creationism
pharyngula | March 15, 2006Paul Nelson responds to Amanda Marcotte, who mentioned that the poor quality of his debate explains why Nelson thinks ID should not be taught in schools.
Amanda, Sahotra and I spent three hours talking at an Austin bar the night before the debate. I reiterated to him what I've said for years: I'm not interested in getting ID into the public schools. He allowed as much in his spoken remarks (which should be available soon as streaming video from the UPA), but still stood up a straw-man ID bad guy. What's funny is Sahotra and I have been debating/discussing design since we met in 1985, and in…
pharyngula | March 14, 2006Attendees of the Sarkar-Nelson debate are speaking up at Pandagon and The Ethical Werewolf. As I expected, it sounds like it was a bit of a farce, and that Sarkar did a fine job.
I'm getting a little tired of making this concession every time I speak of him, so let's get it over with. Paul Nelson is a nice guy. But—and this is a huge "but"—he's peddling a falsified ideology as science, and he and his fellow travelers at the Discovery Institute are doing their best to screw up education in this country. I'm beginning to think that his only saving grace is that he's so darned bad at it.
pharyngula | March 14, 2006How about selling off Kansas?
It seems a little harsh to me. How about if we give it in trust to Josh and Pat until everyone comes to their senses?
pharyngula | March 14, 2006
Lots of people have been emailing me with this story of yet another Ark expedition. It's a routine lunacy that comes up all the time—probably the most irritating part of it all is the way MSNBC filed it under their tech/science section. It's nothing of the kind: it's mere pareidolia, the product of a loon biased by a desire to confirm a silly story from the Bible, a misplaced myth that claims a big boat landed on Mt Ararat, and a willingness to stare at satellite photos of rock and ice formations until one convinces oneself that a piece looks like a big boat. It also helps if one is willing…
pharyngula | March 11, 2006I'm wondering how the Sarkar-Nelson debate in Austin went down—any attendees want to let me know? I ask because I just now read the discussion paper by Nelson that supposedly represents his side of the argument, and rarely have I seen such a shallow and pointless position advanced with any seriousness, by anyone other than the most fatuous sort of creationist.
The paper goes on much too long for what is actually a trivial point—but then, that's what BS artists do when they don't have anything of substance: they go on and on. Here, though, is one key paragraph and figure that basically sums up…
pharyngula | March 11, 2006Barbara Forrest is one of the big guns of anti-creationism, and she's interviewed on Daily Kos today.
pharyngula | March 11, 2006John Pieret quotes a religious apologist, about which I am rather conflicted:
For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases, funded by Doubting Thomas Institutes. When advocates of ID use the vocabulary of science to argue for God's presence in cellular machinery or in the fossil record, they too poke their fingers through Jesus' hands. In so doing, ID vitiates faith.
This is the conundrum we face when we get a thoughtful…
pharyngula | March 10, 2006Part two of his masturbation session is up; it makes me a little queasy, so I'm not going to link to it directly, but you can get to it via Stranger Fruit. This one begins with The Pompous One redefining science (these guys know ID doesn't meet the standards of science, so their strategy is to redefine everything else, to lower it far enough that they can clear the bar. In other words, they're digging a very deep hole) to exclude biology and to make mathematics the One True Science.
And then it gets worse.
pharyngula | March 10, 2006In an interview with Michael Specter in the New Yorker, we get to be really depressed at the way the Bush administration is politicizing science to an unheard-of degree. Bush is bowing and scraping before the twin gods of the Religiously Ridiculous and the Myopic Mullahs of Big Business, and letting science diminish. As a patriotic (isn't it sad that that word is fast becoming synonymous with stupid and selfish?) American, this bothers me:
Are we losing ground in science as a nation? Are other countries doing better science, and doing more of it? Are there economic as well as medical costs?…
pharyngula | March 8, 2006
I feel a bit like a cat with a fat mouse between its paddy paws—although the temptation is there to bite its little head off and crunch on its itty-bitty bones, I think I'll bat it around a bit and extrude a single needle-like claw and stick it in somewhere non-vital and twist, and maybe pluck out something pink and stringy and wet, and elicit a few squeaks for the sadistic fun of it all.
