creationism
gregladen | November 16, 2009Bergman gave the argument FOR Intelligent Design, and Myers gave the argument AGAINST.
I have never seen an argument against Intelligent design so well made. It would seem that Intelligent Design is a point of view rather than a coherent theory, one that emerges as a socio political side-effect of the struggle between atheism and religion, one that has many proponents but no valid scientific published research to support it. Intelligent design, according to what I saw argued, makes little internal coherent sense. It is based on a two step process of reasoning: Irreducible complexity, which…
gregladen | November 16, 2009I believe they are trying to keep it secret, but that's Robert Luhn swinging around the big knife while raging about Ray Comfort:
The source of this video is the new NCSE Don't Dis Drwin site, HERE.
gregladen | November 16, 2009Tomorrow, the NCSE will release a response to Ray Comfort's tricked-out version of Darwin's Origin of Species.
I got a sneak preview of the web site and if you are good, I can let you see it too.
(a GLB exclusive!)
First, you need to go here and click around and get interested in dopplegangers. Then come right back.
...
OK, you're back, cool.
The new site addresses this gosh-awful rendition of the Origin of Species put out by the creationists that includes a creationist introduction and some pre-quote mined text. The NCSE has responded.
On November 19th, Los Angeles-based creationist…
gregladen | November 16, 2009In Going Rogue: An American Life Sarah Palin make sthe claim that she does not believe in evolution. She has not been so straightfoward in the past on this topic, according to think progress.
...she talks about creationism, saying she "didn't believe in the theory that human beings -- thinking, loving beings -- originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea" or from "monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees."
This is a flip flop from what she said during the campaign. Sara Palin is a flip flopper. Spread it around.
gregladen | November 16, 2009MnCSE stands for Minnesota Citizens for Science Education.
If you are a Minnesotan, this will of course be of direct interest to you. If you are interested in science education issues (read: defending our children against the onslaught of the Creashunist Foes!!!1!!) then you will find it to be a model example of a state-wide non-profit.
There is also this cool thing on the right side bar that has a picture of something cool, and you click on it, and find out what it is.
The site is here.
And please, do have a look at this thing at Seed Magazine if you have not yet. Thanks.
pharyngula | November 16, 2009She has so much of it to spread around, too. Sarah Palin's memoir reveals her unsurprising opinion about evolution.
Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she "didn't believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea" or from "monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees." In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: "My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years…
pharyngula | November 16, 2009For those who were wondering, it's still happening. 7:30pm tonight, at the North Star Ballroom in the St Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave. S. The topic is "Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?". I'll be there. It's going to be recorded. I'll probably be available for conversation afterwards, briefly…I still have to drive all the way back to Morris tonight.
The infamous Skatje will also be in attendance.
laelaps | November 16, 2009
The display of horse evolution at the AMNH as created by W.D. Matthew. Price reproduced this illustration without permission in his creationist textbook The New Geology.
The 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" put scientists on the defensive. It did not matter that the defendant in the famous case, John Scopes, probably never taught evolution in a Tennessee school (he was only a substitute teacher and football coach who agreed to take the fall so that the ACLU could test a law that barred evolution from schools); the issue that everyone was concerned about was the conflict between science and…
pharyngula | November 14, 2009I was going to blog along with the talks today, but my note-taking computer, a little netpc, decided to turn up dead on arrival when I sat down to start listening — I had to take notes on paper. It felt medieval. There were a bunch of good talks and I'll transcribe them later when I get a chance.
For now, I just have a brief moment before I head off to the next event, so I'll leave you with a couple of Immensely Difficult Questions for Evolution that were just sent to me.
Q1. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there not any other intelligent
beings that have evolved from other animals?…
pharyngula | November 13, 2009Plans are afoot to build a creation "science" education center in Henning, Minnesota — about two hours north of Morris. They plan to push the simple-minded literalist creationist claim that the earth is 6,000 years old and peddle the same BS that the Creation "Museum" does — it's stark raving mad. These quotes tell the whole story:
The aim, Schultz said, is to provide families and young people with information they can use to respectfully question differing points of view they may encounter, like at school.
"What we're finding is, many kids are subject to ridicule, lower grades, being…
pharyngula | November 11, 2009Why is it always 10 questions? Couldn't they just ask one really good question? I'd prefer that to these flibbertigibbet deluges of piddling pointlessnesses that the creationists want to fling at us. I think it's because they want to make sure no one spends too much time showing how silly each individual question is.
