creationism
razib | August 27, 2009Just a quick follow-up to the previous post, as I finished watching the whole Behe-McWhorter exchange. Notes:
1) McWhorter is an atheist, and implies he's always been an atheist (or at least not a theist).
2) He's really impressed by Michael Behe's arguments, to the point where he might assent to Michael Behe being the Isaac Newton of evolutionary genetics (though his summation of some of the jaw-dropping talking points in The Edge of Evolution leaves me a bit skeptical as to McWhorter's deep knowledge of basic evolutionary ideas).
3) Part of the issue really has to do with the…
sa smith | August 27, 2009Ive been puking all morning.
No, Im not pregnant.
Its just that Michael Behe recently filmed a show for BloggingHeads with some dude, John McWhorter. Never heard of the guy, but he gave Behe one hot, 44 minute blow-job.
On BloggingHeads.
BloggingHeads.
Bonus: Ive been trying to debate Behe for several years now, and hes told the mediators of those proposed debates to fuck off. Yet Behe somehow managed to find the time to get deep-throated by whats-his-face. How convenient!
Whats-his-face was apparently ashamed of himself for filming this piece of hard-core TARD pron and asked BHTV to take…
gregladen | August 26, 2009If you are a teacher or a parent you may find some of these books especially useful to: a) prepare yourself; b) give to your child's teacher or a colleague; or c) give to a school administrator. Seriously.
Each link is to a review of the book to help you decide if you are interested.
The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Evolution vs. Creationism by Eugenie Scott, Second Edition
Don't forget to have a look at this post as well.
pharyngula | August 25, 2009In his "museum," he didn't single out any atheists, but he does have displays berating liberal Christians, like Slacktivist. You'll see why.
pharyngula | August 25, 2009I've really gotten under the skin of the frauds at Answers in Genesis — now Terry Mortenson is whining about my cruelty and lying frantically.
Last week I gave a lecture in the Creation Museum on "Millions of Years: Where Did the Idea Come From?" This is based on my PhD research. The next day the well-known (and self-proclaimed) atheist Dr. P.Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, wrote a blog post about me with his usual caustic language. After labeling me a "crackpot," he then proceeded to critique my lecture . . . without even hearing it (not very academic, is…
tfk | August 24, 2009In 1925, John Scopes was tried and convicted of violating Tennessee's Butler Act. His trial was ginned up as a constitutional test case by the ACLU and as an economic stimulus plan for the town of Dayton, TN. The trial was promoted as "the trial of the century," celebrity lawyers were recruited for both sides, and the town did all it could to attract journalists and onlookers.
The trial wound up famously embarrassing William Jennings Bryan, who died shortly after the trial, and before an appellate court overturned the conviction he won on a technicality. While laws like the Butler Act stayed…
pharyngula | August 24, 2009I must have really stung those poor fellows at the Creation "Museum". They've added a new article in the Jason Lisle ouevre which takes a few silly slaps at me, and also perpetuates the image of Lisle as the most boring pedant ever. As usual, his schtick is always the same: he accuses everyone else of committing horrible logical fallacies, therefore, God. This one made me laugh, though. The fallacy du jour is the question-begging epithet, in which someone uses leading or insulting language in addressing a claim to discredit it.
As an example, he uses a quote from me…and I freely admit to…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? , atheism, religion, water, streaming video
The only people who are so stupid as to not understand the answer to that question are the creationists themselves.
pharyngula | August 22, 2009His recent "peer-reviewed paper" has prompted one giant to look down and notice: Joe Felsenstein gives it a brief dismissal. Dembski has apparently graduated from "not even wrong" to "irrelevant"!
tfk | August 21, 2009Disco. hustler Casey Luskin pleads ignorance to fend off an argument by Ken Miller:
In a recent post, I noted that Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Beheâs arguments on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade in his book, Only a Theory. When I blogged at the end of last year about Millerâs similar mistakes at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Dr. Miller responded by making me aware of something I did not previously know: apparently Michael Behe wrote the section in Of Pandas and People on blood clotting.
Under normal circumstances, it would suffice to congratulate Casey for…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009A short letter in this week's Science echoes a point I made in my last article: lying to students will not win them over to your cause. It's what will eventually lead to the defeat of creationism, which prompts them to lie ever more in order to drown out that damning evidence.
