creationism
pharyngula | May 5, 2006This is a war between two worldviews, which Skip explains nicely. Here's the short summary.
Wisdom
Ignorance
Biologists love boobies, beavers, and the weenus!
Creationists fear boobies, beavers, and the weenus.
Which side would you rather be on?
pharyngula | May 5, 2006Uh-oh. Those Catholic creationists had better watch out: the Vatican thinks they're pagans.
Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because…
pharyngula | May 4, 2006Noooooo! I'm a proud graduate of the University of Oregon, and I think Eugene is a wonderful place…and now I learn that damned dumb creationists were drooling stupidly in the student union. Three creationists lectured on their nonsense there.
There was Tom Alderman.
There is "a mountain of evidence that the universe was designed," he said.
"Design has been proven to an extreme probability," he said.
No, there is no evidence for design, let alone "proof" of design—even the fact that he is talking about proof shows that he knows nothing about how science works.
At least he nakedly revels in…
pharyngula | May 4, 2006The following missive was slipped over my transom in the dead of night. It reveals a dark secret, a clandestine society that has been working for years to hide their origins and true purpose. It begins with a murder and wends its way through a series of codes that are, as it turns out, reducible and simple, to reach a shocking conclusion.
I know who the author is, but I'm not telling. I will say that it is not Dan Brown (fortunately!).
The "I.D." Code:
An Evolutionary Fantasy
I.
The sounds came in the middle of the night. At first I thought it was a drunken hotel
guest stumbling in the…
pharyngula | May 3, 2006Speaking of too incredibly stupid to be believed, here's a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of the fine state of South Carolina.
"I think everything ought to be taught ... and let people decide for themselves. There is no science to support trans-species changes, in other words, a monkey becoming a man," the Republican said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press.
"A bunch of amoebas didn't get together and design all this," Jordan said, referring to the human body. "We'd be operating on people ... looking at their hearts, their liver and their lungs, I'd tell the techs, 'Can you…
pharyngula | May 3, 2006Not all my mail is from cranks and ravers; I actually get some nice and friendly and interesting mail, too. Like this one, from Hank Alme, who asks a good question:
To what extent does intellectual honesty require me to also read guys like Behe and Dembski, and to understand their arguments?
That's an easy one: intellectual honesty doesn't require that you read any of their crap. One of their great successes is that they've managed to convince many people that it's only fair to read their books, often reading them instead of good science. It's not true! You are far better off reading a solid…
pharyngula | May 1, 2006Lisa Jardine is a historian who clearly understands how science works:
The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative—they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.
Read the rest. She ties together the ideals of how science should be carried out with a story from Pepys and an unscrupulous sea captain and modern day creationists—excellent stuff!
razib | April 30, 2006Here is a long article titled Catholicism and Evolution which covers a lot of ground and seems pretty accurate. The interesting thing though is that this is published at Islam Online. Weird huh?
pharyngula | April 29, 2006Hurtling1 down the road in my black Chevy2, I laugh maniacally3. "Time to kick creationist butt4," I say, "and test the mettle of the Cheeseheads.5"
I'm heading off to the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point to minister to the heathen today, so my online presence may be limited. I've got a lecture to give in their Evolution Sunday series. Here's a copy of the PowerPoint file6, just so I have an online backup.
I'm racing right back early Monday morning, though. I've got a hellish week or two of grading and exams and classes and more travel, and I've got to get an early start on it all.…
pharyngula | April 29, 2006After sitting through Hovind's talk, I have seen the light. I've always been awfully hard on Christianity and Christians here, despising their beliefs and making mock of their nonsensical ideas and backwards social agenda. But this evangelist really reached out and grabbed me.
I now feel a great pity for them.
