creationism
scientificactivist | November 17, 2006As the Republicans try to pick up the pieces of their Election Day loss last week, one of the things they have to do is select their new Congressional leadership. Most of their choices haven't been too surprising, including their choice for House Minority Leader, John Boehner (R-Ohio). As House Majority leader, Boehner had previously held the second highest Republican rank in the House, and he has now been elevated to the highest. Although most of the press coverage has painted him as a moderate choice, over the conservative Mike Pence (R-Indiana), a look at Boehner's record would…
pharyngula | November 17, 2006We've finally got the piece of evidence they've all been asking for: a cat giving birth to a dog.
It's only a matter of time until my attempts to hatch a bird out of my fish eggs succeed.
pharyngula | November 17, 2006Casey Luskin is still flailing at Carl Zimmer, and Carl has updated his rebuttal appropriately. It's good entertainment if you find attack mice amusing.
pharyngula | November 16, 2006One of the characters who frequents the ID blog Uncommon Descent is the smarm-meister Sal Cordova, an utterly clueless little git with a talent for being simultaneously oleaginous and snide. He has just posted an astonishingly foolish commentary on the apparent impossibility of evolving regeneration, and I promise, you'll enjoy reading Mark Chu-Carroll's reply. Cordova gets everything wrong.
evolvingthoughts | November 16, 2006My favourite rabbi, Natan Slifkin, has a piece in the Jerusalem Post entitled "The problem with intelligent design". In it he distinguishes between thinking that evolutionary processes involve randomness and thinking that a universe that can evolve living things is random, the latter of which he rejects.
In particular, his response to ID is telling:
THE PROBLEM with ID was demonstrated by David Klinghoffer's November 9 Post op-ed "Wayward religious reconcilers." He argued that for the universe to meaningfully attest to a Creator, it must do so in a way that is potentially scientifically…
pharyngula | November 16, 2006This week's issue of Nature contains a bizarre letter from a Polish creationist, forester, and member of the Polish parliament. His credentials notwithstanding, it is a very silly diatribe that makes a series of false claims—claims that are trivial to dismiss, but in that fine tradition of the Gish gallop and Hovind's rambling free-association eructations, he makes a lot of them. A whole lot of them; all just plain naked assertions with no evidence to back them up, because the evidence, if he'd bothered to discuss it, contradicts him. Even the title reveals his ignorance of how science works…
evolvingthoughts | November 15, 2006The Knoxville Metro Pulse Online has a nice guest opinion piece by Rikki Hall that uses Zeno's paradox as an analogy for creationists and evidence.
pharyngula | November 15, 2006Remember that fundie history teacher who was caught on tape? One of the recordings is now online. I haven't listened to the whole thing—the quality is terrible, and it's a typical high school classroom that is in a noisy uproar—but you do hear him nattering on about Satan and the Bible and sin and so forth; apparently, the "Scriptures aren't religion, they are the foundation of all of the world's major religions", and he claims evolution isn't science.
I'm not sure what he's teaching.
Dave, an audio engineer, has provided an amazingly cleaned-up version of the recording. Listen to that one.
pharyngula | November 15, 2006John G. West of the Discovery Institute wants all you conservatives to know that the Debate Over Evolution Not Going Away, and that you need to join up with his side and question "Darwinism", because of all those intolerant nasty dogmatists who want to suppress the truth. You know, people like me.
Biology professor P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has demanded "the public firing and humiliation of some teachers" who express their doubts about Darwin. He further says, "It's time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer…
clock | November 15, 2006An oldie but goodie (June 12, 2005) debunking one of the rare Creationist claims that encroaches onto my territory.
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I got homework to do. PZ Myers alerted me to an incredible argument that the existence of circadian rhythms denies evolution!
bryanm, the proprietor of the aptly-named The Narrow blog, describes himself as "...nobody who wants to tell everybody that there is somebody who can save anybody." In other words he is a know-nothing who keeps bothering everybody trying to push his idea that there is this non-existent being who…
stcynic | November 15, 2006A small newspaper in Michigan, the Argus Leader, has had quite a series of letters to the editor over the last few weeks after printing an article about Dick DeVos and his position that ID ought to be taught. You'll get a good laugh out of this one from a youth minister named Jerod Jordan. He talks about how much research he's done to conclude that evolution is wrong while simultaneously proving his utter ignorance even of the standard creationist nonsense as he trots out the tried-and-false Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man.
In 1912, a scientist named Charles Dawson, a medical doctor and…
stcynic | November 15, 2006Zenoferox has a blog post about a new book put out by Answers in Genesis, a book they said previously was a secret project "to overcome the widespread censorship found in public schools concerning the creation/evolution issue." As it turns out, however, this "big secret" is just another anti-evolution book that pretends not to be pushing Biblical literalism:
We got copies of the three major biology textbooks used in most public school systems across America. AiG's Roger Patterson carefully went through each of them and noted every place where there's a reference to millions of years and…
pharyngula | November 14, 2006Uh, guys? You know that trip to Ken Ham's creation science "museum"? I think he got wind of our plans.
He's training guard dogs now.
clock | November 14, 2006Michael Shermer has an interview in the latest American Scientist on Creationism and his new book Why Darwin Matters.
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2006
So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists...
Let's set the scene with some philosophical definitions. A scientific question is one that evidence can tell for or against. All else is a philosophical question, or as it is popularly known, navel gazing. What is at issue here is whether or not evidence can tell for or against the notion that God exists. Atheists (and theists) say…
pharyngula | November 13, 2006Cody visited the creation science "museum" near Glenrose, Texas, and came back with a photo of the mural portraying Adam and Eve. Adam looks…familiar.
I knew he was old, but that old?
I'm not sure who Eve resembles. Anita Bryant? Skeletor?
pharyngula | November 13, 2006This fairly typical scrap of creationist email made me smirk. Please, if you're going to be sarcastic and tell me how stupid I am, don't make the first word of your diatribe grammatically incorrect.
your soo smart... I wish I was as smart as you
Oh you are soo much smarter than everyone else. That's odd being that your ancestors were monkeys. Too bad you are going to drown soon when mankind melts the polar ice caps. I guess you would have done just as well if we would have used your embryo for research and the rest of us would be much better off too. What a stupid arrogant know-it-all…
pharyngula | November 13, 2006It's a sign of the lowly state to which the DI is descending that their assaults on evolutionary ideas have lately been led by the pathetic Casey Luskin. Luskin is a guy who doesn't understand biology, and whose usual line of attack is to whine about credentials—it isn't a good combination. After all, isn't it a bit sad to have a particularly ignorant lawyer and ideologue complaining about scientists' (or science journalists') understanding of science?
Anyway, while taking a break from the futilely but furiously spinning exercise wheel at the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin is now squeaking…
pharyngula | November 13, 2006Stephen Bates of the Guardian gets an advance tour of Ken Ham's new creation science museum. It's amusing and creepy at the same time.
When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.
The Creation Museum — motto: "Prepare to Believe!" — will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its…
pharyngula | November 12, 2006Julia Sweeney has audio samples from her new CD online—and gosh, she seems to have the same opinions of Intelligent Design and Deepak Chopra that I do! It must be something correlated with godlessness…like brains.
(Thanks to Hank Fox)