creationism
pharyngula | June 18, 2013Don't you hate it when you get up in the morning and the first thing you read on the internet is that the news that your entire career has been a waste of time, your whole field of study has collapsed, and you're going to have to rethink your entire future? Happens to me all the time. But then, I read the creationist news, so I've become desensitized to the whole idea of intellectual catastrophes.
Today's fresh demolition of the whole of evolutionary theory comes via Christian News, which reports on a paper in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution which challenges the ape to human…
pharyngula | June 16, 2013Daniel Friedmann has found it! It's the scaling factor that lets you convert the 'days' of God in the book of Genesis into human years. This is reported with total credulity in the Toronto Star.
Let’s take the word “day.” In terms of the first six days, they’re “creation days,” which are different from just days. There are a number of sources in all the religions that interpret those days as periods of time.
I’m certainly not the first. What is unique about my work is that I went into the sources and I said, “Look, if the Bible is self-contained and if I say a day is not 24 hours, then what…
pharyngula | May 15, 2013Remember the good old days, when you could always trust a creationist to claim their theory was not religious, and then they'd turn around and neatly undermine their own claims for you? Think Bill Buckingham at the Dover trial, who completely won the case for the good guys by saying a lot of stupid stuff.
Wait, good old days? I think I meant now.
The Louisville Area Christian Educator Support (LACES) organization had a conference, where Bryce Hibbard, principal of Southern High School (a public school!) was one of the speakers. He first tries to claim that teaching creationism in the school…
gregladen | May 8, 2013In honor of Genie Scott's imminent retirement as Executive Director of the NCSE, you are hereby offered a free downloadable PDF excerpt form Genie's classic book.
Click here to download the PDF.
Click here to read my review of the book.
Click here to find out about other books and resources related to creationism.
Click here to find some resources for life science teachers.
gregladen | May 7, 2013Here is a presentation by Genie Scott of the National Center for Science Education.
Far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers, but both camps use similar strategies to promote their views. Genie Scott explores the connections, the similarities, and the divergent ideologies. Where: New York. When: 10/23/2011. Hosted by the New York City Skeptics.
gregladen | May 6, 2013My friend and colleague, executive director of the National Center for Science Education's Genie Scott, will retire by the end of the year. She's been director of the NCSE for 26 years. Genie is a key player, perhaps the key player, in the battle to keep science in the classroom and other things that are not science out of the classroom, in public schools. She's gotten piles of awards and has done a huge amount of great work. While a lot of people have been involved in this fight, I think it is fair to give Genie top billing in such major and momentous efforts as the fight in Dover (which…
pharyngula | April 27, 2013Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn't the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It's hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance.
I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman…
pharyngula | April 16, 2013Every time I despair at the dreadful nonsense from the Discovery Institute, I can reliably turn to Answers in Genesis and despair harder. They've just announced that "after two centuries of research", they've finally determined the dates of the Ice Age. They've even announced that they're going to have a chat on their facebook page at 2pm ET today if you really want to learn more. They have figured out the dates of the Ice Age (singular) from reading their Bibles closely.
You might quibble and say that the Bible doesn't say anything about glaciers or ice sheets or changes in climate, so how…
tfk | April 12, 2013Disco. 'tute "research" director Casey Luskin is sad. Congressional Quarterly wrote about creationism and didn't say nice things about "intelligent design" creationism. Casey insists that ID shouldn't be lumped in with young earth creationism or geocentrism, asserting:
the vast majority of leaders of the ID movement accept the conventional age of the Earth and the universe
This is a tough claim to judge, and Casey's word choice here is interesting. Calling the best scientific estimates of the age of the earth "conventional" leaves Casey wiggle room: does he regard 4.54 billion years as a mere…
pharyngula | April 9, 2013The New York Times has an article on the rise of predatory, fake science journals — these are journals put out by commercial interests with titles that sound vaguely like the real thing, but are not legitimate in any sense of the word. They exist only for the resource that open access publishing also uses, the dreaded page charge. PLoS (a good science journal), for instance, covers their publishing costs by charging authors $1350; these parasitic publishers see that as easy money, and put up cheap web-based "journals", draw in contributors, and then charge the scientists for publishing, often…
pharyngula | April 8, 2013Apoplexy is such an antique disease. I'd hate to die of it, just because is so unfashionable, but every time I read one of these stories about Answers In Genesis, I feel an attack coming on.
Yeah, they're working on building a replica of Noah's Ark. It's all part of their plan for defrauding the public. The author talked to people at the existing creation "museum", and hit one of those points that spike my blood pressure.
When I was at the Creation Museum I got talking to Greg Duck, an industrial courier who was visiting from Texas. He said his favourite part was a video where a creationist…
pharyngula | April 7, 2013It's a dying holiday, I'm sorry to say -- I completely forgot it last year. But I was reminded this year, so I'll mention it again. I think the proper way to celebrate it is simply to laugh at a creationist today.