A few years ago, Jonathan Wells came up with his 10 questions to ask your biology teacher — they were largely drawn from his book, Icons of Evolution, and they were awful — they were only difficult to answer if you knew nothing of the science and accepted the dishonest…
laelaps | November 10, 2009
A mammoth as restored in Gosse's Omphalos. In Gosse's view of history, however, such a scene never actually existed. The bones of the mammoth existed in the earth from the time of Creation and had never given form to a living animal.
Without a doubt, Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos is one of the strangest books I have ever read. Published in 1857, two years before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would cause the public and academics alike to take evolution more seriously, Gosse's book was an attempt to rescue Creation itself from the perceived threat of science denuded of Christian…
pharyngula | November 9, 2009I'm feeling a bit nauseous right now. I'm not sure whether I'm coming down with the flu, or whether it was merely the monthly arrival of answers update, the newsletter from Answers in Genesis, which is mainly a catalog selling garish lies.
Anyway, the reason I'm writing this instead of either puking into the ceramic shrine or tossing the rag into the trash is that Ken Ham has pulled his usual stunt of pulling a quote from some godless critic of his "museum" and wrapping a pious sermon around it, without attribution or linkage. In this case, the quote is from someone Ham refers to only as "a…
razib | November 8, 2009He addresses the Behe diavlog. Sort of. McWhorter states that he did not find the rebuttals to the arguments in Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution persuasive. Fair enough, but I would be curious as to what other books on evolution he has read (I think he mentioned Sean Carroll?). The math in something like John Maynard Smith's Evolutionary Genetics is really not that hard (mostly algebra). One of the major problems I have with intelligent, open-minded people, who have looked into the "debate" and are not convinced about evolution is that they know the terms of the "argument" only in the…
razib | November 7, 2009Another article on Creationism in Turkey:
To John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, however, the news could hardly be more encouraging.
"Why I'm so interested in seeing creationism succeed in Turkey is that evolution is an evil concept that has done such damage to society," said Morris, a Christian who has led several searches for Noah's Ark in eastern Turkey. Members of his group have addressed Turkish conferences numerous times.
...
After a decade in the trenches, Kence said he believes aggressive creationism "is part of a larger plan to convert people to a…
gregladen | November 7, 2009From the NCSE:
The phenomenon of Islamic creationism was addressed by two major newspapers, The New York Times (November 3, 2009) and the Boston Globe (October 25, 2009), in the wake of a recent conference at Hampshire College on evolution in the Muslim world. (Webcasts of the conference presentations will be available on-line by November 15, 2009, according to the conference website.)
The Globe's article began arrestingly, with the news that the Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera's website -- a major news source in the Middle East -- triumphantly misdescribed the recently described early…
gregladen | November 6, 2009From the NCSE:
NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott was invited to debate Ray Comfort, a creationist in the news recently for his plans to distribute copies of the Origin of Species with his own introduction, on the God & Country blog of U.S. News & World Report. Comfort began the debate on October 29, 2009; Scott replied on October 30, 2009; Comfort responded on November 2, 2009; and Scott replied on November 3, 2009. The debate, according to Dan Gilgoff, who maintains the blog, elicited "more feedback than any other issue on this blog has received over any similar stretch in…
pharyngula | November 5, 2009This argument is a new one on me.
If you can't read it, click on it to see a larger original. I can try to summarize it, though. The middle finger is the longest finger on the human hand, and da Vinci drew it in his famous figure of Vitruvian Man, which illustrates ideal proportions…therefore, the Big Bang didn't happen.
I think that if you do a lot of drugs, that will make sense.
I like Jerry Coyne's explanation better.
pharyngula | November 4, 2009The copy-&-paste creationist is a familiar figure in internet debates — they don't have an original idea in their head, but they know how to copy some long screed off the internet and paste it into a comment box, almost always without attribution, or even a link back to their source. I am completely unsurprised by the fact that Ray Comfort is a plagiarist who ripped off a brief biography of Darwin.
He stole the one piece of his introductory essay to the Origin that wasn't awful. I suspect the rest, though, is of similarly dubious provenance.
The remainder of the pamphlet is as expected.…
pharyngula | November 4, 2009Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I'd be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise…