creationism
tfk | July 12, 2011Long-time readers know that, last April and May, I invested a decent amount of time in tearing apart a book by conservative punditress S. E. Cupp. Cupp, a self-proclaimed atheist, had written a book defending the religious right, and she titled it Losing Our Religion: The Media's Attack on Christianity.
Why, you may be asking, would an avowed atheist describe fundamentalism as "our religion"? I don't know. But she does, consistently adopting the fringiest, least atheist-friendly forms of Christianity as if they were the only form Christianity could take. Thus, she mocked Chris Matthews's…
tfk | July 12, 2011
It was a hard job, but someone had to do it. A few days ago, I sat down and watched a 15 minute video of Miss USA pageant contestants as they pondered the question: Should evolution be taught in schools?
Then I watched it again. And again. Until my eardrums bled I had a complete and accurate transcript.
So that you don't have to do endure the same agony, I present the transcript below, as a service to the community, with timecodes relative to the video above. Enjoy. You can find the names and biographies of each state's contestant at the Miss USA site.
"Should evolution be taught in…
pharyngula | July 10, 2011Creationists are so far from being scientists that I'm frequently astounded at just how unaware they are — surely, if you're being that crazy, you've got to realize that what you're doing is nothing like what scientists do, right? I guess when you're that nuts you don't even know it.
The Intelligent Design creationists have been having a secret meeting in Italy, where they claim to be challenging Darwinian orthodoxies. Well, semi-secret: they brought in David Berlinski's daughter to pretend to be a "journalist" and throw gentle little softballs in youtube interviews, but many of the attendees…
pharyngula | July 10, 2011At least, that seems to be the principle in play in Louisiana.
It's not quite right, though. Answers in Genesis teaches that dinosaurs were on the boat. Like that makes the story any less insane.
tfk | July 6, 2011Thanks to everyone for their help with the Miss USA survey. There were 713 responses, which should give me what I need. I'll post the results shortly. I closed the survey and have started crunching numbers.
There was a question raised about the question wording, so I changed how the questions were introduced about halfway through. It was a modest change in the wording, clarifying that I wanted respondents to assess the contestants' answers in terms of their objective merits, not just whether they answered the question asked. I didn't think it was a big impact, but I was curious whether…
pharyngula | July 6, 2011Oh, man, Casey Luskin is such an embarrassing spokesperson for the intelligent design creationists — I hope they keep him employed forever. His latest tirade against me is a cacophany of inanity. His primary point is that creationists like Jonathan MacLatchie have forced me to make concessions to creationism when I say that there are differences between vertebrate embryos. It is no concession to anything other than reality: the differences have been known for a long time. My first laboratory experiences as a graduate student were doing work on frog embryos with Phil Grant at the University of…
pharyngula | July 6, 2011Phil Senter has published the most deviously underhanded, sneaky, subtle undermining of the creationist position I've ever seen, and I applaud him for it. What he did was to take them seriously, something I could never do, and treat their various publications that ape the form of the scientific literature as if they actually were real science papers, and apply their methods consistently to an analysis of taxonomy. So on the one hand, it's bizarre and disturbing to see the like of Ken Ham, Jerry Bergman, and Henry Morris get actual scientific citations, but on the other hand, seeing their…
pharyngula | July 5, 2011If you're really interested, that Cretinist Jerry Bergman is going to be on some weird "Ask the Expert" show at Creation Conversations, a site I'm going to have to browse more often because it is one of the lamest creationist web sites I've seen yet — it's all young earth creationism presented with the goofiest arguments, like that vestigial snake limbs disprove evolution.
One warning: in order to access everything on the site, they insist that you fill out a little questionnaire with your date of birth, home town, etc., and one of the questions is "Who created the world?" You don't get to…
pharyngula | July 2, 2011New and digitally remastered with enhanced sound! Here's the Bergman/Myers debate again, all in one single file for your convenience in being driven insane by the futility of arguing with that loon.
tfk | June 29, 2011Last night, several folks on twitter expressed similar concerns about the wording of the survey I created and blogged about a couple days ago. Some folks taking the survey were confused about whether I wanted respondents to rate the answers by whether or not they answered the question, or by how well the ideas expressed by the contestants matched the raters' own beliefs (even if they didn't quite answer the question).
