creationism
pharyngula | June 17, 2014Poor Ken Ham is heartbroken by the latest polling data.
Look at that! More people regard the Bible as a book of fables than ever before. This hurts the Hamster, who declares that they must keep doing more of what has discredited the book.
In this day and age, I consider Genesis, out of all the other books of the Bible, to be the most attacked, scoffed at, and ridiculed—from within parts of the church and outside. You see, because of the indoctrination in the belief evolution and millions of years through the education system and media, many people believe that Genesis 1-11 cannot be taken as…
pharyngula | June 17, 2014Jonathan Chait makes an interesting observation.
Asked by reporters yesterday if he accepts the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming, John Boehner demurred on the curious but increasingly familiar grounds that he is not a scientist. “Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” the House Speaker said. Boehner immediately turned the question to the killing of jobs that would result from any proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which he asserts with unwavering certainty. (On this question, Boehner is not held back by…
pharyngula | June 10, 2014I'm having a light dinner while traveling off to a visit with Humanists of Minnesota, and I thought I'd deal with a little email. I got a request to address a fairly common creationist argument--here's the relevant part of the claim.
As a member of the Greater Manchester Humanists I was recently involved in a discussion with the Ahmadi sect of Islam with regards to evolution. They had asked me to look at a couple of chapters in a book entitled 'Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge and Truth by their prophet Mirza Tahir Ahmad. One of those chapters was called 'The Blind Watchmaker who is also…
pharyngula | May 29, 2014A correspondent asked me an interesting and difficult question about the sponsorship of science. I've been talking a bit lately about the allosaur affair at the Creation "Museum", which can be summarized this way:
Michael Peroutka, an odious neo-Confederate nut, donates a valuable allosaur fossil to the Creation "Museum".
Now the tricky part. What's the difference in principle between that statement and this next one?
David Koch, an odious destroyer of the environment and climate change denialist, donates $35 million for a Smithsonian dinosaur hall redesign.
That's a good question, and it…
pharyngula | May 28, 2014You might have wondered, like I did, how Ken Ham was going to deal with the revelation that his prize Allosaurus specimen was the gift of a freaky neo-Confederate crank. We now know: he's going to ignore it indignantly.
Rachel Maddow had a segment on the allosaur, the creationists, and the neo-Confederate. She makes some good points: why is this kook being given tax incentives to build another pile of bullshit in the state of Kentucky? How can they claim that this ancient fossil supports their claim of a young earth? And what about Michael Peroutka? Watch it yourself and see.…
pharyngula | May 26, 2014Yesterday, I attended a discussion led by a philosophy professor after a matinee showing of God's Not Dead. It was a strangely skewed group: about half the attendees were local pastors or wives of pastors. Also, not to my surprise, most of them didn't care for the movie. It was too over the top, it paid short shrift to serious theology, some of the scenes (especially the death scene) made them uncomfortable and wasn't true to how Christians actually respond to death. So that was good. Of course, I had to point out that the caricatures of atheists were also unrepresentative.
One guy wandered…
pharyngula | April 25, 2014We've had a creationist named "biasevolution" babbling away in the comments. He's not very bright and he's longwinded, always a disastrous combination, and he tends to echo tedious creationist tropes that have been demolished many times before. But hey, I'm indefatigable, I can hammer at these things all day long.
He brings up irreducible complexity (IC), Behe's ever-popular contribution to the creationism debate. Behe's version of the idea was published in 1996, so we've had almost 20 years to refute it -- successfully! -- so it gets a little old seeing it brought up again and again.
If you…
pharyngula | April 22, 2014Recently, Carl Zimmer made a criticism of the computer animations of molecular events (it's the same criticism I made 8 years ago): they're beautiful and they're informative, but they leave out the critical aspect of stochastic behavior that is important in understanding the biochemistry. He's talking specifically about kinesin, a transport protein which the animators are particularly fond of illustrating.
Every now and then, a tiny molecule loaded with fuel binds to one of the kinesin "feet." It delivers a jolt of energy, causing that foot to leap off the molecular cable and flail wildly,…
gregladen | April 17, 2014You will recall that last February, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, debated Ken Ham, the Not-So-Science Guy, on the question of creationism as a viable explanation for the Earth's history. The debate was held in Ham's home territory, at the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky. Nye didn't really debate Ham. He ate him for breakfast. Form now on we shall call him Ken Bacon and Eggs.
Anyway, people, including me, who have been engaged with the "debate" between science (evolution) and not-so-science (creationism of one kind or another) were very concerned when we heard that this debate might…
pharyngula | April 15, 2014He hates Tiktaalik. He hates it so much he even has a hard time spelling its name correctly.
Tikaalik is again being popularized through the new PBS series "Your Inner Fish.'' it's really a desperate con job on the part of evolutionists who can't defend their evolutionary fictional story.
He actually surprises me a little bit: one of his arguments that it can't possibly be a transitional form is that it is only a fossil. That's one I hadn't heard before. So extinct species can't be evidence for evolution anymore, because only living species count?
Because it belongs to the group of lobe…
pharyngula | April 9, 2014There's a common tactic used by creationists, and I've encountered it over and over again. It's a form of the Gish Gallop: present the wicked evolutionist with a long list of assertions, questions, and non sequiturs, and if they answer with "I don't know" to any of them, declare victory. It's easy. We say "I don't know" a lot.
Jack Chick's Big Daddy tract is a version of the creationist list, and contains a fair amount of fantasy as well. You know what they believe will happen: they'll ask that one question that the scientist can't answer, and then they'll have an epiphany, a revelation, and…
pharyngula | March 24, 2014
Yes, it surely does. It reeks.
I completely missed this article -- no surprise, it seems everyone did -- titled "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory," by Md. Abdul Ahad and Charles D. Michener, in the Journal of Biology and Life Science, and now you can't read it because the journal retracted it and deleted it.
The first sign that something might be off in this paper is the title. "Fossils Evidences (Paleontology) Opposite to Darwin’s Theory"? Seriously? No one even stopped to notice how ungrammatical it was?
And then there's the abstract.
Darwin‟s Theory is a…
pharyngula | March 19, 2014Here's another twist on the problematic trend to hire more temporary/part-time/adjunct faculty at universities. It's a disgraceful abuse of skilled academics and good teachers — would you believe that some schools hire adjuncts to teach four courses a semester (a brutal load, let me tell you) and pay them $16,000 per year? Who would be insane enough to accumulate all that college debt, then invest 4+ years in an advanced study program to get a Ph.D., for a poverty-level income? But that's where we stand.
Here's the other ugly side of the problem. The University of Idaho needed someone to…
pharyngula | March 17, 2014I told you that the Discovery Institute really hates Cosmos. On Sunday night, Jay Richards, Master of Divinity, Master of Theology, Ph.D. in philosophy and theology, former instructor in apoletics at Biola, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, watched the show and occasionally curled his lip in disdain on Twitter. It was very amusing, and rather revealing. These guys really are just gussied-up creationists.
I can't help myself. I have to reply to these nonsensical complaints.
https://twitter.com/FreemarketJay/status/445366586246197248
On #Cosmos, Neil Degrasse Tyson is recapitulating…
pharyngula | March 13, 2014I was looking over the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views site, prior to forgetting about it. I mentioned that I am forced to revamp my email handling and was going to be blocking a lot of noise from my work address, and as I was reviewing what domains I needed to allow through, I noticed that boy-howdy, I get a lot of crappy spam from the Discovery Institute (all of which is now getting blocked). So I actually bothered to go through one of their links and see what they're babbling about now.
General impression: the Discovery Institute is really obsessed with Cosmos: A Spacetime…
pharyngula | February 22, 2014I don't say this lightly, but Saletan is one of the more dishonest pundits out there -- I've read multiple columns by this guy where he lies with numbers and fudges the evidence to fit his preconceptions, and this is no exception. He's once again arguing that creationism is compatible with science, and he has to make some dodgy claims to do so. Look here:
And what about the engineers in Ken Ham’s videos—the guys who made demonstrable contributions to science and technology while declaring themselves young-Earth creationists? Those men are what a good social scientist would call “evidence.”…
gregladen | February 18, 2014Every year the Twin Cities Creation Science Association puts on a science fair which is sometimes called the Home Schooling Creation Science Fair. It used to be held at Har Mar mall, which was great because it is always a pleasure to stop in at Har Mar. But for the last two years, including last weekend, it was held at a local Bible College. I haven't gone every year, but most years, as does The Lorax at Angry By Choice and a variable handful of others. This year, PZ Myers also attended. (Speaking of PZ I just noticed that his book is now available as an audio edition, just so you know.)…
pharyngula | February 13, 2014I've been collecting responses to the notorious debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, and intend to write a couple of summaries of various aspects of the debate: Bill Nye won it hands down, but that does not remove him from criticism, and there have been some weird arguments presented both to defend and criticize him.
Right now, I want to focus on William Saletan, corporate tool and professional contrarian, who also seems to have some kind of weird Malcolm Gladwell envy. Don't feel jealous, Will, to me you're both glib and superficial apologists for capitalism. here's the gist of Saletan's…
milhayser | February 13, 2014As an alternative to biblical creationism, Intelligent Design infers a less obtrusive God to explain life on Earth. This deity doesn't hurl bolts of lightning, unless it's with the express purpose of sparking abiogenesis in the primordial soup. On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse dismisses probabilistic arguments against the likelihood of complex organisms, explaining that even the most improbable-seeming outcome of natural selection is more or less inevitable. As a flawed analogy, he imagines flipping a coin 500 times. This will always manifest a sequence of heads and tails that only had a…
gregladen | February 13, 2014As PZ Myers points out, it is time for the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair! It is this Saturday, details here. Lorax is going.
Normally, those of us from the science community who go to this simply show up and wander around looking at the exhibits and talk science to the kids. No shenanigans. Also, we often go to a nearby venue and get lunch. Last year it was Grumpy's.
Over the years, I think, the quality of the exhibits has gone up and the attention to the usual "creation science" myths has gone down. I like to think that a bunch of evolutionary biologists showing up every year has…