creationism
pharyngula | August 28, 2006Wilkins pins the blame where it belongs: on on a medieval hierarchical concept that Darwin actively negated. It's a very thorough take-down, not that fans of D. James Kennedy will even notice.
pharyngula | August 28, 2006Pope Ratzi is getting ready to get medieval on the Catholic church—he's meeting this week to prepare to smack down those uppity scientists.
There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.
If this happens, there will be much rejoicing in Seattle. The Discovery Institute hasn't made much headway…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2006I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is what the unDiscovery Institute wants to implant.
So, what's the real story?
There are several ways in which evolution might have made it possible for the sort of racial eugenics that rationalised (not motivated - the German tradition of anti-Semitism goes back as far as Luther, and to the middle…
pharyngula | August 27, 2006
Oh, no. Our work is never going to end. You should take a look at the new Politically Incorrect Guides that will be coming out after Wells'.
At least the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Holocaust looks like it will be very short.
pharyngula | August 27, 2006Over at All-Too-Common Dissent, the conversation has turned to Terry Trainor. You've probably never heard of him; he's one of those garden variety self-infatuated creationists who frequented talk.origins some years ago, using the pseudonym "American Patriot" (which does rather tell you a lot about him right there.) He has now retreated to his own little MSN discussion group, to which I will not link—he really doesn't deserve the attention.
However, all the talk lately about Darwin as the source of all racism, and the comments that noted a peculiar tendency of creationists to think very, very…
pharyngula | August 27, 2006If you aren't yet sick unto nausea with D. James Kennedy, S. Daniel Morgan has a roundup of the recent commentary. And if you haven't had enough, the program is about to be rebroadcast in my area, in the next few minutes.
I'm going to give it a pass.
pharyngula | August 26, 2006Well, I just watched the much-ballyhooed Darwin's Deadly Legacy, with D. James Kennedy. Here are a few quick comments.
The opening scene was perfect. Kennedy walked onto a stage decorated with flasks and beakers and graduated cylinders full of brightly colored water. One had a small flame going under it; the graduated cylinder was bubbling. It was practically an admission that all of the science in the show was going to be fake.
In a show purportedly about science, how desperate do you have to be to give Ann Coulter that much face time? Triple points for irony, though, when Coulter calls…
clock | August 26, 2006I finally got to meet Reed Cartwright in person last night. Now that he is in Raleigh, and Panda's Thumb resides in my old building on campus, I hope I'll see him more often.
Speaking of Panda's Thumb, it is currently, as in "this week", demonstrating the power of the scienceblogging community, dissecting Jonathan Wells' new pamphlet-in-book-form "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design" literally chapter by chapter.
The introduction to the series was written by Reed. Burt Humburg tackles the first chapter. PZ Myers dissected the Chapter 3, first with a draft on…
clock | August 26, 2006As we age, our sleep gets less well consolidated: we take more naps during the day and wake up more oftenduring the night. This happens to other mammals as their age. Now we know that it also happens in Drosophila:
"As humans age, so I'm told, they tend not to sleep as well. There are all sorts of reasons -- aches and pains, worries about work and lifelong accumulations of sins that pretty much rule out the sweet sleep of innocence.
But what about fruit flies? Not as a cause of insomnia. What about the problems fruit flies have sleeping?
Yes, Drosophila melanogaster also suffer sleep…
pharyngula | August 26, 2006Perhaps this is redundant, since Jon Swift has already taken care of it, but how could I possibly resist an article titled "The Death of Science," posted on a "Blogs for Bush" site? It's got wingnuts, it's got irony, it's got dizzyingly inane interpretations of science. It's like everything that's wrong with the Bush approach to science, all in one short article.
What reasons could a blinkered Bush supporter with a petrified brain and no background in science possibly advance to support the claim that science is dead?
A lot of different factors - but the main thing was that science could…
pharyngula | August 26, 2006For more metaphorical execution of the ghastly Mr Wells and his dumb little book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, my article on chapter 3 is now available at the Panda's Thumb, and if you want something fresh, Burt Humburg tackles the internal contradictions and fuzzy thinking of Wells' theology. Not that I would ever imply that there is a theology that isn't fuzzy and contradictory, but Wells seems to have bunged up the job particularly well.
tfk | August 25, 2006I know that true Sciencebloggers don't link to Billy D's blog, but there's just too much amusement to be had there. His latest shows that not only did he clearly fail biology (and math), but literature isn't his thing either. Billy explains:
The Nazi emphasis on proper breeding, racial purity, and weeding out defectives come from taking Darwin’s theory seriously and applying it at the level of society.
Those of you who do remember high school will remember quotes like these from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:
He was at the same time haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners,…
pharyngula | August 25, 2006We have a more complete demolition of the odious Mr Wells wretched book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, on the way at the Panda's Thumb. Different chapters were farmed out to different contributors (as you can see, I got the chapter on idiotic embryology), and others will be appearing periodically in the near future.
Reed Cartwright has put up an introduction to the whole enterprise, and once the whole collection has been placed on the web, he'll tie it all together and organize them in an orderly fashion.
It really is a ghastly, badly done book, and…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006Darwin's Deadly Legacy, the program that Coral Ridge Ministries is airing this weekend that supposedly links Hitler to Darwin, is beginning to look like a public relations catastrophe for the organization. First Francis Collins repudiated the show, then the ADL put the hammer down, and now another of the "featured guests" is distancing himself from the content. Andrew Arensburger wrote to Michael Behe to find out about his contribution, and got this reply:
I'm "associated" with it only in the sense that a clip of my appearance
on a TV show of Dr. Kennedy's from years ago apparently is used in…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006
This article is part of a series of critiques of Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that will be appearing at the Panda's Thumb over the course of the next week or so. Previously, I'd dissected the summary of chapter 3. This is a longer criticism of the whole of the chapter, which is purportedly a critique of evo-devo.
Jonathan Wells is a titular developmental biologist, so you'd expect he'd at least get something right in his chapter on development and evolution in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, but no:…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006The situation on the right wing must be getting bad when you can't even tell Jack Kemp and Phyllis Schlafly apart anymore.
pharyngula | August 23, 2006Douglas Theobald passed along an interesting collection of quotes from that atheist evolutionist, Adolph Hitler. It's particularly interesting the he outlawed atheist and freethought groups in 1933.
It's a long list of quotes, so I'll tuck it below the fold.
"The anti-Semitism of the new movement (Christian Social movement)
was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty
Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."
[Adolph Hitler, Speech,…
pharyngula | August 23, 2006Aaron Kinney makes a good point about claims that the Holocaust was Darwin-inspired:
I would argue that even if Hitler really did use Darwin's theory as inspiration for the mass-murder of Jews, he got it wrong. Throwing millions of Jews into death camps is, in my opinion, artificial selection! It is stacking the decks, not proving the superior adaptability of a breed of human.
Exactly so. There are a lot of mistaken ideas about how an individual demonstrates a natural superiority to other individuals, and foremost among them is this belief that it always involves being "red in tooth and claw…
pharyngula | August 23, 2006George Coyne, the Vatican astronomer, has been sacked. Red State Rabble and John Wilkins speak out on it.
They cite one source condescendingly claiming that Coyne "appointed himself an expert in evolutionary biology," while Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute (speaking of unqualified gits appointing themselves the status of 'expert') calls Coyne an "evangelizing Darwinist," and blames his fall on his radical theology. It seems to me that Coyne was actually a highly qualified scientist who was well-informed about the general principles of science, and who informed the Vatican about the…