creationism
pharyngula | January 27, 2011Tom Ritter has a dream. It's a grand dream.
Tom Ritter dreams of a day when people recognize that he's more than just a cranky high school teacher, and they realize that all the scientists in the world have been completely wrong, while Truth lives in the sweaty cranium of a harumphing gomer in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
He dreams of a day when everyone sees that he fills an important niche.
He dreams of a day when people realize that evolution is an unscientific theory, while Jesus is our Principal Investigator.
Ritter dreams of a day when the kids get off of his lawn.
He dreams of a day when…
pharyngula | January 26, 2011According to Ken Ham, he will be appearing on Anderson Cooper tonight (10pm (9 Central time) on CNN), along with Barry Lynn of Americans United. It sounds a little odd — the day after the state of the union address, they bring on a creationist kook? — and they don't say exactly what the topic is, although we can probably guess.
Ham is asking for prayers. They won't help him much against Lynn, who is simply an awesome speaker. It could be fine entertainment.
Actually, prayers wouldn't help him much if his opponent was Big Bird, either.
Barry Lynn was excellent, but then he always is. The…
pharyngula | January 26, 2011At the end of February, I've mentioned that a flack from Answers in Genesis will be appearing in Morris. I guess the local hosts of that event are a little worried that I might breathe fire over their little church, so they just sent me a note.
Professor Myers,
I am the local coordinator for the Answers in Genesis conference which will be held in Morris on Feb. 27 and 28 featuring Dr. Terry Mortenson. I realize that there is a lot of real estate between our opinions on this subject. My hope is that we create a respectful discussion about this issue which will be challenging.
I would…
sa smith | January 26, 2011Darwin vs. Design
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mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2011Last week, I mentioned how NY Times op-ed columnist and economist Paul Krugman has finally had his 'creationist moment': "the epiphany one realizes that, to creationists, words have no meaning, that they are not being honest." Well, a reader points us to yesterday's post on Krugman's blog, "The War on Demand." Krugman knocks down the arguments that the current depression isn't a result of inadequate demand, but what's really interesting is what he writes near the end:
It's kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement [the recognition that…
pharyngula | January 25, 2011Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn't get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.
A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, "If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a giant purple Mongoose". That commentator probably felt rather pleased with…
pharyngula | January 24, 2011Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I'm sure, just as…
pharyngula | January 24, 2011Google Scholar is a really useful tool — it's like vanilla Google in that it returns links to resources on the web, but it has additional filters to return genuine scholarly articles, enriched for the kind of stuff that gets peer-reviewed and formally published. Unfortunately, somebody or some algorithm is getting a bit sloppy, and it also returns articles for Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and Creation Ministries International. It's somewhat understandable — all of those institutions know deep down in their sweet stupid little hearts that rank theology has no…
pharyngula | January 22, 2011Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who wasn't hired at the University of Kentucky (my words were chosen carefully; that really is the only 'crime' against him), has won an out-of-court settlement in his discrimination suit, and has gone on to give an interview which confirms my opinion of him: Kentucky is better off not having this credulous guy on the staff. He now insists that he is a supporter of evolution, a fact not in evidence in his writings about the field, and also not evident in his answers to his dodgy replies to specific questions in the interview.
But the real problem is his complete…
pharyngula | January 21, 2011An indie film project is looking for help funding their movie, Standing up to the Experts, which tells the story of the Texas board of education, its excessive power in defining what science is taught, and featuring that blithely incompetent buffoon, Don McLeroy. Here's a taste.
I'd like to see the whole thing myself. But then, I am a fan of horror movies.
gregladen | January 20, 2011A new study compares "acceptance of evolution" by highly educated adult academics with college students in various categories, with all those sampled being in New England, which has the highest overall acceptance of evolution in the US (a mere 59 percent). The results are interesting.
The study is rather complicated. The original paper provides a great deal of detail about the characteristics of the population. Several different questions were ask. At the end of the day, however, the following results are the most important:
The percentage of respondents who feel that evolution alone…
pharyngula | January 20, 2011That loon Terry Hurlbut is irate that I mocked his "Creationist Hall of Fame" in a post the other day, so he rails against me today. It's a typical collection of squirrely non-sequiturs, but I'll address the funniest of them.
But what PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog fails to understand is that the CSHF does not intend to limit its honors to contemporary creation-oriented scientists. He probably believes that because he is under a common misapprehension: that creation science is a new movement, one going no further back than Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood.
As in all…
pharyngula | January 19, 2011A representative from Answers in Genesis will be speaking here in Morris, Minnesota! And none of the scheduled talks conflict with any of my classes! Not that I'll go to them all — I do have limits on how much BS I can be served before gakking up chunks — but I'll go to some, and will live-tweet the foolishness and blog up the events afterwards. My introductory biology students will also get some extra credit for attending.
Sunday, February 27, 2011 to Monday, February 28, 2011
Dr. Terry Mortenson
Schedule
Note: Any overlapping times indicate multiple, simultaneous sessions
Sunday,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 19, 2011I've written many times that everything you need to know about movement conservatism can be understood by observing creationists (not surprising, since the theopolitical right is a major element of the conservative movement). I'm glad to see NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman has finally reached his 'creationist moment': the epiphany one realizes that, to creationists, words have no meaning, that they are not being honest.
Let's jump to the end of Krugman's recent op-ed "The War on Logic" (italics mine):
The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the…
pharyngula | January 18, 2011This is an awesome coincidence. The availablity of all those quantifiable metrics extracted by Google Books has fueled the establishment of a Science Hall of Fame, which lists scientists by an objective measure of their fame, the frequency with which they are cited in books. It was announced in Science, where they also introduced a new unit of measure, the milli-Darwin.
To be able to compare scientists to one another, it is helpful to have a standard unit of fame. I proposed one that would make this kind of fame easy to comprehend: the Darwin. It is defined as the average annual frequency…
pharyngula | January 18, 2011Ken Ham is complaining bitterly about the newspaper article that showed his attendance estimates for the Ark Park are unlikely. He's reduced to nonsensical whines about persecution, and acts as if he's baffled about the criticisms.
The article raises a question: why is the Courier-Journal even concerned with possible attendance at the Ark? If the attraction does not meet its projected figures, the state government and its citizens are not impacted—except positively, in that the attraction will still produce state sales tax to benefit Kentucky and its citizens regardless of the attendance. So…
pharyngula | January 16, 2011Ken "The Squealing Piglet" Ham is irate again. The Louisville Courier-Journal ran an article today (a print-only exclusive, so I haven't been able to read it) in which they had independent experts review Ham's claims about prospective attendance at his silly theme park. The headline is "Ark park attendance claims exaggerated, theme-park experts say", so I can guess at the gist of the analysis.
Ham is complaining about how the newspapers dare to question his estimates.
Mark Looy, our CCO, has sent me a report on how the two state newspapers have been misrepresenting the project and are…
pharyngula | January 11, 2011If you've been following Richard Hoppe's coverage of the John Freshwater trial on the Panda's Thumb, you know this event has been dragging along like the OJ trial, only with less media pandemonium and now, at last, a less unsatisfying outcome. Freshwater, you may recall, is the bible-thumping public school science teacher who was more interested in promoting Christianity than science in the classroom, and whose most egregious error was using a gadget to burn crosses into students' arms.
He'll be getting his sadistic Christian jollies at the expense of students no more: John Freshwater has…
pharyngula | January 10, 2011David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom, three creationists working at the Creation "Museum", have written an outraged op-ed correcting some misconceptions about them. I read this far before I had to stop:
For one, the guest columnist, Roger Guffey, claimed there were no "serious" scientists who are creationists. We are full-time Ph.D. researchers with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, and we will be helping to design the full-scale Noah's Ark and other attractions to be built north of Lexington.
There are thousands of serious scientists who doubt…
pharyngula | January 9, 2011The Lexington Herald-Leader has posted a copy of the executive summary. Just in case it goes away, here is a pdf of the 18-page executive summary; it's a strangely fact-free document, relying on surveys and opinion polls to make estimates about economic impact. I'm serious: in the section that justifies the claim that it will bring in 1.2 million visitors a year, the sole source of information given is the results of a nationwide survey in which people were asked whether they'd take a family vacation to see Noah's Ark, and 3 in 5 said they would.
I am reminded of surveys that evaluate how…