creationism
pharyngula | August 16, 2006I feel a little bit sorry for Joel Borofsky, Dembski's 'research' assistant. Over at Inoculated Mind, Karl Mogel has excavated Borofsky's tawdry history on them thar IntarWubs. I'd forgive him some of the earlier illiterate, whiny stuff—he started at a very young age, at about the same age as my daughter (who seems to be able to use the internet without sounding like a doofus, though)—but he doesn't seem to have improved with age.
scientificactivist | August 15, 2006Since I've been on the road so much lately, I haven't really had a chance to follow up on some of the more interesting links forwarded to me lately. Each probably deserves its own post... but I'm going to dump them all into this post anyway. Besides, there seems to be a common thread running through all of them.
First up is an interview with climate scientist Ben Santer in Environmental Science & Technology. Santer was a lead author on the president's recent Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and has been a target of anti-environmental groups since he was a lead author on a 1995…
pharyngula | August 15, 2006According to Red State Rabble, the Kansas Citizens for Science group has just turned 7. They're an example to us all—local activism on behalf of science is exactly how we can win this war against ignorance.
pharyngula | August 15, 2006I'd point at England and give a Nelson Muntz laugh if it weren't so depressing. A survey of UK students on evolution is showing large numbers falling for the creationism/ID scam.
In a survey last month, more than 12% questioned preferred creationism — the idea God created us within the past 10,000 years — to any other explanation of how we got here. Another 19% favoured the theory of intelligent design — that some features of living things are due to a supernatural being such as God. This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin — evolution theory rang…
pharyngula | August 15, 2006Although I do think Lawrence Krauss's op-ed in today's NY Times, How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate, is a good, strong piece of work, it doesn't go quite far enough. He's specifically targeting a couple of the Kansas state school board members for ridicule. First he slams Steve Abrams:
The chairman of the school board, Dr. Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, is not merely a strict creationist. He has openly stated that he believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago, although he was quoted in The New York Times this month as saying that his personal faith "doesn't…
pharyngula | August 14, 2006Here's an interesting leak, if true. Someone ("Yellow Rose", or YR) is a mole within a religious group trying to subvert the Wikipedia:
YR gathered intell on a baker's dozen fundamentalist techno-geeks, resembling a cult within a cult, who have become Wikipedians. Lacking a Y chromosome and being thus subordinated to menial church chores, she could not herself get closer than the loneliest of the 13 guys, but the Pentecostal sexual prohibitions at least afforded her the ability to avoid sacrifices espionage agents often have to make. YR emphasizes that their names mean nothing, and their ages…
pharyngula | August 13, 2006
Reading through Good Math, Bad Math, I saw a classic example of creationist foolishness: a fellow who insists that math will vindicate the Bible by proving that π = 3. It reminded me of this old post where a creationist had the thread jumping in her need to prove that the story of Jacob and Laban actually demonstrated a valid form of biblical genetics. So here it is; the original comments are also amusing.
It's not just the US that is infested with creationists; take a look at Canadian Christianity. Like their southern brethren, they seem to be greatly concerned about homosexuals and…
pharyngula | August 13, 2006Joe Carter is making a curiously convoluted argument. He's trying to get at why the majority of the American public does not accept the theory of evolution, and he's made a ten part list of reasons, which boils down to placing the blame on the critics of intelligent design creationism. We're all bad, bad people who are doing a bad, bad job of informing the public and doing a good job of antagonizing them. There is a germ of truth there—I do think we all have to do a better job of educating American citizens—but what makes it a curious and ultimately dishonest argument is that Joe Carter is a…
evolvingthoughts | August 12, 2006PZ Placeholder at Pharyngula is reporting that evangelical churches in Kenya want to shut down the rich human fossil exhibit at the Kenya national museum. He's concerned that a rich heritage of all humanity will be Talibanised (remember the Buddha statues in Afghanistan?). From what I know of African religion, churches there tend to be more conservative than western churches, but I doubt Kenya will accede to their requests. Despite Arap Moi's previous dictatorship there, it's now a democratic nation not based on religion.
More encouraging for me is that the current Australian federal science…
pharyngula | August 12, 2006Hey, Wilkins! I know you were a lucky dog who got to visit Darwin's home a while back, but did you know who else had been there?
Ken Ham.
He seems to have had a different reaction than you did.
