creationism
pharyngula | September 13, 2006The Pope speaks, John Wilkins replies. Wilkins is sufficient, but I just had to comment on one silly thing the pope said about the consequences of evolution.
Man, "would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless," said the Pope.
This is terrible news. Forget evolution; I am the chance result of one out of trillions of my father's sperm meeting one out of hundreds of thousands of my mother's ova. And, oh no, the allelic content of each of those gametes was the result of chance molecular events in meiosis. And each of those gametes…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2006
Previous posts in this thread: 1, 2, and 3
With this model of the bounded rationality of anti-science in mind, what lessons can we draw from it for public policy and education?
Assuming that the model is a good first approximation of why people choose to believe creationist and other anti-science belief sets, several implications might affect our mode of public education and discourse.
The first is that it is highly unlikely that we can argue creationists et al. out of their belief sets by merely presenting better information about science. Since they lack the epistemic values that…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution".
Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...?
For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this seems very Controlish. The pope is worried about KAOS. They had a Cone of Silence conversation, which pretty well everyone in the world overheard, and while I'm very pleased that the Catholic Church isn't about to go ID on our asses, we might perhaps think a little bit about this.
In a homily in…
clock | September 12, 2006Why are religious people religious, in two parts: Why do religious wingnuts think the way they do? Part I and Why do religious wingnuts think the way they do? Part II
Why are creationists creationists, in three parts: Why are creationists creationist?, Why are creationists creationist? 2 - conceptual spaces and Why are creationists creationist? 3: compartments and coherence.
Why conservatives take conservative jobs and suck if sucked into liberal professions, in two parts: It takes talent to make good schlock TV and Conservatives in the classroom
pharyngula | September 12, 2006Pam Spaulding reports that Ken Ham's clown palace of a 'museum' will be opening in April. I am so tempted to make a road trip this summer to see it and mock it…but no, I don't really want to put one penny in his coffers. I did think this was funny, though:
According to Ham, the museum is already receiving worldwide attention. "The international press are getting very, very interested in this," he says, "and it's going to be not just a national event here in America. It's going to be an international event when it opens in April 2007."
I'm sure it is getting lots of international attention.…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006
What happens when rational coherence is not assumed, in the development of creationist views?
No child is able to make their epistemic set maximally coherent, and so it is likely that they will acquire a number of mutually inconsistent epistemic values and principles. If your parent tells you to try and see if things work out on the one hand, and that you need not do anything but believe the pastor or Bible on the other, this does not register for most young children as a conflict.
Young learners are natively active explorers and experimenters to some degree, but this doesn't immediately…
pharyngula | September 11, 2006Look, everyone! The Lehigh University biology department is hiring! I wonder if they're searching for a "design theorist" to complement their eminent Professor Behe…
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Evolutionary Biology
The Department of Biological Sciences seeks candidates with outstanding research that employs modern analytical methods in the study of fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process. Areas of specialization may include field and/or laboratory studies on molecular aspects of population genetics, molecular mechanisms of phenotypic expression, cell division, asexual or sexual development,…
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2006After reading PZ's post and the follow-up about Ken Miller's statements regarding atheism, I was just going to leave the subject alone. I usually find the arguments predictable, boring; there's always a lot of talking past each other. But for some reason, this particular argument over Ken Miller's remarks intrigues me. So, foolishly, I'm going to dive in. (I'm partially responding to particular claims by both sides, and also adding a few points of my own.) Here goes nuthin':
1) If you believe in a God who intervenes in history, then evolution is a theological challenge to that belief.…
pharyngula | September 11, 2006Surely you can't be tired of dissecting Ken Miller yet, can you? Perhaps you're tired of me going over it, though. In that case, Jon Voisey discusses his talk and the Q & A afterwards (don't worry, he's less vicious than I am, despite being an angry astronomer), and Mark Perakh points us to Amiel Rossow's review of Finding Darwin's God. Personally, I find it a strange book: pages 1-164 are excellent, among the best and plainest and most direct critiques of Intelligent Design creationism you'll find; pages 165-292, eh, not so much. It's like mild-mannered, sensible Dr Miller wrote the…
pharyngula | September 10, 2006Oh, no. I've got to add another book to my growing stack: Frederick Crews' Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you knew how many books are piling up on that shelf…
Here's a piece of Jerry Coyne's review:
The quality of Crewss prose is particularly evident in his two chapters on evolution versus creationism. In the first, he takes on creationists in their new guise as intelligent-design advocates, chastising them for pushing not only bad science, but contorted faith:
Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities one a glutton for praise and a…
pharyngula | September 10, 2006Jack Krebs has his summary of the KU talk by Ken Miller, and I've also had a bit of a private conversation with Miller in email. I'm not going to post it, but I will summarize my ideas after getting more of the story.