Hovind is one of the leading lights of fundamentalist Christianity in this country; the large auditorium was packed full, and they had to put up folding seats on the stage behind him to handle the crowd. They were enthusiastic and laughing and cheering and shouting "Amen!" throughout…
pharyngula | April 28, 2006Be amused. The malevolent clown at Billy Dembski's blog has joined the blithering clown at Telic Thoughts in calling for my head, because I've admitted that I will vote on matters of substance and scientific validity in tenure decisions. This will not do! Why, if college professors hinder the advancement of fools in academia, creationists will have more difficulty pretending to be credentialed scientists! What can they do?
My thoughts are that the University of Minnesota needs to censure Associate Professor Paul Myers and assure the public that he will not be allowed to participate in tenure…
pharyngula | April 28, 2006There's no doubt that Tony Snow is a creationist, especially not after Nick Matzke's interview.
pharyngula | April 27, 2006My life isn't easing up just yet as we wend our way to the imminent end of the term. I'm going to be flitting about over the next few days.
I'm chauffeuring #1 son to a job interview in Minneapolis today, and then returning him home to St Cloud again sometime this evening. I'm planning to be in St Cloud in time for a painful event: Kent Hovind is speaking there.
Date :April 28, 2006
Time :7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Title:Dr. Kent Hovind (Dr. Dino) -- Creation v. Evolu.
Description:Dr. Kent Hovind or the more popularly known Dr. Dino, is one of the most requested speakers on the Creation and Evolution…
pharyngula | April 26, 2006Paul Nelson has been twittering about ORFans for some time now—he seems to precede his talks by threatening to make us evolutionists tremble in our boots by bringing them up, but he never seems to follow through. Ian Musgrave got tired of waiting for him to give us a coherent creationist argument about them, and has gone ahead and cut him off at the knees by explaining the place of ORFans in evolution.
In case you're baffled by the jargon, "ORF" is an Open Reading Frame, or a stretch of DNA bracketed by a start and stop codon; it's a kind of bare minimum criterion for recognizing an actual…
pharyngula | April 26, 2006Here's a description of the contents of her newest book:
Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In Godless, Ann Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:
Its sacraments (abortion)
Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
Its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
Its clergy (public school teachers)
Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen…
stcynic | April 26, 2006A reader alerted me to this letter to the editor in a St. Louis newspaper (correction: the op-ed piece that the letter responded to was originally printed in a St. Louis newspaper, but the letter itself was in a Kennewick, Washington paper) that contains one of the most bizarre statements I've ever seen about paleontology. The writer, someone named Scott Chambers, said:
The discrete, hierarchical nature of the fossil record, and its similarity to the existing biological kingdom, still is what Stephen Jay Gould once referred to as "the trade secret of paleontology," and is hardly supportive of…
pharyngula | April 26, 2006More than once, I've said that I think the Discovery Institute is on the wane; Dover dealt a serious blow to their credibility, and demonstrated that their strategy was not an effective one for helping creationists get their way. That's really all they had, was the promise that their pseudo-secular approach would give anti-evolutionists an inroad into the public school system, and it is clear now that that is not true.
I've also noticed that people give me a leery look when I say that—the DI has been a recent but ubiquitous feature in the Creation Wars—but now I can just tell you all to read…
pharyngula | April 25, 2006There are a number of creationist organizations flourishing in America. One I've criticized many times is the Discovery Institute, which I suspect is now waning in influence after the Dover debacle; another is Answers in Genesis, which is a Mecca for the Young Earth Creationists; and one other is Reasons to Believe, which is an Old Earth Creationist haven for crackpots. Despite their doctrinal differences, though, it's amazing how uniformly they respond to evolutionary discovers with denial. The recent discovery of Tiktaalik has been instructive: all three organizations have now weighed in,…
stcynic | April 24, 2006The hit parade of creationist responses to Tiktaalik roseae continues with this article about the response of Ken Ham, founder of the American wing of Answers in Genesis. Like the rest, it's amusing for the almost total lack of any substantive response to the facts.
"If you look at a platypus, a platypus has features of reptiles, birds, and mammals," he notes. "Now, that's not considered to be a transitional form. But what you find is that God has used optimum features in different creatures. And so you see some similarities and you see differences, and so on -- just as the forelimb of a…