creationism
pharyngula | January 9, 2010Once again, the Discovery Institute stumbles all over itself to crow victory over evolution, led by the inspiring figure of that squeaking incompetent, Casey Luskin. This time, what has them declaring the bankruptcy of evolution is the discovery of tetrapod trackways in Poland dating back 395 million years. I know, it's peculiar; every time a scientist finds something new and exciting about our evolutionary history, the bozos at the DI rush in to announce that it means the demise of Darwinism. Luskin has become the Baghdad Bob of creationism.
The grounds for this announcement is the bizarre…
tfk | January 8, 2010Billy Dembski is concerned. His latest book, The End of Christianity, was attacked by a Baptist minister as a work of theistic evolution, and Dembski defended his honor by charging that windmill:
Johnny T. Helms' concerns about my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY as well as his concerns about my role as a seminary professor in the SBC are unfounded. I subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. I believe Adam and Eve were literal historical persons specially created by God. I am not, as he claims, a theistic evolutionist. Within the…
tfk | January 8, 2010This headline is hardly news, but still noteworthy. A few days ago, Todd Wood (a young earth creationist from Bryan College, in Dayton, TN) noted an article in ICR's Acts & Facts on trilobite tracks by his predecessor at Bryan, creationist Kurt Wise:
"Why would dozens of feet of rock have tracks but not the animals that made them?" asks Wise. He proposes that the Flood uniquely solves this dilemma.
He quotes Wise:
What if, when the "fountains of the great deep were broken up" (Genesis 7:11), the spreading waters surprised the trilobites living on the ocean bottom? As the water became…
pharyngula | January 7, 2010His class was going to go on a field trip to a museum; his parents denied the trip and scrawled their reasons why on the note.
Note: Just to let you it is not that we don't believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay…
sa smith | January 6, 2010Hey, you remember last fall when Stephen '1985' Meyer came to OU?
And I went to see him, not Johnny Wells, so Wells threw an epic tantrum?
Smith left abruptly after the lecture and did not stay for the Q&A.
"Hi! Im Johnny Wells! I wasnt at the lecture, but Im going to tell everyone what happened at the lecture anyway!"
Actually, Johnny, there were still hands up at the end of the Q&A. The last Q was given to none other than my resident troll, Rho. And, I not only stayed for the entire Q&A, I stayed and spoke with Rho, Brian, StGJM, and other members of OUIDEA/Trinity until we…
pharyngula | January 6, 2010They've gone too far. It was bad enough that the creationists treat science with such contempt, but now…the fundy kooks hate science fiction, too!
Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!
Hey! Sagan was a physicist, and Asimov was a chemist; of the other evil science fiction authors listed, Heinlein, Clarke…
pharyngula | January 6, 2010Carl Wieland, the creationist clown from Australia, wrote a bitter article denouncing atheists and scientists for refusing to give him a platform to yodel nonsense on, and one of the things he did was link to my my public refusal to debate him. Unfortunately, what that meant is that all of his Too-Stupid-To-Know-They're-Stupid acolytes came charging over to declare that creationism was too scientific, evolutionism is a religion, scientists are afraid to debate their pet idiots, you're all mean poopyheads who call us names, yadda yadda yadda. It's turned into a regular storm of argument that…
gregladen | January 5, 2010.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module"...
Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I understand she gave her Life Science teachers a very hard time. This is the only contemporary depiction of Joan of…
pharyngula | January 4, 2010Perhaps you thought Texas' malign influence was confined to corrupting science teaching in their own state. It's far, far worse than that.
Until recently, Texas's influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation's largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.
Read the rest and tremble. It's not just evolution, it's…
mikethemadbiologist | January 3, 2010Before I start, let me say that I have no personal animus towards Chris Mooney: my limited interactions with him have been civil, and I agree with him on many things. But this beating up the victim has to stop. Sure, I agree with Mooney that many scientists need to learn how to communicate with the public better (although Randy Olsen really needs to stop setting up straw men to knock down). But many scientists do communicate with the public, in one form or another, to the extent they are able to do so.