Miller is not trying to redirect creationists to fight atheists, and he's very clear that all of us need to stand together in our opposition to bad science (I also agree the religious and the non-religious should be united on this issue.) Krebs mentions that this was a new section of his talk, so I suspect this is one where he'll be reworking some of the wording. I hope.…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…
pharyngula | September 9, 2006I've now listened to a recording of Miller's talk in Kansas. I like it even less.
Miller is an excellent speaker. He's persuasive, he's clear, he knows his science well, and he was an impressive participant in the conflict at Dover…and he was on the correct side. Here's the problem: he's wrong now.
What he does is an insightful and lucid analysis of the problems with creationism, and then tries to wrap it up by identifying the source of the problem. Unfortunately, he places the blame in the laps of atheists, which is simply absurd. We've got fundamentalists straining to insert religious…
pharyngula | September 9, 2006Red State Rabble has an account of Ken Miller's talk at the University of Kansas.
"Creationists," biologist Ken Miller, told a large, receptive audience at the University of Kansas last night, "are shooting at the wrong target."
Showing a slide of the cover art of "The Lie," an anti-evolution tract by Ken Ham, that prominently features a serpent tempting us with a poisoned apple labeled evolution, Miller said creationists mistakenly take aim at Darwin's theory because they believe science to be anti-religious.
Evolution isn't anti-religious, said Miller. Rather, it's the non-scientific…
tfk | September 8, 2006Akron's Beacon Journal explains how the attacks on science by creationists are expanding to climate change and stem cells.
There's a lot that has to be unpacked about that, but one thing stands out: evolution, climate change and stem cells are not scientifically controversial. All exist, and are well-documented. Scientists discuss the details, but the basic understanding is consistent.
To mark these as "controversial issues" in a science class is to blur the distinction between scientific controversy and social controversy. The causes of the hump-shaped relationship between productivity…
stcynic | September 8, 2006Reasons to Believe, an old earth creationist group headed by astronomer Hugh Ross, is trying hard to sell their new book, Creation As Science: A Testable Approach to End the Evolution/Creation Wars. They issued a press release yesterday about the book, which included some false claims, some good analysis of why ID isn't taken seriously by scientists, and little detail on this new model they've been talking about for years. First, the false claims:
"The 1981 Supreme Court ruling guarantees the place of any scientifically viable model in public education regardless of its theological…
pharyngula | September 7, 2006There's no official declaration of the Pope's recent consult on evolution, but news is leaking out…and the good news is that Intelligent Design is not going to have a place at the table, and didn't figure in the discussions at all. Catholic News has one source:
A participant at the Pope's closed door symposium on creation and evolution, Jesuit Fr Joseph Fessio, has denied speculation about a change in the Church's teaching on evolution, saying nothing presented at the meeting broke new ground and that American debates on Intelligent Design did not feature in discussions.
Declan Butler, in…
mikethemadbiologist | September 6, 2006A very good blogger I stumbled upon, olvlzl, has two great posts about the sorry state of American journalism. From the first post, an attack on the artifice of 'balance':
The most important political use of this "balance" comes in the context of news reporting and the parasitic limpets attached to it, opinion "journalism". In that context something called balance has replaced the reporting of facts*. It used to be that a reporter was required to get two independent sources to verify the truth of what their primary source had said. Now, instead, they just have to get a second opinion and…
tfk | September 6, 2006The Panda's Thumb issues an Ohio Call to Action:
Please write the Board of Ed TODAY. Politely urge them to hold a vote of the entire Board –at their Tuesday Sept 12 meeting – establishing that additional language is NOT needed to replace the creationist nonsense removed at the Feb 06 mtg.
The Board should devote their energy to closing the achievement gap, solving the school funding crisis, and other genuine issues. They should resist religious extremists pressuring them to corrupt science education and co-opt the classroom for religious conversion.
Politely insist they stand up for freedom…