The source of the holiday is a remarkable exhibition from Paul Nelson, who like several other creationists, loves to register and present at legitimate science conferences. The barriers are low, and many conferences are intended to give students an opportunity to present, so you'll often find that all you have to do is send in a fee and an abstract and you'll be allowed to put up a…
tfk | April 3, 2013Ever since Chris Mooney's Republican War on Science was published in 2005, folks have been looking for a way to argue that Democrats are just as bad. The standard example for this counternarrative, one which Mooney even offered in his book, was vaccine denial – the claim that vaccines cause autism or are otherwise dangerous.
Intuitively, this seems right. The folks and venues touting antivaxx conspiracy theories tended to be New Agey outlets, and the places facing outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases tended to be liberal strongholds, like Boulder, CO or Marin County, CA. That must mean…
tfk | April 1, 2013The University of Notre Dame's Center for the Study of Social Movements is hosting a dialogue on science and politics, and I'm rather pleased with my contribution: "Will Climate Change Denial Inherit the Wind?" Do check out the other essays in the dialogue, especially Jeffrey Guhin's discussion of some results from his observations of creationist Muslim and evangelical Christian schools in New York, and Kelly Moore's debunking of 5 myths about science and politics.
I've been noodling around with the ideas in my essay for a while, ever since reading Michael Lienesch's In the Beginning, which…
pharyngula | March 30, 2013Earlier today, Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this tweet:
I dig this graph, but I think it misses an outreach opportunity by ascribing common misconceptions to creationists only bouncingdodecahedrons.tumblr.com/post/17808416988
It links to a diagram showing evolution as a linear path rather than a branching tree, and it got me thinking about terribly popular misconceptions about evolution that were started by smart people, and a doozy came to mind. A whole collection of doozies, actually, from one single terribly clever person.
You've all heard the stupid creationist objection to evolution — "if…
pharyngula | March 28, 2013So you can stop sending me email about it now. Also, dear gob, but I despise the Huffington Post. They've started this recent flurry of publicity for deranged loon Mastropaolo with an awful article on his tired old stunt of announcing a $10,000 prize for a debate — an article in which they blithely consult the Discovery Institute to get their opinion that both evolution and young earth creationism are unproveable assertions that can't be tested by "observable science".
I've known about Mastropaolo for almost 20 years now. He's been on the same worn out horse all that time, doing exactly the…
pharyngula | March 25, 2013This is a new one for me. Earlier today I was summoned on Twitter to address an assertion by a creationist, @jarrydtrokis. I was slightly boggled.
He was baffled by eyelid development. It seems he thinks it requires…intelligent design!.
... Here's one for you to ponder :) Eye lids in the womb... How are they formed? #IntelligentDesign?
Wait, what? What's mystifying about eyelid formation?
The section of skin in the middle dies... How does it know to do that? And in a perfectly straight line???
Oh. It forms a straight line. Whoa. And he claims to have done research to get the answer.
The…
pharyngula | March 17, 2013After that debate between Tzortzis and Lawrence Krauss that was overshadowed by the disgraceful anti-egalitarian exhibition of Muslim misogyny, iERA is now trying a new tactic: they're releasing tiny snippets of the debate that they believe they can spin into anti-Krauss sentiment. Here's a perfect example, Krauss's reply to a question about the morality of incest.
The audience gasped when Krauss said it's not clear to him that incest is wrong, and then he went on to argue that there are biological and societal reasons why incest is not a good idea, but that he'd be willing to listen to…
pharyngula | March 15, 2013Oh, boy. The Intelligent Design creationists are all excited about a new paper that purports to have identified an intelligent signal in the genetic code.
Here's a new paper that can be added to the growing stack of intelligent-design articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even though the authors do not use the phrase "intelligent design," their reasoning centers on the detection of an intelligent signal embedded in the genetic code -- a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by a natural cause, "be it Darwinian, Lamarckian," chemical affinities or energetics, or any…
gregladen | March 14, 2013You know about the Atheists Nightmare, right? Also known as the Evolutionists Nightmare. No? It goes like this:
That's pretty darn convincing. Until someone opens up some closed thing and there is some new species in there, then EVOLUTION IS MADE UP!!!1!!!
Well, it turns out, Evolution is True. Some guy on the internet opened up an Oreo Cookie and inside was a new organism that could only be there IF IT EVOVED IN SIDE THE COOKIE!!1!! Look here's a picture:
PROOF THAT EVOLUTION IS TRUE: This spider evolved inside this Oreo Cookie!
A fake you say? A falsehood you say? Sorry, but Snopes…