creationism
mikethemadbiologist | November 26, 2006As a part of the Carnival of the Liberals, I wrote a post about our failing political discourse. Here's something related from the archives.
In an excellent post on news reporting, Thoughts from Kansas writes (italics mine):
The same thing is a major part of the ongoing creationism battles. A good reporter with a background in science would not feel obliged to go to a scientist and get a quote to balance a story about creationists. Nor would such a reporter feel obliged to troll the waters for some bottom-feeding creationist to "balance" some claim about actual science.
But that's what many…
pharyngula | November 26, 2006This fellow, Daniel J. Lewis, from Answers in Genesis has come along and requested a space to defend creationism.
Then if the blog administrator allows it, I'm available to publicly discuss creation vs. evolution if we can do so on level, intelligent grounds without childish attacks. You can start with your belief system (naturalism), and I can start with mine (the Bible).
Perhaps the blog administrator will create a specific area where we can do this. (Preferably a place to which I can subscribe via RSS or email.)
I'm open to debate, are you?
I'm not too keen on accommodating creationist…
pharyngula | November 24, 2006If you want to see how the other side thinks, and I mean more than just the vocal leaders at the top of the creationist movement, there's an excellent example at The Friendly Atheist. It's written by a fellow who visited his local church, Parkview Christian Church, and reviewed a 25 page pamphlet on creationism put out by the pastor, Tim Harlow.
I have to be blunter than the Friendly Atheist (he's friendly, after all; I have no such qualifier): Reverend Tim Harlow is sincere, caring, literate, and open to conversation, but his pamphlet is 199 proof distilled stupid, aged in oaken casks and…
clock | November 23, 2006I am still sleepy from all that tryptophan in turkey meat and the Evolution wine, so I don't think I have the energy to write a big post now - I'll leave much of my thoughts on the matter for a post-weekend post reviewing Dawkins' The God Delusion.
But I have to chime in briefly by sending you to the relevant links and copying some of the comments I wrote on those comment threads. Brace yourself for a lot of reading as there are several posts and many comments on each of the posts. Sorry, the links are not neccessarly in order, but you'll get the gist of the argument anyway.
Ed Brayton…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2006Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book back in the 15th century called De Docta Ignorantia, often translated as "On learned ignorance". It has nothing whatsoever to do with this post. Well, it sort of does.
Nicholas, a Cardinal, held that human reason was limited, and could not reach knowledge of things beyond the world. In short, he was an agnostic. Wait, I hear you saying - a Cardinal of the Catholic Church who thought that nothing could be known of God? Well yes, as Cusa held that "knowledge" of God was had solely by faith.
The world, as we are so often reminded, divides into two kinds of people.…
pharyngula | November 23, 2006That guy, Larry Moran…he seems to have been the final straw to tip a whole lot of people into twitterpated consternation. In particular, Ed Brayton, that sad panjandrum of the self-satisfied mean, medium, middle, moderate, and mediocre, has declared Moran (and all those who dare to profess their atheism without compromise) to be anathema, and John Lynch, Pat Hayes, and Nick Matzke have drawn up sides to put themselves clearly against wicked "evangelical atheists" like Dawkins and Moran and even PZ Maiieghrs.
What could have prompted such vociferous contempt? What awful thing could Moran have…
pharyngula | November 22, 2006Kent Hovind is still blogging…from jail!
His sentencing is on 19 January, he's busy "saving" men (five so far!), and he has been without a pillow for 8 days. They play the TV too loud.
His fellow inmates are "starved for real affection." This could get disturbing fast.
He has a list of reasons why God allowed him to be tossed in jail. One is to make him more like Jesus.
The insanity will go on.
pharyngula | November 22, 2006Why is it that the funny stuff always breaks out when I'm away from the interwebs? The always looney DaveScot takes issue with the claim that the virgin birth of Jesus is biologically unlikely, and cobbles up a bizarre scenario to allow it. Why, I don't know; is ID dependent on the chromosomal status of Jesus Christ, or something?
Anyway, DaveScot proposes that 1) meiosis was incomplete in one of Mary's ova, producing an egg that contained 2N chromosomes; 2) this egg also bore a mutation that causes XX individuals to develop as phenotypically male; and 3) something then activated this egg to…
pharyngula | November 22, 2006The cat who gave birth to a dog has failed her tests. All hope rests on their search for a lizard giving birth to a chicken now.
pharyngula | November 21, 2006Some dirt is being unearthed in the tale of the biggest creationist group around, Answers in Genesis, led by Ken Ham. There were two branches of AiG, one in Australia and another in the US, and there'd been hints of a split between them—and now Jim Lippard has details. It's looking ugly.