If a reporter contacts me, I always try to make time to speak with, usually to the…
pharyngula | January 1, 2010I've been hearing a few complaints lately that there has been a shortage of creationist cretins around here — you all need an occasional fool to gnaw on to keep your fangs sniny and your pelts glossy, I know. Well, aren't you lucky: Carl Wieland, head of the Australian contingent of global wackaloons, put up an irate reply to the atheist rejection of his offer to debate us. We're getting a sudden surge because it included this summary of my dismissal:
PZ Myers' "in your face, Christians" response
PZ Myers, however, while not giving the courtesy of a direct reply, did so firmly and…
pharyngula | December 31, 2009Two distressing news stories out of that wealthy western state:
Berkeley High School has a serious problem: it's a good, relatively well-funded school, but black and latino students aren't doing as well as white students. Their solution: kill those expensive science labs and redirect the money to remedial classes. Science classes with no labs? Inconceivable! That's what a body of earnest, well-meaning, and apparently scientifically illiterate parents and teachers have decided to do.
You cannot learn about science without doing science. It's like deciding to continue to teach theater and…
pharyngula | December 30, 2009Zeno has posted the complete text of a long creationist screed published in the Sacramento Bee. It's got everything: the second law of thermodynamics, the fallacy of the excluded middle, the 'law' of biogenesis, mysterious barriers between species, and of course, the Imminent Death of Darwinism. It's tediously familiar, and you've probably heard it all many times before. Only two things make it interesting.
It was published in 1981, and it's mostly indistinguishable from creationist rhetoric in 2009. Which is rather depressing, if you think about it.
The author is someone who also defends…
pharyngula | December 30, 2009I've had a few run-ins with this wacky retired chemist and obsessive creationist, and recently pestered Jeffrey Shallit. There's a good tip in that account; Shallit just mentioned my name, and Skell fled. I guess I've become an anti-creationist talisman now.
clock | December 29, 2009In a recent post, my SciBling Jason Rosenhouse with whom I usually agree on these matters, voices a strong disagreement with this quote (from Thomas Dixon's book Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2008):
Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge.
Jason counters that Galileo affair, as well as the more modern Creationist wars, are primarily and perhaps entirely…
pharyngula | December 28, 2009Liberty University is fielding an expedition to Turkey to dig up Noah's Ark.
When your professors are looking for a 4,000 year old boat that beached on a mountain top after a global flood, you might as well give up on any pretense to scholarly credibility, OK?
pharyngula | December 25, 2009This is absurd. The Italian National Research Council is sponsoring the publication of a creationist book, titled Evolutionism: The Decline of an Hypothesis. Right away, from the title alone, you can tell that the book has problems: evolution is not a theory in decline, no matter how much the creationists declare it so, but is guiding a thriving research program. The contents are something else, too: apparently, it declares that dinosaurs went extinct just 40,000 years ago, and that radiometric dating is wrong.
Wow. It's not just a creationist book, but a young earth creationist book. Right…
clock | December 22, 2009If a publisher offered me a contract to write a book under a title that would be something like "Unscientific America", how would I go about it?
I would definitely be SUCH a scientist! But, being such a scientist does not mean indulging in Sesquipedalian Obscurantism. Being such a scientist means being dilligent, thorough and systematic in one's reasearch. And then being excited about presenting the findings, while being honest about the degree of confidence one can have in each piece of information.
I was not offered a book contract, and I do not have the resources and nine or twelve months…
pharyngula | December 22, 2009Ken Ham is distressed that he gets no respect. This triggers a little litany of self-defense.
Guess what's missing from Sunday's Cincinnati Enquirer's (our main Cincinnati newspaper) long articles about local Christmas/holiday activities?
This long piece-plus other Christmas-related articles--appeared in the paper yesterday (Sunday). No mention of the Creation Museum and its Bethlehem's Blessings Christmas programs--not even the free day on Thursday (the museum is open to the public for free for Christmas Eve), even though through our publicist, we sent two news releases to the paper about…