…
pharyngula | December 28, 2006Wheee! Look at this slick new game. Doesn't it look fun to play?
It's even educational!
"Intelligent Design vs Evolution" is unique in that the playing pieces are small rubber brains and each team plays for "brain" cards. Each player uses his or her brains to get more brains, and the team with the most brains wins. It has been designed to make people think … and that's exactly what it does.
Errm, until you look more closely at who puts it out: Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. You know, the insane guys with the banana. And then you read the testimonial:
"Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are doing…
pharyngula | December 26, 2006I'm not the praying kind, but this example I found on Greg Laden's blog strikes me as rather familiar. I do believe I've heard the sentiments from a great many apologetic quarters before.
A Prayer to the Faith Based
I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to offend you,
And you didn’t even ask for this but
I’m going to put in a plug for your beliefs
So that you won’t get too mad at me as I utter words
With which you or someone you know may not agree,
(No matter how utterly wrong you may happen to be)
It is good that you are religious
And I will personally defend your right to believe
Whatever it is you…
pharyngula | December 26, 2006Oh, man, we're in trouble now—they're catching on. Casey Luskin wags his finger at the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and you know that when the sharpest tool (a phrase intending a variety of meanings) in the ID creationist toolbox notices the obvious, we can expect…we can expect…well, we can't expect much, but we do get lots of gassy blitherings.
He makes much of the fact that he knows the FSM is supposed to be a joke (a joke that, personally, I think is getting well past its sell-by date), but he clucks primly at the fact that all these "Darwinist academics" are finding the joke humorous…yet the…
pharyngula | December 26, 2006Greg Laden has the story. It's really not much of a story, but it's local, so we care—basically, a crazy Jesus lady is buying prime billboard space around the area to flaunt her opinion that evolution is bunk, and newspapers are writing about it. It's content-free noise, and we can only hope that all of our creationist opponents continue to be this shallow and stupid (and what do you know—they are!), but still, shallow and stupid seems to draw in the fan base. The article does mention some of her sponsors: if you're planning on having a home built in the Duluth area, scratch Legacy Custom…
pharyngula | December 25, 2006Wesley Elsberry is taking a sabbatical from the creo-evo wars to do research…real stuff having nothing to do with the foolishness of the IDists, and learning something new about science. Good idea!
(Creationists shouldn't rest too easy, though, lots of us will be taking up the slack.)
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2006
It's a season, so I am told, that has something to do with religion. We celebrate the birth of commodity capitalism, or something. So I thought I would combine my favourite issues - philosophy, religion and evolution.
It's all Alex Rosenberg's fault. At a dinner before the conference, he was sitting opposite me, and talk turned, as it does, to creationist attacks on science. Alex made the following claim: It is not possible to be a theist and believe in evolution by natural selection consistently.
I demurred, of course. But on further thought, I wondered if he might not be right.
To…
clock | December 22, 2006This is the way Discovery Insitute intelligently designed the year.
This is the way 2006 actually evolved
clock | December 22, 2006Below the fold are the pictures of me, Prof. Steve Steve and Rev.Big Dumb Chimp taken immediately after the Ken Miller talk in Raleigh. If we look a little drunk or high, it is because we were just subjected to an overdose of theistic evolution and religious apologetics!
clock | December 22, 2006So, why do Creationists and other quacks try so hard to sound all 'scienc-y'? (June 15, 2005)
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Check this guy out - Jim Pinkoski - in the posts AND in the comments here, here and here.
OK, he's a creationist, but he is not even trying to be consistently within ONE version of creationism. He freely switches between YEC and OEC and IDC and when asked ONLY for internal logical consistency, not even evidence, he starts using all caps and bold and calls everyone stupid and liars and exhibits all symptoms of a persecution complex. What gives? He appears…
pharyngula | December 20, 2006Could anyone have possibly predicted this? Larry Moran has been banned from Uncommon Descent by DaveScot. Stunning surprise, eh?
We should have set up a betting pool.
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2006As PZ McMyers notes, the Libyan court has condemned to death five nurses and a doctor for infecting children with AIDS deliberately as part of an experiment, despite the clear scientific evidence that the real cause was pre-existing strains of AIDS and the lack of proper funding and material, with hypodermics being reused without even sterilisation.
Obviously playing to the domestic audience, the judges are simply following the religious paranoia and extremism of Khaddafi and his government. Expecting them to act rationally was at best an outside bet.
pharyngula | December 19, 2006Creationism gets another defeat: the Cobb County case about the textbook stickers has been settled, and the bad guys have surrendered.
In an agreement announced today, Cobb County school officials state that they will not order the placement of "any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action." School officials also agreed not to take other actions that would undermine the teaching of evolution in biology classes.
I will make my by now familiar disclaimer: this…