I wanted the latter, and have updated the instructions to clarify. If you took the survey before, and if this clarification changes how you would have answered, please…
pharyngula | June 29, 2011The Pew Foundation has surveyed evangelical Christians on a variety of topics, and here's an interesting result: only 3% accept evolution. And it's worse than that, since that 3% seems to be just in the bounds of noise and the frequency of individuals who essentially reject the basics of Christianity.
To put the 3% figure in perspective, it is the same as the percentage of evangelicals who answered that it is not "essential to follow the teachings of Christ in one's personal and family life": pretty much the defining feature of evangelical Christianity. Furthermore, the 3% figure for support…
tfk | June 29, 2011Because Nobel laureate Werner Arber is addressing evolution at the Landau meeting of Nobel laureates, I thought I'd repost this piece from January 21, 2009, which was first posted from the Texas Board of Education meeting room. Enjoy.
In November, the Texas Board of Education met to consider their new science standards. As I've mentioned a major point of contention is a reference in the current standards to "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific explanations, a concept only ever applied to evolution, and without any clear explanation of what it means.
In the course of 6 hours of…
pharyngula | June 29, 2011Should math be taught in the schools?
(Obviously inspired by the Miss USA question.)
pharyngula | June 29, 2011Kent Hovind has been transferred to a new prison, Florence Admax.
The United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) is a supermax prison for men that is located in unincorporated Fremont County, Colorado, United States, south of Florence. It is unofficially known as ADX Florence, Florence ADMAX, Supermax, or The Alcatraz of the Rockies. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. ADX, a part of the Florence Federal Correctional Complex (FCC), houses the prisoners who are deemed the most dangerous and in need of the…
pharyngula | June 28, 2011That was quick. Here's the video of that ancient debate. It's in five parts because that was the way it was organized on the DVD.
pharyngula | June 28, 2011Someone, not yet identified, paid $201,000 for that piece of crap. It wasn't the Talk Origins Archive Foundation, either; they had nowhere near that sum to spend, nor would it have been worthwhile to cough up that much cash.
I'm hoping some creationist organization just got fleeced.
pharyngula | June 28, 2011I've received a suggestion that one potential source of a lot of the recent nonsensical creationist literature-quoting has a plausible source: Jerry Bergman. That guy is completely nuts, as I learned in a debate a while back; he's also pretentious while not knowing much, and he's painfully prolific, publishing lots in fringey creationist pseudo-journals.
So now I have a technical question. I have a DVD copy of that wretched debate, and I've even gone so far as to rip it, and now have five MP4 files sitting on my computer (I also have a folder of the raw ripped files, a bunch of .bup, .ifo, .…
pharyngula | June 28, 2011I tell other scientists all the time that their work is being appropriated by creationists who barely understand it, and that it is getting distorted to support bogus pseudoscience. Whenever you see a creationist quote a genuine science paper, you can pretty much trust that it is going to be mangled beyond recognition.
For instance, Jonathan MacLatchie raised a peculiar collection of questions to grill me with; here's one of them.
9) If, as is often claimed by Darwinists, the pharyngeal pouches and ridges are indeed accurately thought of as vestigial gill slits (thus demonstrating our shared…
tfk | June 28, 2011Prompted by some questions on twitter and elsewhere, I'm working on some research based on the much-discussed Miss USA answers to a question about evolution.
I'd like your help with that research. I need to come up with a consistent rating of the contestants' answers, and I created a survey that you can use help.
Please take the survey, and share it with others. I'd prefer to have science-friendly and science literate people take the survey, but don't be shy about sharing the answers more widely.
Thanks!
