creationism
clock | December 10, 2006So says Sahotra Sarkar in the latest American Prospect.
Hat-tip: Neil the Ethical Werewolf
pharyngula | December 8, 2006I'm going to rudely hijack one political issue to make a point about another. I think you'll quickly figure out what it is.
NARAL has been undermining their own relevance by failing to support pro-choice positions in a misguided attempt to court moderates—basically, as Ezra Klein points out, they're failing to recognize their role in the political ecosphere. They're an advocacy group for a specific range of policies, not a politician who has to balance constituencies—they are supposed to be spokespeople for one particular constituency.
…one thing groups like NARAL have a tendency to do is…
pharyngula | December 7, 2006Gaaa...stop chattering on the Sean Henry thread! I set that up as a finely focused exercise in politely discussing his criticism of evolution, not for all that ongoing discussion about whether this is good or bad or complaining at each other about whether your answer is appropriate or chatting about how old he is. About 50% of the replies in that thread have been tossed out because you aren't paying attention.
So talk about all that meta stuff here, not there, and stop cluttering up the thread, OK?
Except for you, Charlie Wagner. You've finally worn out your welcome. Goodbye, and good…
pharyngula | December 7, 2006You may recall that a while back Nature published a letter from a Polish creationist, Maciej Giertych. This week, they published some of the replies. It's entertaining stuff: I've put all the letters below the fold.
A timely wake-up call as anti-evolutionists publicize their views
from U. Kutschera, Institute of Biology, University of Kassel
Sir:
Your Special Report "Anti-evolutionists raise their profile in Europe" (Nature 444, 406 407; 2006) mentions a seminar held in Brussels at the European Parliament on 11 October 2006, as part of a new strategy by supporters of intelligent design (ID)…
pharyngula | December 7, 2006The UK Education Minister has the right idea. After the pseudoscientific group "'Truth' in Science" mailed out teaching plans for creationism to schools in England, it took them a while, but the government has now spoken out loudly and clearly against their nonsense.
The government has already stated that the Truth in Science materials should not be used in science lessons. On November 1, the education minister, Jim Knight, wrote: "Neither intelligent design nor creationism are recognised scientific theories and they are not included in the science curriculum. The Truth in Science information…
pharyngula | December 6, 2006The angry young anti-evolutionist who made that ill-informed video has been complaining in the comments about how rude we all are, and saying that he's got other, more substantive gripes about evolution that he hasn't told us about yet.
Well, here's his chance. Mr Henry can instruct us in what he considers the most damning evidence against evolution, and you all can correct him in an informative, constructive fashion.
I will be enforcing very strict commenting rules here. Be polite or your comments will be axed on sight. No complaining, either; give the young gentleman a chance to state his…
pharyngula | December 6, 2006Hey, Minnesotans—anyone want to tune in to KKMS Christian radio right now? I'm about to be tied up in class stuff for a while, so I'll say more later—it seems we have a new creationist group mobilizing in the state.
I caught a few bits of the radio show (that hurt—it's a fundagelical radio station), and I've also heard from a few readers. There is apparently a billboard in a very prominent place at 12th and Washington along 35W, the freeway that cuts through the center of Minneapolis. This, apparently, is the whole raison d'etre for the organization, to throw up billboards. The founder of…
pharyngula | December 6, 2006Today, it's Peter Hitchens' turn to make a mealy-mouthed appeal for an unearned respect for Intelligent Design creationism. This one is another generic whine, begging that people be fair and give some version of equal time to an underdog heterodoxy…creationism. After all, the only possible reason scientists could accept the idea of evolution is because they've mysteriously and unfairly acquired a dominant position, and this brand of pundit doesn't stop to consider why it's so popular. I think it's a kind of projection: they've acquired this unearned position of authority, so they can't…
pharyngula | December 5, 2006Synthesis is a good thing: Mark Chu-Carroll finds a similarity between Notch signaling and something mysterious called The Itai-Rodeh solution. It's not surprising that similar algorithms might arise by design and by evolution—which is why the IDists have to demonstrate something unique to their assertions for which a mechanism without a designer cannot account.
pharyngula | December 5, 2006Ouch, this is painful to watch. It starts with pictures of kittens and Bambi and bagpipers (bagpipers?), and then this 12 year old kid comes on to declare evolution invalid. He throws up a list of objections to evolution culled from some creationist website somewhere—among them, for instance, is that there is no inheritance of acquired characters—and then he spends most of his time babbling incoherently about how evolution is impossible.