Yes, Fred Hutchison has replied to my challenge. We've swapped some email back and forth. I'll see how long I can keep him on the hook—I'm hoping that he'll try to turn this into another triumphal column.…
pharyngula | March 7, 2006That strange raspy rumbly sound you hear is the frozen earth shifting as Minnesota edges away from that deranged state to our west.
pharyngula | March 7, 2006There's a bizarre "interview" with David Berlinski at one of the ID blogs. What's bizarre about it, and the reason I have to put "interview" in quotes, is that the interviewer and interviewee are both David Berlinski. It is nothing more than a pompous exercise in preening his ego; he arrogantly babbles on, saying nothing much except to sneer at anyone who has pricked that colossal ego.
I'm pleased to say that I'm one of them, and again find myself in good company.
… With all due respect, Mr. Berlinski, there are times reading what you have written when it seems that you are right down there…
pharyngula | March 7, 2006Please forgive me: you've probably all forgotten Fred Hutchison, the incredibly delusional right-wing paragon of hubris, but I've got to bring him up again. He wrote one of the more painful diatribes against evolution on Alan Keyes "Renew America" site (yeah, that Alan Keyes; you know we're deep in crazytown already) which I ripped up a while back. This is a guy who gets everything wrong, and wraps it all up in the most astonishingly pretentious, arrogant tone. Hutchison himself is a CPA. He thinks he has demonstrated that Darwin and Einstein were all wrong.
That's right. He thinks he is a…
pharyngula | March 6, 2006We're going to have to rethink all monotheistic religions, actually, since a study now proves the universe was created by a committee.
The most extensive analysis yet undertaken of the structure and contents of the universe conclusively proves the universe was created not by a single entity, as has been widely suggested, but by "a fractious and disorganized committee or committees given to groupthink and petty infighting", according to Drs. Karl Pootle and Yumble Frick, co-authors of the study. The analysis is expected to have profound implications on the theoretical underpinnings of many…
pharyngula | March 6, 2006One wonders exactly how desperate or deluded a young biology graduate would have to be to accept this job?
Position: Biology
Salary: Unspecified
Institution: Liberty University
Location: Virginia
Date posted: 3/6/2006
Biology: Liberty University invites applications for: Faculty member with Ph.D. and compatibility with a young-earth creationist philosophy. Teaching expertise in Microbiology and supervision of undergraduate research expected. Experience in molecular genetics helpful. Send letter of interest, resume, and statement of personal Christian faith commitment to Dr. Ron Hawkins,…
pharyngula | March 5, 2006The Da Vinci Code is opening up some interesting contrasts—like creationists who suddenly find scholarship and expertise in a discipline to be worth something.
Just to correct one false impression: the blogger that led to the article does plainly state that he "has no truck with creationism". However, one of the authors of the article itself is more lukewarm, and is willing to credit the empty noise of ID with some value and gripes about those authoritarian scientists, who he thinks ought to be more humble. The irony alert is still valid.
pharyngula | March 5, 2006Doonesbury is perfect today. Ever had this problem?
Then what you need is…situational science!
The Discovery Institute should love it, too—respect for the side of the scientific argument that is completely unsupported by any evidence is exactly what they are demanding.
pharyngula | March 4, 2006Ken Ham shows his sleazy colors a little more. Ham and Answers in Genesis have split from the organization that included Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International. Big deal, you say; so what if a gang of creationist wankers can't keep their act together?
The interesting thing is why Ham left the umbrella organization. It's because Wieland insisted on "checks/balances/peer review" on some of their content. Where AiG formerly hosted a list of bad arguments that creationists ought to avoid, that list has been yanked from the AiG site at about the time they broke up with CMI.
I guess Ham…
pharyngula | March 3, 2006Curse you, Orac. He had to pass along a link to a podcast interview with William Dembski. It was extremely aggravating—Dembski is dishonest bloviator of the first water.
He blames the loss in Dover on everyone else: it was the Dover school board's fault because they had religious motives (and Dembski doesn't?), the judge was biased, the Thomas More Law Center alienated anybody who was anybody in the ID movement. He tried to claim the the Discovery Institute saw the case was a loser right from the beginning, conveniently glossing over the fact that Dembski himself was actually going to testify…
pharyngula | March 2, 2006Well, this isn't a big surprise: Rick Santorum is writing a foreword to a book…this book, Darwin's Nemesis, a volume that praises Philip Johnson, father of the Intelligent Design movement. Santorum has a very confused history with ID: he was the author of the Santorum amendment, an attempt to couple ID to the No Child Left Behind bill. It was stripped from the bill, but that has never stopped the creationists from claiming it was a legally binding requirement.
The really funny thing is that the day after the Dover decision came down, Santorum backed down fast. And now he's endorsing a pro-ID…