creationism
pharyngula | August 9, 2006
John Price sent me some scans from another Pinkoski masterpiece, titled Discovered: The True! Genesis Story of Creation. A Presentation of Ron Wyatt's Material. It's clear that Pinkoski has completely swallowed all of Ron Wyatt's pseudo-archaeological hokum—Wyatt was an outrageous fraud, and even devout Christians and creationists back away from him.
We discover that Pinkoski is a repeat offender: here he's using his silly "PYGMIES + DWARFS" argument again. He seems obsessed with this idea that because the bible mentions giants, any variation in human size is confirmation of biblical…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006
Can you stomach a little more Jim Pinkoski? He's ranting in the comments most amusingly.
You guys LIE about Java man, you LIE about Lucy, you LIE about the horse ancestary chart, you LIE about fetuses mimicking evolution stages, you LIE about upright trees sticking through different geology layers, you LIE when you ignore the arguments about the earth's magnetic field, you LIE when you respond to the rotation of the moon orbiting the earth -- SO WHY SHOULD I EVER CONCLUDE THAT ANY OF YOU ARE ACTUALLY "RIGHT" ABOUT ANYTHING? All I see is repeated pathological LYING done by evolutionists in…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006
I've been having some fun with a bizarrely didactic creationist comic book by one Jim Pinkoski that purports to explain all the flaws in evolutionary biology. What it really is is the most astounding collection of bad creationist arguments I've ever seen gathered in one place. I've been trying to slog through rebuttals, but unfortunately, it's like every word and phrase is so far off kilter that it's going to take me forever to get through it. One putative "problem" that I've already dealt with is that we only use 10% of our brains, and so scientists are stupid and untrustworthy, but here'…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006
I promised to show you some more of Pinkoski's A Creationist's View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution, so here we go.
Pinkoski's book is actually reasonably representative of the majority opinion held by creationists; the arguments in this book aren't what you see openly presented by most of the Intelligent Design creationists, but do reflect what you'll see in most of your small town church meetings and your big city mega-church revivals. Informed Christians are, of course, a bit embarrassed by the foolishness and don't endorse this stuff, but unfortunately the kind of nonsense…
pharyngula | August 9, 2006
How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!
Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah's Ark, and announces that 'THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A "MYTH"…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!' It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?
The fossil remains of numerous dinosaurs have been found with their heads and necks arched upwards, as if in their death throes they were…
pharyngula | August 8, 2006Zeno has this quote from an acolyte of D. James Kennedy, Dr. Paul Jehle, and I have to shake my head in disbelief.
I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian....
I asked a question to my calculus professor: "What makes this course distinctly Christian?" He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before...
He said, "Okay, I'm a Christian you're a Christian."
I said, "That's not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular…
pharyngula | August 7, 2006Collins has another published interview in Salon. It's sad, actually—in every new interview, he says pretty much the same thing, but he digs himself in a little deeper. I ordered his book the other day, and now I'm beginning to regret it; it's beginning to sound like trite Christian apologetics with no depth, no self-reflection, no insight…just compound anecdotes intended to rationalize a conclusion he has arrived at with no evidence. It's distressingly anti-scientific.
For instance, we get an expansion of his hiking anecdote:
You also write about a seminal experience you had a little later…
pharyngula | August 6, 2006As a public service, I provide here an extremely rigorous and intense test of your irony meters. Please set your resistance values to at least one gigOhm, make sure all shielding is in place, and please have a fire extinguisher and first aid kit handy. If you are using some cheap off-brand meter, do not click to read anything below the fold. You have been warned, and I will not be liable for any mishaps.
Harun Yahya has a new book…or more likely, it seems, yet another rehash of the same old stuff. This one, though, is streaming straight from Bizarro World.
Imagine yourself meeting a person…
pharyngula | August 6, 2006I've visited Boulder, Colorado a few times—it's a wonderful place, and at least so far it's got Gary—but usually when I hear about the state it's all about lunatics like Dobson and Coors and about megachurches and our air war for Jesus, and now…some overendowed Christian charity based in Colorado plunks ONE MILLION DOLLARS into Ken Ham's collection plate, donating all that money to his fake museum.
One million dollars to fund disinformation and fraud, and this from a charitable institution that claims their "vision is to glorify Jesus Christ by inspiring and enabling personal commitment of…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2006...check out Ed Brayton's post. The poor attention span version: ID isn't serious science because it's 'founders' don't have a scientific agenda, but a cultural one. A must read.
pharyngula | August 4, 2006Oh, great. Nelson is at it again. You know the DI is sweating bullets when Paul Nelson emerges to state his lugubrious 'truths', make his unfulfilled promises, and start citing mysterious, unnamed 'senior scientists' with profound insights into Intelligent Design's promising destiny. He's kind of the Thomas Friedman of the Discovery Institute, and just as trustworthy.
He once again argues that "legal, legislative, or public policy action" aren't "meaningful or relevant"—I agree—but it's interesting how they trot out this same sour grapes line every time they lose, and when they win, it…
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2006One of the lesser known microbiology facts is that the pathogen Shigella is actually E. coli. From the archives, here's an explanation (with a little modification).
As I mentioned in a previous post, Orac has two very good posts on MDs and creationism. In one of the posts, he links to a creationist medical student who writes the following:
Has anyone ever documented a plateful of Strep pneumo mutating into E coli? Or even into Strep pyogenes? I didn't think so. They mutate, and they exchange information. But they remain separate species, with their own unique characteristics. Staph aureus…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2006Science & Theology News has an article on "evolutionism" that is replete with historical errors and other misdemeanors. But it indicates some nuances of the evolutionary biological debates are starting to have some impact.
The author, Gennaro Auletta, is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. One may applaud his attempt to come to terms with biology, but he repeats many of the usual theological canards about evolution. Let's have a look at his article, shall we?
The distinction between evolution and evolutionism is of extreme relevance. Michael Ruse's…
pharyngula | August 3, 2006Wow. As reported at the Panda's Thumb, the DI is puffing up and getting pissy about a misattribution of a quote to one of their own. How dare we 'Darwinists' promote such blatant falsehoods!
Today there is another urban myth building up a head of steam, and being helped along by Darwinists, about Discovery Fellow Paul Nelson. Gaurdian reporter Karen Armstrong reports: 'Great shakings and darkness are descending on Planet Earth,' says the ID philosopher Paul Nelson, 'but they will be overshadowed by even more amazing displays of God's power and light.' And yet this is pure rubbish because…
pharyngula | August 2, 2006It feels good to see the IDist crackpots beaten back a little bit in their bid to control the Kansas school board, and I think it is necessary to keep up the pressure and prevent them from getting a better grip on public school education. However, Paul Nelson actually has a point with his little parable. It's not the point he thinks he's making, but it's important to keep in mind anyway, and I'm going to dash some cold water on any sense of triumphalism on the pro-science side.
Once upon a time, there were a whole bunch of people who thought that what really mattered in thinking hard about…
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2006It looks like supporters of reason won out over sectarian ideologues in Kansas. Josh at Thoughts from Kansas writes:
The Board is back in moderate hands no matter what. The night is, on balance, a victory. It'd be nice to further marginalize the extremists by winning the remaining races in November, but we've got a majority that will implement the science standards recommended by the scientists, educators and parents of the science standards committee. The Board can focus on bigger issues. They can dig into ways to address the special challenges of rural districts, and to find solutions to…
pharyngula | August 2, 2006It wasn't a clean sweep that threw all the rascals out, but the Kansas school board election did return a little more balance and helped out the pro-science side. Thoughts from Kansas summarizes the results:
The Board is back in moderate hands no matter what. The night is, on balance, a victory. It'd be nice to further marginalize the extremists by winning the remaining races in November, but we've got a majority that will implement the science standards recommended by the scientists, educators and parents of the science standards committee. The Board can focus on bigger issues. They can…
clock | August 1, 2006The eyes of the nation today are (or should be) on Kansas elections, as many Creationists on the school board are facing tough reality-based challengers. If you are in Kansas - go and vote. If you want to know how it all goes, check what Josh and Pat report during the day.
Update: Science won!
pharyngula | August 1, 2006The daughter is flying away to lovely Paducah, Kentucky today (another drive to the airport for me, bleh), so I was thinking of suggesting that she visit Ken Ham's brand-new creationist museum for me, as a kind of mole…darn it, though, Paducah's almost as far out in the boonies as Morris, and it's nowhere near the 'museum,' which is up somewhere near Cincinnati, and still has a year to go before it opens…so no super-secret evilutionist missions for Skatje this time, other than to temporarily increase the average IQ of the state for a little while.
I do have to say that that article ends on a…
pharyngula | August 1, 2006Kansans, remember to get out and vote today—a low turnout is expected for the primary election for the Kansas school board, and you really want to dump Connie Morris, right?
Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.
"It's a nice bedtime story," she said. "Science doesn't back it up."
Evolution is the only story backed up by science. You don't really want a school board run by ninnies who don't know that, do…