Warning: it also ends with a bagpiper.
The 8 year old atheist sounded much more intelligent.
(via DoubleViking)
pharyngula | December 5, 2006All-too-common-dissent finds another crazy creationist engineer. This one opens a molecular biology and genetics text, discovers that it doesn't talk about "Darwinism" (not surprising), and concludes that biology doesn't need evolution.
My hypothesis is that the field of molecular biology is simply not understood by the majority of biologists and thus pretty secure from rational debate by laymen. By claiming that this discipline (which they probably don't understand either) proves Darwinism and that Darwinism is vital to understanding molecular biology, the Creationists can be silenced,…
pharyngula | December 4, 2006I take my criticisms back. It seems Intelligent Design creationism has made a profound contribution to computer science.
Introduction
Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design.
Algorithm Description
The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it's in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it's clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it's safe to assume that it's already optimally Sorted in some way that…
mikethemadbiologist | December 4, 2006The story about Kenyan religious leaders who are attempting to stifle evolutionary biology at the Kenyan National Museum is making the rounds of the progressive political blogs (interesting, how the right-wing blogs aren't covering this...). Within this story, there is a real tragedy: Kenya has a serious problem in treating certain types of bacterial dysentery due to the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
pharyngula | December 4, 2006This story has been simmering for a while: Kenyan fundamentalists are trying to suppress the fossil evidence, so well represented in their country, of human evolution. On one side, we have Richard Leakey:
He told The Daily Telegraph (London): "The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya's very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science."
On another side, we have…
evolvingthoughts | December 2, 2006Google prides itself for being an ethical company. "Do no harm" is their motto, I believe (although some Chinese dissidents may dispute this). But what happens when an honest site is hacked and porn links are included on their index page?
Google delists and deindexes that site immediately, with neither warning nor notification of what is wrong, that's what. What site are we talking about? The award winning anticreationist site, The Talk Origins Archive.
Wesley Elsberry, the admin, gives the story of trying to get Google to reindex us here. But the site has been subjected, along with the Panda…
pharyngula | November 30, 2006But of course, he had to go somewhere else. That creationist who bailed out of his very own personal thread here turned up at the Calladus blog, only to get crushed there, too.
He's a very silly man. We're glad to be shed of him; anyone else want to invite him to visit your blog?
clock | November 29, 2006While all this was going on I was wondering where Jason Rosenhouse would stand on all of this. He is back from a break and has two posts on the issue here and here.
Update: Chris Rowan wrote an intriguing analysis and a huge thread on the topic is still ongoing on Panda's Thumb
pharyngula | November 29, 2006Well, hooray! I was going to jump onto this awesome example of flagrantly stupid creationist innumeracy, but I'd been putting it off (oh, my grading. My grading. It tears at me with talons like razors). This guy mangles recent measurements of human variation, making comments like this: "previous concepts that all humans were 99.9% alike were blown apart by the research conducted on 270 people of various races that confirmed that 2,900 genes could vary within people, making over a million combinations possible." I mean, seriously, how ignorant do you have to be to think that the possibility of…
pharyngula | November 29, 2006The Onion reports on the latest anti-evolution tactic.
In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.
"From now on, the streets, forests, plains, and rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless practice of evolution, and species will be able to procreate without deviating from God's intended design," said Bob Bethell, a member of the state House of Representatives. "This is about protecting the integrity of…
pharyngula | November 27, 2006They're befuddled over there in the UK—I know that when I visited, I seemed to down a couple of pints of that potent stuff every day, so I'm assuming the natives must also be living in a constant state of alcohol saturation. Right? It's the only explanation I can think of for the latest burst of creationist foolishness in the UK. They've got the former head of some school out there coming out in favor of the shoddy pseudoscience that this creationist group, Truth in Science, has been peddling.
However, Mr Cowan says the materials are "very scholarly" and could be extremely useful in helping…