creationism
pharyngula | April 25, 2010I don't know why the creationists haven't been pushing this one.
(Moved below the fold because apparently a cartoon of a naked man and woman will freak some people out. Isn't it enough to just say it's a Bible story? That excuses everything!)
pharyngula | April 23, 2010The long-awaited review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's anti-evolution book by Jerry Coyne is now online in The Nation. It's a double-review of both the bad philosophy book and the good science book by Dawkins. Settle in for a nice read.
tfk | April 21, 2010I'm in the Washington Post's book review blog today, offering my take on a chapter from conservative pundit S.E. Cupp's forthcoming book. I haven't seen anything but the 4th chapter ("Thou Shalt Evolve"), but the book as a whole seems like an odd project. Not least that a book titled Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity would be penned by a self-described atheist. In other words, when the title calls it "our religion," she isn't including herself.
I first learned of Cupp's existence in January, from a Salon.com profile which presented her as a possible bright light…
pharyngula | April 21, 2010Below is a short video from AndromedasWake refuting some specific claims by a couple of creationists from the UK, Andrew Inns and Malcolm Bowden. It's nicely done, a good explanation of some basic physics, but what caught my eye is the beginning, when the creationists start explaining that they are going to disprove evolution. How are they going to do it?
Would you believe…by saying that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe, and doesn't even rotate — everything else spins around it with a 24 hour period? Most of our American creationists aren't that stupid!
I feel a brief…
gregladen | April 21, 2010C.E. Cupp is Ann Coulter before the bottle-blond crap is poured on her head, but maybe slightly less vile.1 She just came out with a new book: Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity, which explains everything you had wrong if you were a progressive liberal in the education business. The book even comes with forward by Mike Huckabee.
Well, Steve Levingston of Political Bookworm on the Washington Post web site has reviewed the book, and seeing as how he does not have a lot of background in the Creationism vs Reality struggle, he interviewed Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE…
pharyngula | April 20, 2010CFI sponsored one of those awful debates between a Christian and a rationalist in Vancouver, BC. It followed the typical sequence: the specific topic was "What's right and what's wrong with Christianity," which the creationist essentially ignored and the philosophy student tried to address, which meant, of course, that neither one was talking to each other.
The one amusing bit is the person defending Christianity: it's Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe. Ross is unlike Kent Hovind and Ken Ham in that he believes in an old earth…but exactly the same in the way he came to that conclusion, which is…
pharyngula | April 19, 2010You all recall Ardipithecus ramidus, the very cool 4.4 million year old fossil that showed that bipedalism was very old. It's a great fossil, a revealing story, and worth the attention it was given.
Amazingly, someone has now had an actual conversation with Ardipithecus. You may be wondering how; so am I. Well, not actually — I have a pretty good idea how this fellow could be chatting with a 4 million year old fossil. He's nuts.
Kent Hovind, who many of us are enjoying the sensation of seeing him slip from our memories as he cools his heels in prison for tax fraud, occasionally writes these…
mikethemadbiologist | April 17, 2010It's the willful ignorance:
No, tea baggers believe stupid shit because they want to. It's willful ignorance. They spin outrageous theories because they know that the naked truth about what they believe would make them look like giant bigots and big meanies. So, instead of saying, "I don't want health care reform because I like a system where poor people are shut out because that means I don't have to see them in my doctor's office," they start yelling about the slide into socialism. Instead of saying, "I'm an incredibly selfish person who wants to keep my government-funded Medicare, but…
pharyngula | April 16, 2010Can't get enough ripping into the nonsense De Dora and Pigliucci are peddling? Then go read Ophelia Benson (always good advice) and Jerry Coyne. Coyne points out that if De Dora's way of thinking were correct, than Darwin's Origin would be banned from the science classroom. He also brings up this enlightening response to a question by De Dora:
Deen: "Are you saying that it's OK to teach people that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but it's wrong to teach them that the earth isn't 6000 years old?"
De Dora: Yes. One imparts scientific knowledge. The other denies a religious idea. One is…
pharyngula | April 16, 2010I'm in trouble now — I have drawn the ire of Massimo Pigliucci. I'd be chagrined if it weren't such an ineffectual criticism that is mainly Pigliucci doing a little foot-shooting. I've also annoyed Ronald Lindsay of the CFI (as well as several other people associated with CFI), but his criticism is even feebler. Somehow, CFI has the idea that ferocious criticism of CFI staff is to be discouraged — because we are generally on the same side, we're apparently supposed to be in solidarity on everything.
