creationism
mikethemadbiologist | June 21, 2006I have to admit that creationists are a creative bunch, if not accurate. From the files of the Mad Biologist comes this post about a creationist explanation of antibiotic resistance. It's pretty remarkable. And I hope nobody tells the Coultergeist about this argument... (originally published April 18, 2005).
Google is an amazing thing (so is Gizoogle). I typed in "evangelical" and "antibiotic" and found a "creationist explanation" of the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. What strikes me is the selective use of facts to support a preconceived notion. While creationists do…
pharyngula | June 21, 2006Hank Fox reports that a pair of administrators who wasted the school's time and money on Intelligent Design creationism are losing their jobs:
The Wilkes-Barre, Penn., Times-Leader reports that the Dover school board has "decided not to guarantee contract renewals for two top administrators who helped implement an intelligent-design policy that a federal judge overturned last year."
"The Dover Area School Board voted Monday to open the jobs of Superintendent Richard Nilsen and Assistant Superintendent Michael Baksa to other applicants. Nilsen's contract expires June 30, 2007, and Baksa's…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2006Courtesy of Panda's Thumb, a link to this wonderful short OpEd: The York Daily Record - Coulter mangles Dover case, by Mike Argento. It includes many beautiful zingers about the mad blonde, but the best is this:
... that brings us to the big irony of Coulter's work.
Her vitriol and ignorance shows contempt for science and for the scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and whatever it is that is afflicting Ann Coulter.
I wish I had said that...
pharyngula | June 20, 2006DaveScot is one of those genuinely deranged ID supporters, and I don't like giving him any attention…but Richard Hughes just sent me a note mentioning this long defensive thread he has started at UncommonDescent, and he's just done something so darned funny and stupid I can't resist.
He's arguing about gravity. At one point, he claims that "By the way, gravity is the strongest force in nature." As you might guess, he's jumped on for that, and so he rushes off to find some supporting evidence…and gets it, he says, from John G. Cramer, professor of physics. Here's the part he quotes:
Curiously…
pharyngula | June 20, 2006A strange thing, after I clarified my Coulter challenge and requested that her fans get specific and tell me what they supported and why in her book…the e-mail from them all dried up. Pffft. Gone.
Maybe they just got bored with me, but it's sad that no one has even tried to suggest a single good paragraph in all of Godlessssss. It's as if they're willing to play mindless cheerleader, but actually committing to thinking and supporting specifically a single thing she says…well, that's just not going to happen.
pharyngula | June 20, 2006I need some suggestions, so I'm asking for a little tactical brainstorming in the comments. This afternoon, August Berkshire mentioned that there would be an Intelligent Design advocate on KKMS Christian talk radio in the Twin Cities, and that they'd be interviewing a Dr. Don Bierle. I'd never heard of the guy, so I did a little digging; you can hear him at a talk at the MacLaurin Institute, for instance. His schtick is that he actually has a Ph.D. in biology from a credible school, although he doesn't seem to have ever actually done any biology, and is just another minister as near as I can…
pharyngula | June 19, 2006
They've elected a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. You have to look at her biography to see why I'm even mentioning a new religious leader:
As a scientist and an Episcopalian, I cherish the prayer that follows a baptism, that the newly baptized may receive "the gift of joy and wonder in all God's works." I spent the early years of my adulthood as an oceanographer, studying squid and octopuses, including their evolutionary relationships. I have always found that God's creation is "strange and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139). ...
The vast preponderance of scientific evidence,…
pharyngula | June 19, 2006Responses to my challenge at the end of this article are trickling in, but so far, none of them are filling the bill. Let me explain what is not an appropriate reply:
Cackling that Coulter must be right because she's got "liberal panties in a twist" is not cogent.
Telling me that the "WHOLE BOOK PROVES LIBERALS ARE THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICA" is not cogent.
Promising to pray for me, or assuring me that I will burn in hell, is not cogent.
Explicit details about how Ann Coulter is sexier than "fat harry hippie jew girls" is not cogent.
Here's the simple summary. Ann Coulter has written this…
mikethemadbiologist | June 18, 2006In what I think is the only way to
cope with the Blond Banshee (aka the Coultergeist), PZ writes (italics mine):
Like I said, I'm not going to take this trip apart sentence by sentence, even though I could, given enough time and interest. I will suggest instead that if anyone reading this thinks some particular paragraph anywhere in chapters 8-11 is at all competent or accurate in its description of science, send it to me. I couldn't find one. That's where the obligation lies: show me one supportable claim in Coulter's farrago of lies and misleading statements and out-of-context quotes, and…
pharyngula | June 18, 2006There are some great lines in Coulter's Godless—great lines in the sense that you can scarcely believe someone was so stupid that they'd say them. Here's one for the ladies and the life scientists here at scienceblogs.