It was a book that attacked the foundations of the Christian faith,
with an impact that was felt around the world. I prayed, “Lord, bring down this
‘house’—this ‘house’ of evolution that has permeated cultures around the world.”
Ol' Ken does have a sense of mission, though. I guess mumbling to a nonexistent being isn't effective in accomplishing his ends, even if that nonexistent being is…
pharyngula | August 12, 2006The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America's standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum's fossil collection. This includes some of the most impressive examples of humankind's ancient history, such as multiple australopithecine specimens and Turkana Boy; it's arguably one of the world's foremost collections of hominid fossils. This is where many of Richard Leakey's finds are stored.
Who wants to hide away in back rooms…
pharyngula | August 12, 2006A columnist in the Cincinnati Post, Kevin Eigelbach, has a few words for Answers in Genesis. He got a letter from them asking for money to protect the Bible from the wicked secularists who want people to think critically about its contents.
Ham fears that one day we'll find stickers inside our Bibles that tell us the Bible is fictional. A friend of his found one in a Gideon Bible in Salt Lake City.
The sticker says the Bible contains religious stories regarding the origin of living things. They are theories, not facts, it says.
"This material should be approached with an open mind, and a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 12, 2006By now, you might have heard about the Science article examining the acceptance of evolution in 34 countries. I don't have much else to say that PZ, Shelley, John, and Nick Matzke haven't said already. But I have some additional good news and bad news. The bad news is that we're even more stupid that we thought: 30% of Americans don't know what year the 9/11 attacks were, and five percent can't identify the month and the day of the 9/11 attacks.
The good news is that I was at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory to give a lecture about antibiotic resistance to high school teachers…
pharyngula | August 12, 2006Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of the political divide. However, he takes exception to the idea that a good part of the blame belongs to the religious and to the far right. Instead, he blames the failure on schools run by Democrats.
It goes without saying that those school systems — mostly located in large cities and the rural south…
pharyngula | August 10, 2006We are so screwed.
That's the result of a new survey of people's attitudes toward evolution. Notice where the United States lies: nearly dead last. We beat Turkey.
There was more to this study than just asking whether a person agreed with the statement that "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." They also collected other data on age, gender, education, genetic literacy, religious belief, attitude toward life, attitude toward science and technology, belief in science and technology, reservations about science and technology, and political ideology, and…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006That Moonie creationist with a degree in developmental biology, Jonathan Wells, floated an actual hypothesis a while back: he postulated that the centrioles were little turbines that generated a force with their rotation. I never saw it as much of a support for Intelligent Design; it was an idea about how centrioles function that did not rule out that they arose by evolutionary mechanisms. Wells seemed to think it was significant because he was inspired by an analogy with a human artifact, but la de da…I don't think benzene rings are actually made of snakes, despite Kekule's inspiration.…
evolvingthoughts | August 9, 2006One of the pitfalls of blogging is that you can go for days without finding anything worth saying, and then get a bunch of things worth noting all at once. Today is such a day. So here is a heterogeneous collection of links and topics for your delectation (I love that word, and "heterogeneous"):
1. The AAAS has released a book called The Evolution Dialogues, which addresses the relation between Christian theology and science, with a study guide to come. More power to Christians, I say, if it helps them understand the actual science.
2. Here is a release about the loss of retrocyclin, a…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006Since there was a comment asking about that strange "PYGMIES + DWARFS" exclamation we sometimes get in these parts, I thought I'd bring over all the articles from the old site, just to have them here and explain some of the inside baseball lingo. So here's the collection:
Pinkoski explains the Trinity
Pinkoski: serial offender
If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??
Pinkoski again: How stupid can creationism get?
Pinkoski Part 1: Danged know-it-alls
Why is it called biblical literalism?
"PYGMIES + DWARFS" is simple—it's a wonderfully illogical non sequitur. How…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006
It's been a little while since I last brought up Pinkoski, so maybe you can handle another dollop. When I got his creationism comic book, I also picked up another, titled "Christian SF", which promised to be the first in a series of comics containing science fiction stories with Christian themes.
Oh, it is bad.
Ignoring the Christian content completely, it is a major rip-off. It contains all of two stories, each given only 3 or four pages, which barely set up the premise and then stop cold, telling you to buy Christian SF #2 to find out what happens.
The first is titled "Who is the model…