I was always a mediocre student, especially in high school. I never really knew what I wanted to do, and nothing seemed to excite me. This changed in my senior year, when a creationist visited my biology class.
On that fateful day, all the science students were herded into the school auditorium, where we listened to a…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009
That Answers in Genesis crackpot, Terry Mortenson, is speaking on "Millions of Years" at the Creation "Museum". Those of us who visited that circus of charlatanry know that this is one of their obsessions — the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old is one of the wrecking balls atheists use to destroy faith.
He's right, of course. It's a very useful tool. When fundamentalists tie their faith absolutely to a claim that is easily refuted, that contradicts the evidence, and that requires them to constantly escalate their denial and delusions in order to sustain their belief, it makes…
pharyngula | August 21, 2009His recent "peer-reviewed paper" gets scrutinized, and is judged: boring, trivial, and pretentious. Just like the author!
pharyngula | August 20, 2009Speaking of intellectual cowardice from creationists, we have another shining example: Pastor Tom Estes. You remember Pastor Tom; squirrelly fella who darted up to shake my hand at the Creation "Museum" before running away to hide behind the creationist staff, shrill commenter, proud owner of a very silly blog? Well, he has just declared his blog an atheist-free zone. All you annoying people who wouldn't simply accept his patriarchal authority finally compelled him to restrict his readership, and you had to register to comment. Somebody was trying to register under my name (I suspect his…
pharyngula | August 20, 2009Unbelievable. Dembski is bragging about getting a peer-reviewed paper published — in IEEE Transactions, so not a biology journal, and it's a paper about search algorithms — and he misrepresents Dawkins again. He just had to toss in his garbled version of the "Methinks it is a weasel" program in which Dembski has consistently gotten the algorithm stupidly wrong, and he does it again. The man really doesn't understand selection at all.
To make it even more amusing and even more like a standard creationist on the web, people pointed out to him in the comments that he was still getting it wrong,…
pharyngula | August 19, 2009They're going to have a "Science" Fair at the Creation "Museum", which seems extremely cruel. Little kids with some enthusiasm for science are going to show up at that circus and be misled about what science actually is, and see their careers stunted before they even begin.
But let's be charitable and see what they're going to do. They're going to emphasize hypothesis testing, experiment, and good methodology, and they also have a restriction against product comparisons (the stuff of commercials: is Brand X paper towel actually more absorbent than Brand Y?) and simple demonstrations, like…
pharyngula | August 17, 2009My talk at the Secular Student Alliance (given the day after the Creation "Museum" trip) is now available online. I think this video was put together by Ashley Paramore, whose smiling face appears near the end of the video — she was also one of several mischievous people who disobeyed a certain sign.
pharyngula | August 17, 2009This was predictable. As I mentioned, there was a lecture by a Scientist with a Ph.D. in Science from Harvard on Sunday, by a fellow named Dr Nathaniel Jeanson, which is part of a fairly typical trend nowadays: the devout creationist who grinds his way through a graduate program to earn an advanced degree so he can disregard everything he learned to wave his title like a victory flag and pretend to an authority he does not have. Other well-known examples are Jonathan Wells and Marcus Ross — their degrees are meaningless since they clearly prioritize the trappings of authority over the…
pharyngula | August 16, 2009Here's a little secret about getting a graduate degree: it helps to be a little bit crazy. You are dedicating a good chunk of your life to the pursuit of some very abstract knowledge after all, and as a reward, you get faint hopes of landing a low-paying job in your field. A bigger secret: you can even be a lot crazy and still manage to land that degree (you, in the back: stop pointing and snickering at me!)
So it means precisely nothing when someone brags about finding a Ph.D. willing to espouse utter nonsense. It happens all the time — the degree in itself is not an indicator of credibility…
pharyngula | August 16, 2009Some very persnickety people have been demanding that I apologize for riding a fiberglas dinosaur at the Creation "Museum", because it had a sign saying it was intended only for those under the age of 12. I've thought about it. There is that sign, after all, and if I'd looked a little more carefully, I might have noticed it.
But then, I realized that I still would have clambered aboard. There isn't the slightest twinge of repentance in my heart. I'll even encourage everyone else to jump on, if you go there — it's irresistibly ludicrous, and is a good way to thumb your nose at the goofballs…