Their grandiose self-conceptions to the contrary, the cult [the "evolution cult"] members are rarely scientists at all.
They aren't scientists? Get ready for it: here's the problem with those darned people who study evolution. They're biologists and women.
They're almost always biologists—the "science" with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT "scientist" who…
pharyngula | June 18, 2006I've now read all of the science-related (that's applying the term "related" very generously) stuff in Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book, Godless, and it's a bit overwhelming. This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate another book, ten times longer than Coulter's, all merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So I'm stumped. I'm not interested in writing such a lengthy rebuttal, and I'm sure this is…
stcynic | June 18, 2006Following up on the latest Noah's Ark story, I notice that Howse refers to Bob Cornuke as "Dr". But his bio at the BASE Institute webpage mentions nothing about a doctorate, only his background as a police officer. Is this yet another example of a creationist faking a credential, or perhaps using an honorary degree from some two-bit bible college to call himself Dr? Does anyone know?
Update: Question answered at Wikipedia. His PhD is from Louisiana Baptist University, an unaccredited Christian diploma mill that offers credit for "life experience" and even just for reading a Chuck Missler book…
mikethemadbiologist | June 17, 2006I go for a walk, and watch some soccer, only to find out that Thursday, the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee passed 'standards' that force students to "summarize ways that scientists use data from a variety of sources to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." I have to hand it to the creationists: pushing this during the summer, when university faculties are off doing science, is probably the right time to do something like this. Too bad it will make the kids of South Carolina ignorant and stupid. Teaching the basics of evolutionary biology is hard…
stcynic | June 17, 2006The folks at Worldview Weekend are busily promoting the latest discovery of Noah's Ark. I say latest because, frankly, the Ark seems to be discovered every few years and yet people keep searching for it. Ron Wyatt claimed to have found it at Durupinar, in Eastern Turkey near Mt. Ararat, but that claim is rejected even by young earth creationist scientists who've visited the site (Wyatt is a first class con artist, or was until he died). Ark searchers have claimed to locate it in Turkey itself, on Mt. Ararat, near Mt. Ararat, in several mountain ranges in Iran and in what was once Urartu. Yet…
pharyngula | June 16, 2006He must be one of those very abstract types who never looks at data, doesn't understand statistics, and has never heard of the word "normalized." In a post that is a microcosmic analog of the whole Intelligent Design paradigm, Dembski completely bungles an analysis of Google searches to conclude that "international interest in ID is growing." Andrea Bottaro shows that he screwed up thoroughly, and the conclusion is actually the reverse.
I wonder if Dembski will acknowledge the correction, and admit that international interest in ID is negligible or declining? Or will his mistake mysteriously…
pharyngula | June 15, 2006Maybe I was too hard on Harun Yahya. As Wesley writes, plagiarism and theft are common practices among creationists—it's even encouraged.
Authors such as George Macready Price and Henry M. Morris assembled many of the arguments together in various books. And, as I said, nobody cares if you steal it. In fact, others will be confused if you provide complete references and trace back claims to sources. That just isn't done as a matter of course in this field, and, of course, it pays to pick up the social gestalt of your new career.
When among knaves and fools, do as they do.
pharyngula | June 15, 2006Here's a gorgeous educational site, The Virtual Fossil Museum. It has a nicely organized set of fossil galleries, all intended for use by the education community, and all appropriately credited. This is the way it is supposed to be done.
Unfortunately, that's not the way creationists do it. Here's a case of creationists caught red-handed in blatant theft.
The webmaster for the Fossil Museum site just wrote to me with an interesting discovery: here's another site, called Living Fossils, which also has many beautiful pictures. Unfortunately, at least 50 and maybe many more of those pictures…
pharyngula | June 14, 2006A reader (who will be nameless, unless he wants to confess in the comments) sent me a chunk of Coulter's book, Godless. It's worse than I feared. It contains the usual stock creationist crap presented at a rapid pace, full of the usual bald assertions of outright lies, intentional misinterpretations, and lots and lots of quote mining. Seriously, it looks like every paragraph contains multiple falsehoods or screwy manglings of science.
She claims Darwin's theory is "one step above Scientology in scientific rigor", that it is a "tautology", that there is "no proof in the scientist's laboratory…
pharyngula | June 14, 2006Lots of people have been telling me to ignore Ann Coulter: that she says outrageous things to get attention, that addressing her antics is exactly what she wants, that the best thing to do is to starve her of the publicity. I sympathize, I really do. It's giving her and her kind far too much credit.
However, I've been hearing the same argument applied to creationists for about 25 years. "Ignore them and they'll go away," or "Serious scientists don't pay attention to the lunatic fringe," they say. We tend our little gardens, and we don't worry about what the crackpot next door is growing in…