creationism
pharyngula | August 16, 2009Ken Ham is whining about me again — this time, I am "this atheist professor". He really chokes over my name, doesn't he?
Anyway, that's not interesting. What is bizarre is this photo and question:
Where were these taken?
Answer: In the AiG parking lot when the 285 atheists visited. As one looks at the messages on these bumper stickers, we need to pray for these very lost people who so desperately need the Lord. Actually, I believe some of these messages really do reflect what the devil offered Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, "you shall become as gods…"
This is creepy on two levels: that Ken…
mikethemadbiologist | August 16, 2009Following on yesterday's post, we read that Rick Perlstein has similar thoughts:
Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present…
pharyngula | August 16, 2009When we Americans need a little reassurance that we aren't Number Last (or reminders that it could get worse), all we have to do is look to Turkey. A Turkish television show had a 'debate' that attempted to disprove evolution, in which the audience was treated to some serious intellectual problems.
They called in the question which evolution created angel and daemon, how felicities in the heaven evolved, how the snake came into existence out of the baton as well as the bird out of mud. The creationists tried to disprove evolution theory with these questions.
I give up. They're right.…
pharyngula | August 15, 2009Kevin Miller, screenwriter for the propaganda film Expelled, has a new project in the works that follows in the Christian movie tradition.
Creation, Resurrection Pictures' first original film project—a humorous and tearful story of a high school biology teacher's struggle to expose the lie of evolution, based on the life of creation evangelist Dr. Kent Hovind and written by Kevin Miller the writer of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for production in 2010.
I was rolling my eyes, nothing more, as I read that, until I hit those magic words, "Dr Kent Hovind"…then I had to smirk.…
pharyngula | August 15, 2009Cool, I'll accept the title. One of the reporters who joined us in Kentucky has a nice article on the Creation "Museum" trip in the Star Tribune. One thing I appreciate about it is that he actually quotes us on the scientific flaws in the exhibits.
There is a very silly quote from Ken Ham, of course.
"Our own, full-time Ph.D. scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts," replied Ham. "This man is obviously very angry at God and relishes in mocking Christianity -- spending a lot of his time fighting against someone he doesn't…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2009One of the things that has enabled the mainstreaming of various idiocies, from altie woo, to creationism, to global warming denialism is mainstream corporate media's inability to accurately describe lunacy. For obvious reasons, 'family-friendly' newspapers and teevee can't call creationists, birthers, or deathers batshit lunatic or fucking morons. This is where 'civility' (beyond the basic norms of decency when dealing with the mentally ill) and pretensions of 'balance' utterly fail.
In Idiot America, Charles Pierce provides a good example of how this works:
How does it work? This is how it…
pharyngula | August 14, 2009We have made Michael Ruse very sad and very angry. He has an essay up called Why I Think the New Atheists are a [Bloody] Disaster, in which he bemoans the way he has been abused by these brutal atheists, and explains how he thinks these godless scientists are damaging the cause of science and science education. Here's the heart of his pitiful complaint.
Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, likens me to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler at Munich. Jerry Coyne reviewed one of my books (Can a Darwinian be a Christian?) using the Orwellian quote that only…
gregladen | August 14, 2009The following are links to selected posts on this blog that are related to science education or the evolution-creationism 'debate.'
The Wedge Strategy
Teaching Creationism in Social Studies: The Wedge Strategy, Plan B
Teachers Under Fire
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know!
Drs Myers and Decker: Advice on Teaching Evolution
Ken Hubert, Hero of Life Science Teaching
Major Blunder in Science Reporting will Fuel Creationist Claims
Review of SMM Exhibit on Race and Racism
How fast does evolution happen?
Creationism and…
pharyngula | August 14, 2009Did you miss out on our trip to the Creation "Museum" last week? Do you wish you could see such amazing inanity on display, but you live far away and you just don't think it's worth the money? Or perhaps you just don't want to give AiG a penny. Well, here's your solution: make your own! It's easy, it's cheap, and trust me, it's just as scientifically accurate.
All you have to do is go to your local WalMart and browse the toy section. Get a random assortment of plastic animals, arrange them into a beautiful diorama, and take pictures. Presto! That's what these clever people did.
I just have…
razib | August 13, 2009Below I pointed to the rise in acceptance of evolution among the young, in particular the 18-30 cohort. There were some natural questions about other correlated demographic variables (I did point to data suggesting that this is not simply a byproduct of increased secularity of the young). Naturally one wonders about the impact of education. There's a problem with this: people who are 22 are far less likely to have graduate degrees than people who are 40, because most people are just finishing their undergraduate degree at this age! The comparison isn't fair (additionally, the reduction in the…
sa smith | August 13, 2009Kevin Miller, XI
Kevin Miller, ksī
Kevin Miller, *sigh*
I love how Intelligent Design is SO NOT Creationism.
I love how professional proponents of ID, when confronted by real scientists and real educated laymen, feign ignorance. Go all Po-Mo "different ways of knowing". Act like little know-it-alls, but when they get stuck and cant provide evidence for their parroted claims, they pull 'Oh gorsh golly! I aint no scientist!' And all their personal sources are conveniently Anon.
Kevin Miller XI, the fellow who wrote EXPELLED (you write documentaries?) did all that and more when he…
pharyngula | August 13, 2009We more or less blitzed through the "museum" last Friday, and I think I speak for many of the 300 when I say that we'd had enough lunacy for the day. Some of us, apparently, had stronger stomachs, and went back for Terry Mortenson's talk later that afternoon. Dr Mortenson is, I think, one of those people with Ph.D.s of whom Ken Ham is so proud…but man, that guy is freakin' nuts. He spoke about human evolution, and you can guess where that went. Well, maybe. I wouldn't have anticipated this:
I know. One minute they're telling us that Gawd created humans exactly as they are now, and all those…
gregladen | August 13, 2009Chris Comer was the Director of Science with the Texas Educaiton Agency until she was forced to resign in November of 2007. That happened because she disseminated information about an upcoming talk that would likely be critical of creationism. She was fired because the TEA (hee hee he said .... "tea") claimed a "neutrality" policy and claimed that Chris had broken the policy. Her reference, via email, to the upcoming talk was an endorsement of ... OMG! Evolution! Evolution over Creationism!!!
Yes folks, you read that right. Chis Comer was effectively fired from her job as director of…
razib | August 13, 2009The use of the word "Darwinist" is to catch the attention of Creationists, normally I'm not too warm to its usage in a scientific (as opposed to philosophical or historical) context. In any case, Jerry Coyne has a post up where he states:
The "new atheists" have been on the scene for exactly five years, beginning with Sam Harris's The End of Faith, published in 2004. But American's attitudes to evolution have been relatively unchanged (with 40+% denying it) for twenty-five years. This means two things.
This is true to a first approximation, and rather depressing. So I thought I would…
pharyngula | August 13, 2009That's what I must conclude from Anna Falling's priorities. She's running for the office of mayor, and her #1 most important issue, the one she's made the centerpiece of her campaign, is to get creationist displays installed in the Tulsa Zoo.
For Anna Falling, the road to city hall runs through the Tulsa Zoo. She's made her Christianity central to her platform and now the exhibit depicting the Christian story of Creationism is her first campaign promise.
"Today we are announcing that God will be glorified in this city. He shall not be shunned. Upon our election, we hereby commit to…
pharyngula | August 12, 2009Man, he is annoying. He is making a number of assertions about the age of the earth that are patently ridiculous: he claims 90% of all dating methods contradict the idea that the earth is millions of years old. This is simply not true. The key point in acceptance of the age of the earth is the concordance of the many methods.
When a caller asked him to name a few, he really couldn't. He mentioned the hoary old creationist assertion that the amount of salt in the ocean is inadequate to match a 4 billion year old earth — but salt levels are in a roughly steady state.
I tried to call in to do…
gregladen | August 12, 2009Well, I spent the morning with a wonderful group of Middle and High School teacher committed to doing an excellent job of teaching evolution in their classrooms. Then, I go check my email and I've got a similar number of people sending me this story about a person who could be the next mayor of Tulsa Oklahoma, apparently.
Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that also include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.
"It's first," she
said to calls of "hallelujah" at…
pharyngula | August 12, 2009Guess who is going to be on our local evangelical Christian radio station, KKMS, between 3 and 6 Central time? Ken Ham! You can call in at 651-289-4499 or 888-332-5169. I sort of suspect that the odds of me getting past their screeners is somewhere between "No way!" and "Hell no!", so I'll just have to listen in.
gregladen | August 12, 2009.... 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…
laelaps | August 12, 2009
True to my word I have been reading John Olson's creationism-infused novel Fossil Hunter. I am at approximately the halfway point, but I can't say I have been enjoying it very much (though it is much better than Frank Peretti's Monster). This is not so much because of the book's creationist themes, which have yet to fully manifest themselves, but because I do not care for Olson's writing style.
Olson is not very good when it comes to description. It takes a lot of effort to imagine where his characters are and what their surroundings look like during any given scene. Even worse, though, are…