creationism
tfk | November 3, 2009Todd Wood is a creationist. He is a professor at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in 1925. He is, in particular, a professor of baraminology, the creationist notion that his particular Christian God created the "kinds" in the first week, and that by careful measurement, he can identify those "kinds." He thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. He thinks evolution is wrong, but he also freely acknowledges that it is the very best scientific knowledge available, and has been on a minor crusade to move other creationists away from the…
gregladen | November 3, 2009Please do me a favor. Start collecting those bogus-ized copies of Darwin's Origin being distributed by Ray Comfort. We're low on firewood up at the cabin. Oh, and if you see Ray, puke on his shoes for me, OK?
It's not that I like burning books. But this is not burning books. When Ray Comfort distributes a faked-up copy of The Origin, he's committing a kind of intellectual violence. Tossing the books into the wood stove is a parry.
If you want to reduce the effects of global warming, you could always bury them in your garden thus sequestering the carbon they are made from.
Here are the…
pharyngula | November 3, 2009I could only get two paragraphs into that sleazebag's reply in the debate about his Origin giveaway before I had to close the window and throw him away.
A major concern of Genie Scott was that the copy of On the Origin of Species sent to her by my publisher was missing "four crucial chapters," as well as Darwin's introduction. She will be pleased to know that the second printing of 170,000 copies (the one that we will give to students) is the entire book. Not one word will be omitted.
Then perhaps Comfort should have acknowledged that it was a dishonest move on his part in the first place?…
pharyngula | November 1, 2009You've probably all heard by now that Ray Comfort is coming out with his own butchered version of Darwin's Origin, with big chunks cut out of it, and a deeply stupid introduction slapped on. It's within his rights to do that, since the book is in the public domain now (as is, say, the KJV Bible), but it's also a metaphor for the sleaziness of creationism. They have no original ideas, so all they can do is steal the work of real scientists; their ideas are contradicted by the evidence, so their only strategy is to delete the parts that make them uncomfortable, and put a false spin on what's…
pharyngula | October 29, 2009Ron Numbers gave a brief history of creationism, reminding us that perhaps a majority of the people in the world reject Darwin, and he also emphasized a few facts in that history that many would find surprising.
There was no organized opposition to evolution until the 1920s, when it was marshalled by William Jennings Bryan, who was most concerned about the ethical implications of evolution. He made the point that the popular movie about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind, was historically inaccurate. One of the most memorable moments in the movie was when Darrow pinned Bryan down on the date…
tfk | October 29, 2009There's been much ink spilled lately about the latest work from the authors of Freakonomics. I should say before getting into this that I haven't read their last book, and don't plan to read the sequel. I also haven't read any of Malcolm Gladwell's books, for largely the same reasons (note that the Freakonomists apparently acknowledge that they cut one section of their latest book because Gladwell scooped them). Basically, I see these sorts of books as attempts by minimally-informed dilettantes to insert themselves into complex topics by applying a canned methodology and pretending that…
razib | October 29, 2009Carl Zimmer points me an article about a former anthropologist who has some weird ideas about the origin of man:
Since his resignation from the university in 1990, however, Horn has changed his tune. Once a staunch Darwinist and tenured CSU anthropology professor, Horn has devoted the last 19 years of his life to the study of alternative theories of human origin.
After receiving a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University and while teaching at CSU, Horn focused his energies on the study of the evolution of non-human primates, his wife Lynette Horn said.
He now advocates the theory that…
pharyngula | October 28, 2009Answers in Genesis, that site that tries to promote an alternative view to natural origins, has put up an article to answer that question that I'm sure is pressing on everyone's mind as we get close to Halloween: Are demons real?. You won't be surprised to learn that AiG's answer is that yes, they are.
According to the Bible, demons are real spiritual and personal beings, not just forces or phenomena in the physical and psychological realm. Various Bible passages reveal that they have intellect, emotions, and will. They think, hate, and choose plans of action against God, Christ, and mankind…
tfk | October 27, 2009Jason Rosenhouse, criticizing Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's reply to Jerry Coyne's review of their book in Science, ends with this thought:
You can not consistently argue that one side hurts the cause every time they open their mouths, but then object that you are not telling them to keep quiet. Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this, as has been explained to M and K many times. No one thinks they want the government to come in and do anything. To be honest, I'm baffled that M and K persist in getting so irate on this point. Of course they want people like Dawkins to keep…
tfk | October 27, 2009
I'll be back in Kansas to take part in the celebration of KCFS's tenth anniversary, and I hope to see you all there
pharyngula | October 27, 2009I'm going to be in this silly debate on "Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?" with creationist kook Jerry Bergman on 16 November, sponsored by CASH and the local Kook Central. The latest hangup, though, is that the creationists want to have a pre- and post-debate survey, and they plan to give the audience these questions:
I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in all schools, public and private.
