creationism
gregladen | March 17, 2015The Louisville Insider is reporting that Answers In Genesis has filed an injunction to try to force the state of Kentucky to help pay for their religious theme park. The State had chosen to pull back from the project because Answers in Genesis would not guarantee that there would be no discrimination in hiring based on religious belief. Now, Answers in Genesis is claiming that having taxpayers not pay for a part of a religious spectacle is discrimination based on religion.
From the Insider:
In its motion on Monday, Ark Encounter seeks to force the Tourism Cabinet to send the incentives…
pharyngula | February 3, 2015Answers in Genesis has announced today that they are suing the state of Kentucky for withdrawing a tax rebate. To make their case, they have released a long video featuring Ken Ham getting all the answers he wants from a lawyer wearing a greasy muskrat on his head.
The reason that Kentucky withdrew the tax exemption is that AiG refused to comply with state requirements. This was plainly stated by state representatives; they expected this "theme park"/"entertainment center" to abide by the same rules as any other commercial enterprise in the state.
We expect any entity that accepts state…
pharyngula | February 1, 2015Yet again, another defender of Islam hangs the truth of his holy book on the scientific accuracy of the text. It's amazing how defensive these fundies get over the possibility that the author was merely transmitting the guesswork of the time, and like any scientific hypothesis, stands a risk of being shown to be wrong by later work.
In this case, the apologists are confronted with a verse from the Quran, which they happily translate literally as (Man is) created from gushing water (which) comes out from between the backbone and the ribs. I think the Arabs of the 7th century knew exactly where…
pharyngula | January 25, 2015Financial information has to be reduced to the simplest possible form for me to follow. Fortunately, a reader, Brian, has been extracting the data from Answers in Genesis's Form 990 tax information, and this chart tells me what I need to know.
The key thing is the lowest, gray line: that's the revenue from the Creation "Museum". The yellow line above it is the Creation "Museum's" expenses. Now I'm no economics whiz, but it seems to me that having expenses that are significantly greater than revenues is a bad thing. The top two lines are overall expenses and revenues, and notice that revenue…
sa smith | January 25, 2015A paper was recently brought to my attention via a Creationist. It was the usual 'HAHAHA! Oh you silly Creationist! This paper says the opposite of what you think it says!', and I was going to write a blog post along that usual theme.
Fazale Rana, 'Vice President' of 'Research and Apologetics' at Reasons to Believe said on Facebook:
What happens when the best evidence for biological evolution becomes evidence for intelligent deign?
Retroviruses, long thought to be junk DNA, play a role in regulating gene expression in the brain (link to ScienceDaily about the article)
The article has some…
pharyngula | January 14, 2015Perhaps you've heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo's challenge of $10,000 to "prove evolution"; Ray Comfort's challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money, but don't try: they've loaded the dice in every case.
Dana Hunter gives a 19th century example I did not know about before. Alfred Russel Wallace accepted a bet to show the curvature of the earth by a flat-earther, and he did it, too, with a simple and clever observation. You'd think he'd be…
milhayser | December 8, 2014On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes the stubborn obfuscations of Michael Behe, who refuses to yield his illogical calculations. Behe says (rightly) that a certain mutation necessary for drug resistance in the malaria parasite has about a 1 in 1020 chance of occurring. But the mutation is also detected in 96% of malaria patients who respond well to the drug; it proliferated widely because, by itself, it had no impact on the parasite's fitness. The parasite needed another mutation, occurring at a later date, to develop resistance to the drug. Behe rests his case for divine intervention on the…
pharyngula | December 5, 2014He keeps saying the same ol' debunked crap over and over again, and nowadays when a paper comes out that shows he was completely wrong about something, he spins it into a triumphant vindication for his sycophantic fans, who are all, apparently, abysmally innumerate. The hobby horse he's been riding for the past few years is the evolution of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite: he claims it is mathematically impossible. And that's the secret of his success: he dazzles creationists with bad math. Really bad math. The kind of math creationists have been fallaciously using for decades…
sa smith | November 6, 2014Attention those of you in the Atlanta area!
The students in Kennesaw State University Atheists United have invited Richard Dawkins to speak on campus, and they are opening up their event to the public!
Tickets are available for purchase HERE!
Im gonna get him to sign our Nightwish poster!!! :-D
pharyngula | October 29, 2014It's yet another creationist conference in which the imminent demise of evolutionary theory will be declared this weekend, and it's being held on a university campus, which is always jarring. The university is said to be "uneasy" about it all.
The 1 November event, called the Origin Summit, is sponsored by Creation Summit, an Oklahoma-based nonprofit Christian group that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible and was founded to “challenge evolution and all such theories predicated on chance.” The 1-day conference will include eight workshops, according the event’s website,…
pharyngula | October 24, 2014The Discovery Institute doesn't understand the protein folding problem. I mean that literally: they don't understand the problem. Scientists don't know the answer, but they have a clear understanding of the problem.
PNAS published a "Perspective" article, "The Nature of Protein Folding Pathways," by S. Walter Englander and Leland Mayne. Unsurprisingly, they try to approach the problem from purely materialistic presuppositions. There is no mention of specificity, amino acid sequence, or digital information.
You see, there really is an interesting problem here: given a specific amino acid…
sa smith | October 23, 2014The title of this article by Answers In Genesis is a good question:
Where Did Ebola Come From?
*shrug* Look, I love making fun of Creationists, but this is a great question!
Ebola is not 'supposed' to be a human pathogen. Like many emerging infectious diseases, the natural reservoir for ebola is bats. Specifically, fruit bats.
By studying the genomes of many small mammals, we have determined that ebola-like viruses have existed on Earth, infecting small mammals, for 12 to 24 million years.
YAY! Straight forward answer to an interesting, valid question.
...... But with Creationists, things are…
pharyngula | October 4, 2014William Dembski spoke at the University of Chicago in August, and a video of the talk is available. I tried to watch it, I really did, but I ended up skipping through most of it (one of the advantages of seeing it on youtube!). Here's my rather stream-of-consciousness monolog as I was flicking like a damselfly over the stagnant pond of his words:
"Get to the point, Bill. Skip. No biology. Skip. No biology yet. Skip. Wait, that model is anti-biology…evolution doesn't work like that. Watches a short segment. Nope, nonsense. Skip. No biology, skip. Oh, "specified complexity"…does he define it?…
pharyngula | September 28, 2014It's reassuring to know that it's not just other atheists who hate me, but that I also still piss off the creationists. In addition to the mob of atheist dudebros howling at my door, there has been a recent resurgence of creationist loonietarianism in my email. It seems to have been triggered by a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Doug Batchelor.
SDAs are really among the battiest of the batty; their young earth creationism isn't simply a product of ignorance and gullibility, but is literally enforced doctrine. They had a nineteenth century prophetess, Ellen White, who insisted that she had seen…
pharyngula | September 23, 2014Vestigial organs are relics, reduced in function or even completely losing a function. Finding a novel function, or an expanded secondary function, does not make such organs non-vestigial.
The appendix in humans, for instance, is a vestigial organ, despite all the insistence by creationists and less-informed scientists that finding expanded local elements of the immune system means it isn't. An organ is vestigial if it is reduced in size or utility compared to homologous organs in other animals, and another piece of evidence is if it exhibits a wide range of variation that suggests that those…
pharyngula | September 4, 2014JBS Haldane is said to have responded to a question about how evolution could be disproved by saying, "A Precambrian rabbit". What was meant by this, of course, is any substantial discovery that greatly disrupted the evidence for the chronological pattern of descent observed in Earth's life. That pattern of descent is one of the central lines of evidence for evolution, so creationists would dearly love to find something that wrecked it -- this is why they send expeditions to Africa to find a living dinosaur, Mok'ele-mbembe, or more conveniently, to Canada in search of a plesiosaur, Manipogo.…
pharyngula | August 2, 2014A while back, I responded to Behe/Luskin's claim that his model proving the impossibility of evolution of chloroquinone resistance was vindicated. I pointed out (as did Ken Miller) that showing that a particular trait required multiple point mutations did not affect the probability in the naive way that Behe and Luskin calculated -- in particular, it did not require that the mutations be simultaneous. We're familiar with a great many known mutations that involve multiple sequential hits to have their effect. I mentioned the work on steroid receptor evolution, and how cancer is an amazing…
pharyngula | July 23, 2014 I think the engineers are just trying to wind me up, again. Joe Felsenstein tackles a paper published in an applied physics journal that redefines evolution and tries to claim that changes in aircraft design are a good model for evolution. It's a terrible premise, but also, the execution is awful.
But permit me a curmudgeonly point: This paper would have been rejected in any evolutionary biology journal. Most of its central citations to biological allometry are to 1980s papers on allometry that failed to take the the phylogeny of the organisms into account. The points plotted in those old…
pharyngula | July 17, 2014Once again, Casey Luskin demonstrates that he's a biological ignoramus. He is much buoyed by a science report that chloroquinone resistance in the malaria parasite requires two mutations, claims that Michael Behe has been vindicated because that's exactly what he said, and demands an apology from all of Behe's critics.
Will Ken Miller, Jerry Coyne, Paul Gross, Nick Matzke, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Myers Now Apologize to Michael Behe?
No.
Here's what his critics actually said. We have no problem with the idea that a particular functional phenotype requires a couple of mutations;…
sa smith | July 14, 2014Though ERVs are my favorite tool vs Creationists, HIV is a fantastic choice as well.
I mean, has anyone seen hide or hair of Behe since 2007?
Poor guy.
Alas, there are still Creationists out there, so to address some of their 'concerns', c0nc0rdance made a couple of vids using his favorite HIV protein, Vpr: