creationism
tfk | July 12, 2010A draft of the Standards Framework for national science standards, funded by the Carnegie Foundation and sponsored by the National Governors Association and the US Chamber of Commerce (among others), has been published. The National Research Council drafted the framework, and is seeking comment until August 2, and I'll have more to say as I work through the draft. Forty-eight states (excluding Texas and Alaska) have agreed to use English Language Arts and Mathematics standards produced through a similar process, and many people see these standards as natural additions to that national…
gregladen | July 9, 2010And we're talking about bigots and creationists in Alberta, which I figure is more or less the Canadian equivalent of Texas .... the dumbest province in the Great White North.
Starting this coming school year, parents will be able to "opt" their children "out" of certain lessons, such as those that deal in any way with Teh Gay, or with religion. Apparently, it is thought that science that conflicts with religion will be counted as religion, so that means kids can get out of science classes.
And I would not assume that this applies only to evolution. Math, physics, all of it conflicts with…
pharyngula | July 9, 2010I've got a little inside information on Premise Media, makers of Expelled — despite all the bragging about what a successful movie they had, they still haven't fully paid contractors they'd hired, and the company appears to be dead. It was a kind of zombie company anyway, with a fake website filled with fake projects to trick people into taking it seriously, and now it's simply decaying. All that's left is a collection of clips.
However, the writer, Kevin Miller, has found employment working on something even schlockier — the poor guy's career is sinking so fast, he's going to end up writing…
oracknows | July 8, 2010I've been a critic of Arianna Huffington's massive group blog, The Huffington Post, since three weeks after it first blighted the blogosphere. That's when I first noticed that the "health" section (such as it is) of HuffPo had already become a wretched hive of scum and anti-vaccine quackery, something I began documenting again and again and again and again and again over five years ago, before Salon.com and Rolling Stone flushed their credibility right down the crapper with Robert F. Kennedy's infamous conspiracy mongering about thimerosal in vaccines. Indeed, I continue to document the…
pharyngula | July 8, 2010Here we go again, another creationist who doesn't understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He's criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way.
I've never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result of a mindless, purposeless process and thus fundamentally untrustworthy as a reality-processor. (Would you want to buy a "word-processor" made by a random, purposeless process? Would you trust it?)
I've never heard a Darwinist complain they've been given a crappy brain never designed for…
mikethemadbiologist | July 7, 2010Chris Mooney is encouraging people to read the longer paper on which his Washington Post op-ed piece was based (some of my thoughts on the op-ed are here). So I did.
My short take: there's some good, mixed in with some bad. I'll behave unusually and describe the good first.
The powerful influence of politics and ideology is underscored by a rather shocking survey result: Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to…
gregladen | July 6, 2010This topic came up a couple of times during SkepchiCON. I'll be blogging about that later. But for now, I thought you might find this interesting.
gregladen | July 6, 2010Although I quickly add that I've not been reading much on the Internet this morning, but stilll ..... There is this item in HuffPo ... Jesus and the Evolution of the Species by Stanley Knick, PhD:
This is not about whether you believe in God, or whether you believe in evolution. It is not about whether you believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe in God, fine. If not, fine. If you believe evolution is real, fine. If not, fine. This is not about what you believe, or what I believe. It is about the idea of Jesus, and the idea of evolution, and what these two ideas might have to say…
pharyngula | July 6, 2010Last week, the hilarity was that Rand Paul refused to say how old he thought the earth was. The new chew toys are creationist apologists for ignorance trying to justify it, while also refusing to state how old they think the earth is. The amusement lies in the way these guys puff themselves up into a state of moral superiority while claiming that scientists are dogmatists…because, you know, they know stuff.
I don't know the age of the earth, but I know that someone who thinks that someone who doesn't know the age of the earth should have a position on the age of the earth anyway is a…
gregladen | July 6, 2010Apparently, it is OK for a government agency to insist that its employees consider religious explanations for natural phenomenon as equal to scientific ones in the context of science education.
In a decision issued on July 2, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a lower court's decision that the Texas Education Agency's policy requiring "neutrality" of its employees when "talking about evolution and creationism" is not unconstitutional.
This idiotic decision is contrary to a lot of other case law and won't stand. But we will have to fight over this one.…
pharyngula | July 5, 2010I cannot stand the Huffington Post, that bastion of Newage folly. I really despise the Intelligent Design creationists. So when Huffpo gives space to creationist cretins, I'm done with them. Even worse, it's an idiot creationist parroting the same old story, that Hitler was Darwin's fault. I'll mention just one paragraph of this dishonest bunk.
Hitler's ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, "came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin." A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology "weren't reading the…
pharyngula | July 5, 2010This is appalling. This video of a supposedly secular high school biology classroom will show you what we're up against.
These students are simply expressing uninformed incredulity — they can't imagine how anything could have evolved. And the incompetent apologist of a teacher, who is sympathetic to creationism himself, isn't doing his job, which is to explain to them exactly how biology explains these phenomena. Instead, he makes excuses: "How could I say to a student, 'your ideas are trash'?"
It's not hard. One student at the end says this:
How can like an African-American person evolve…
gregladen | July 4, 2010... OK, I think we can arrange that ...
This is YA crazy web site extolling the wonders of Young Earth creationism. Nothing new.
Which is why it is interesting. How can the following possibly still be part of the YEC rhetoric?
There are dating methods like Carbon 14 dating convincing many people that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Carbon 14 dating assumes that the rate of change and decay has been relatively constant through time. This assumes the present is the key to the past. Creationists believe that Noah's flood was a literal, cataclysmic world-wide event. The scale of this event…
pharyngula | July 1, 2010This is a scanned page from a Christian science textbook published by Bob Jones University. I think they've been listening to too much Insane Clown Posse.
We're all just mindless zombies here at scienceblogs, but somehow, BJU is even more brainless. I swear, a creationist could walk by right now and I wouldn't even drool. But even in my decaying state, and as a biologist, not a physicist, I can answer this one.
Electricity is not a mystery on the level this book is discussing. There is a lot we don't know about fundamental particles, but we understand the principles of electromagnetism so…
gregladen | June 29, 2010The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach (volume 3, number 2) is in honor of -- if a few months in advance of -- the sixty-fifth birthday of NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott. Edited by NCSE's deputy director Glenn Branch (who contributed "Three wishes for Genie" by way of introduction), it contains essays by Nicholas J. Matzke, Robert T. Pennock, Barbara Forrest, Raymond Arthur Eve with Susan Carol Losh and Brandon Nzekwe, Lawrence M. Krauss, Robert M. Hazen, Kevin Padian, Jay D. Wexler, Kenneth R. Miller, Brian Alters, and Carl Zimmer. Plus there's a biographical…
tfk | June 29, 2010PZ is unamused. I criticized his criticism of prayer vigils in the Gulf, and he responds:
It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulfâ¦and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological…
tfk | June 29, 2010
Via ClimateProgress (who got it from Barefoot and Progressive), we get Kentucky's Republican nominee for the US Senate, Rand Paul, at an event for local homeschoolers. At the top of the Q&A, he's asked when he became a Christian and how old the earth his.
Paul has no trouble giving a detailed account of where his Christianity came from, giving a careful timeline of not just the origins of his Christian faith, but his anti-abortion position. When it gets time to answer the second part of the question he gets tongue-tied, answering:
Iâm gonna have to pass on the age of the earth. I think…
pharyngula | June 29, 2010Hold onto your hats, don't be too shocked, but a creationist has lied about science. I'm constantly getting email from fundagelical groups insisting that I must obey and join their One True Faith, and I got one from the Worldwide Church of God aka Radio Church of God aka Grace Communion International aka whatever the heck they're calling themselves this week. They're kind of a quirky, long-separated splinter group of the Seventh Day Adventists with their own idiosyncratic theology, but one thing they definitely are: stark raving mad young earth creationists. I was sent this bizarre article…
pharyngula | June 28, 2010Paul was at a Christian homeschooling conference, and was asked outright how old he thought the earth was. He refused to answer.
Silly man. These were Christian homeschoolers in Kentucky. Everyone knows that on that planet, the correct answer is "6000 years".
Libertarians, you aren't really going to vote for this kook, are you?
pharyngula | June 24, 2010The apologetic gang at BioLogos is complaining again — Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins and I didn't understand their recent piece by Daniel Harrell on Adam and Eve, and oh, it is so hard to be the ones in the middle of all those atheist and creationist extremists.
Note to BioLogos: squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you're halfway to crazy town.
The core of Falk's article consists of complaining that we didn't understand what they were talking about, and took their article out of context…