That's not going to happen. I support the CFI; I criticize the CFI. I also support the NCSE;…
tfk | April 14, 2010James Kidder is doing yeoman work. You see, Casey Luskin of the Disco. 'Tute took a look at the new Smithsonian Institute exhibit on human origins, and wrote:
Did you get that? Ignoring the fact that transitional fossils are often missing even among taxa whose records are very complete, now Darwinâs defenders argue that their theory âpredicts gaps in the fossil record.â How convenient!
Kidder then points out that this is a dumb argument by pointing to specific transitional fossils that we know about and that really do help us understand transitions in human evolution. Huzzah!
But that's…
gregladen | April 14, 2010"Mr. Tangarone, a 17-year veteran of the Weston school system, claims that a program he wanted to teach about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln was rejected by the school administration because it involved teaching evolution -- the scientific theory that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor."
Mark Tangarone, who teaches third, fourth, and fifth grade students in the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program at Weston Intermediate School, said he is retiring at the end of the current school year because of a clash with the school administration over the teaching of evolution…
pharyngula | April 14, 2010It looks like Michael De Dora is calling me out. The wishy-washy, sloppy-thinking director of the NY CFI, whose main claim to fame lately is a series of blog articles notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists, is now taking me to task for my post arguing that the Tennessee case of a creationist objecting to a textbook calling creationism "the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days" was a) an example of a true twit peddling ignorance, and b) that the textbook phrasing was accurate and…
tfk | April 13, 2010Michael at "The Bible is the Other Side" is upset. He's been reading about the suppression of research on evolution acceptance among the American public, and doesn't like what he sees. In particular, he doesn't like yours truly, and the way people like me talk about science literacy:
There is a myth propagated by radical left leaning evolutionists that you can have a PHD and have papers published in mainstream science journals and have discoveries that save lives but if you doubt evolution then your an illiterate in science.
Oh my stars and LOLcats! This is so adorable that if I had a…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010I'm a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I'm already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.
Uh-oh.
I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it's the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It's simply not a problem. It can't even be a problem for a…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010Kurt Zimmerman is pissed off. He's not a very bright guy, and he doesn't know much about biology or history, and he's extremely annoyed that not only is the local school teaching his kids stuff he didn't know, but they're actually telling them that his sources of information are wrong. You see, the only level of education we're allowed to raise children to is the Kurt Zimmerman level…which is a little scary. I was kind of hoping that sending my kids off to school would produce progeny who are smarter than me, and now I learn that they're only supposed to produce kids who are dumber than Kurt…
pharyngula | April 9, 2010After tweaking Paul Nelson on his six year delay in explaining Ontogenetic Depth, he has posted a reply. No, it's not the long promised explanation. Instead, here's what he's got:
PZ Myers' criticisms don't count and were all wrong!
But, well, he now realizes Ontogenetic Depth is a "a poorly expressed and unusable idea." (He's quoting me there.)
So he has invented Ontogenetic Depth 2.0!
But he still hasn't defined it.
But he promises to write a whole series of posts explaining why I was wrong!
Jebus. I tend to avoid the ID blogs because I'm not interested in watching someone…
tfk | April 9, 2010At Bill Dembski's blog, Clive Hayden reads my law review article and finds it to be "inaccurate," "prideful," and "a kind of disconnected cluster of arguments that reads like a brainstorm (concerned with quantity of arguments over quality), that could only persuade the uninformed."
Meanwhile, an email correspondent affiliated with a natural history museum writes:
I wanted to write and congratulate you (and thank you) for the very concise and well-written "legal" paper on the trajectory of ID after Dover (in the Saint Thomas Journal). Very nicely done!
Given that Hayden inaccurately describes…
pharyngula | April 7, 2010It's Paul Nelson Day, the yearly event in which we make ludicrous pseudo-scientific claims and promise to back them up tomorrow, as celebrated last year.
Nelson, some of you may recall, is a creationist who made up this wacky claim of "Ontogenetic Depth", saying he had a way of objectively measuring the complexity of the developmental process in organisms with a number that described the distance from egg to adult. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell us how one calculated this number, or how it actually accounted for the complexity of a network, or even how we'd get a number that was different…
pharyngula | April 4, 2010It's tough being Denyse O'Leary. She's one of the loudest voices for Intelligent Design on the net, and she has to perpetually struggle with her own ignorance in order to come up with new excuses to deny evolution, and all she ever accomplishes is to briefly dazzle us with her incompetence. She has come up with two new problems with evolution lately. Brace yourselves, put your coffee down, and swallow before you read them. I'll will not be held accountable for damaged keyboards!
How about this? Macroevolution is about changes in form and size, which kittens do routinely as they grow up.…