In short, it looks like this was a struggle over money and control, with the Australian group out-maneuvered by the U.S. group. If the information in these documents is accurate--and I am inclined to believe that it is--it shows that Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis is as sleazy in its business dealings as it is…
clock | November 21, 2006Two years ago, there was quite a brouhaha in the media when Serbian minister for education decided to kick Darwin out of schools. The whole affair lasted only a few days - the public outrage was swift and loud and the minister was forced to resign immediately. I blogged about it profusely back then and below the fold are those old posts:
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I Take This Personally (September 09, 2004)
Serbia takes a bold step back into the Middle Ages
Serbia strikes blow against evolution Creationism put on equal footing with Darwinism
Serbia vs…
pharyngula | November 21, 2006Casey Luskin's ignorance is well-known, and this recent essay stopped most of us cold at his Ford Pinto comparison. We should have kept going. Karmen plucks out another particularly stupid statement, one that's even dumber than the Pinto remark:
The article called evolution a "simple" process. In our experience, does a "simple" process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?
Luskin apparently thinks the answer is "no." I think Karmen could teach him a few things about fractals to get him started, but it's trivially true that yes, biology is all about the simple…
pharyngula | November 21, 2006Five days ago, I wrote about a creationist letter that was published in Nature. At that time, there was a discussion going on in email with the gang at the Panda's Thumb, and someone said we ought to get a pool going on how long it would take before the Intelligent Design creationists would use this to argue that their case was being seriously discussed in the pages of a major scientific journal. Four months was suggested; I said one week.
I should have put some money down on that.
It turns out one of the PhD alumni in biology from Moran's school (University of Toronto), a respected scientist…
clock | November 20, 2006This is a Pinto that has evolved by natural (and a little bit of artificial) selection:
This is a Pinto that was intelligently designed:
Casey Luskin does not understand the difference.
Although, apparently, even the designed Pinto is always evolving:
pharyngula | November 20, 2006Casey Luskin has been posting a series of articles to argue with Carl Zimmer, and has finally posted his last attempt, which Zimmer has dealt with. We have a new catch phrase, thanks to Luskin, in reference to the shortcomings of the vertebrate eye:
Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed in crash tests, not designed?
You see, we're not allowed to infer anything about the Designer from its handiwork in the natural world (that would be theology, after all), except perhaps when it's necessary to speculate that life was designed by Ford to counter those annoying facts.
pharyngula | November 19, 2006I have to preface this with the comment that I like Eugenie Scott, I think she does a wonderful job, and she's trying to accomplish the difficult task of treading the line between being a representative of science and building an interface with culture and politics. I couldn't do that job. I'd be inspiring rioting mobs outside the office window. However, I also think she's wrong, and that she's working too hard to pander to public superstition to be effective at communicating science.
Jon Voisey took notes on her recent lecture in Kansas. Much of what she said I can go along with, although I…
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2006One of the maddening things about the creationists is that they are rarely forthright about their agenda. Euphimisms like "teach the controversy" and "fairness" abound.
This leads to a lot of support that would not exist were their true agenda to be placed front-and-center. Amanda points out, in an excellent post on the pregnancy-as-punishment anti-abortion right, how this also applies to the abortion debate (an aside: why is evolution a 'controversy', but abortion a 'debate'? Does that mean anything?):
Liberals make the whole thing worse by being obtuse about how the anti-choice movement…
evolvingthoughts | November 19, 2006One of the points made by Rabbi Slifkin in the article I cited recently is that if you insist on using God as an explanans in the aspects of the world we do not yet understand, that is going to mean a decreasing role for God as we learn more. This is an old point. Wesley Elsberry and I made this point about the so-called "explanatory filter" of the Intelligent Design movement - it makes it unnecessary to do any further investigation about things we don't understand, or don't want to because it undercuts our belief system. But the history of the term "the God of the Gaps" is even more…
pharyngula | November 18, 2006The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a very foolish editorial in their Faith and Values section, carping about that Dawkins fella and his atheistic Darwinism. It's typical creationist dreck, I'm afraid. If you want just one good argument against religion, it's that it seems to promote idiots to positions of leadership.
Richard Dawkins, author of the book "The God Delusion," intends that religious readers of his book will be atheists when they finish it. Let's put some of the statements he made in his Nov. 4 Star Tribune interview to the test.
Dawkins claims that evolutionary science "offers…