Strongly DisagreeDisagreeUndecidedAgreeStrongly Agree
I think intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution by teachers who support it, without…
pharyngula | October 23, 2009I almost forgot — in 1658, Archbishop Ussher determined that the world was created precisely at 9am, 23 October, 4004 BC, making today the official creation day, and the earth 6012 years old.
Stop laughing, people. There are some who still seriously believe that: I just got spam from Whirled Nut Daily pushing this very silly book, The Annals of the World, buy James Ussher. They call it a masterpiece. I call it a quaint old oddity.
tfk | October 22, 2009Slacktivist is talking sense. He notes a common problem in dealing with creationists:
I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things.
In particular, they use the word "theory" in ways that don't reflect the term's actual meaning in…
razib | October 22, 2009I've pointed out before that the most (reputedly) secular Muslim majority country, Turkey, is more friendly to Creationism and more religious than the United States. This is why I get really agitated by those who argue that Turkey should join the European Union, it isn't culturally appropriate. Europeans might be prejudiced against Turks because they're "oriental" (in the old sense) and Muslim, but that doesn't mean that Turks are just like any European in values. Liberal elites terrified of seeming prejudiced and Eurocentric don't want to acknowledge this generality of difference, but it is…
pharyngula | October 21, 2009Whoa. Richard Dawkins appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Hewitt, in case you didn't know, is one of those far right radio wingnuts, a lawyer with a blog who defended George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and always sides with religious conservatives in the culture wars.
It's a fairly long interview, and you can see Hewitt trying to make lawyerly probes to lead Dawkins away from the book, and he's also good at making lawyerly innuendo for his already anti-Dawkins audience — he's constantly trying to cast doubt on the evidence for evolution, for instance — and you can tell that Richard is getting…
gregladen | October 20, 2009To answer that question briefly, it is really really old if you mean "how old are the oldest rocks that are exposed by the Grand Canyon," and it is probably just a few million years old (5 or 6 by some estimates) if you mean "how long did the canyon itself take to form."
An African peneplain elevated by doming along the Eastern Rift Valley. The original surface, once flat but now raised as "mountains" in the distance, is shown by the dotted line.
A repost
But Creationists, of course, have a different story, especially young earth creationists. I'm not going to recount it here. If you want to…
pharyngula | October 18, 2009Americans have to own up to a little bit of an inferiority complex in one thing: our accents. If you watch TV at all, you know that whenever a documentary wants its viewers to be impressed with the erudition of the narrator, it's got to have a British accent — it sounds so posh and educated and aristocratic, you know.
I have a cure.
Watch the videos below. These are direct recordings from the exhibits in a creation museum in the UK, and you get to hear those lovely British voices reciting the most godawful drivel, the most cliched creationist nonsense, the most ridiculous lies, and I…
pharyngula | October 16, 2009Ah, this is going to be painfully dreary. Why do I let myself get dragged into these podium battles with kooks? I'm committed, anyway. Come on out to the UMTC next month for a game of kick-the-puppy. I'm going to be coming down off a real high that weekend, the IGERT symposium on evo-devo, where I'm actually going to learn something, and the next day I have to stand up with these clowns. Do me a favor and show up to ask some leading questions about science in the Q&A so I can talk about some interesting stuff.
This is the ad copy from the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. They're…
pharyngula | October 16, 2009One of my favorite examples of the step-by-step evolution of molecules has been the work coming out of Joe Thornton's lab on glucocorticoid receptors. It's marvelous stuff that nails down the changes, nucleotide by nucleotide.
It's also work that Michael Behe called "piddling", despite the fact that it directly addresses the claims of irreducible complexity. Have you ever noticed how the creationists will make grand demands (show me how a duck evolved from a crocodile!) and then reject every piece of fossil evidence you might show them because there are still "gaps"? This is the converse of…
pharyngula | October 16, 2009I was just catching up on a few blogs, and noticed all this stuff I missed about Jonathan Wells' visit to Oklahoma. And then I read Wells' version of the event, and just about choked on my sweet mint tea.
The next person--apparently a professor of developmental biology--objected that the film ignored facts showing the unity of life, especially the universality of the genetic code, the remarkable similarity of about 500 housekeeping genes in all living things, the role of HOX genes in building animal body plans, and the similarity of HOX genes in all animal phyla, including sponges. 1Steve…