creationism
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Look what came in the mail today:
It's an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind! It's impossible to read in this photo, but it has a nice engraving on the back: the Creation Minute logo, and this message.
To PZ Myers
In hopes that your quest for TRUTH will end with God.
The CSE Team
Isn't that nice? I'd been hoping they'd add some little distinguishing touch like that to it — it makes for a splendid victory trophy.
pharyngula | July 8, 2009I'm going to be speaking at the Secular Student Alliance conference on 8 August, and before that, you may recall, I announced that we were going on a little field trip to Ken Ham's bunco joint in Kentucky, on Friday, 7 August. We're trying to organize a bit, so SSA sent me the notice below. Preregister and get a big discount on the entry fee, and SSA is also looking for more people to help with coordinating travel.
Register to get the $10 entry fee at https://secularstudents.wufoo.com/forms/creation-museum-with-pz-myers-registration/. You have to pay in advance but you get the $10 entrance…
pharyngula | July 7, 2009This is so stupid it hurts. Check out the Missing Universe Creation Museum: it's got all the usual creationist jabber. No transitional fossils, all mutations are harmful, and my favorite, prominently quoted, "If you don't believe God created all living things, male and female, in 6 days…How many millions of years was it between the first male and the first female?" How about no time at all, they coevolved? And you must take their evolution test — it will definitely make you laugh.
After you've browsed the site for a bit, they also have a poll. They want to know how effective they are at…
pharyngula | July 7, 2009All right, commenters, you aren't doing your job. I get enough creationist nonsense in my private email, you are the ones who are supposed to smash the creationist lackwits who are babbling in the comments here. Now one of them, this fellow Grant, is apparently unsatisfied with the drubbing you were supposed to give him, and is now trying to pester me personally by email.
I'm also going to rebuke you Australians — he's one of yours, running some kind of web design studio, where he claims 14 years of experience in "Science". Come on, take this personally and rip into him.
You believe the world…
pharyngula | July 6, 2009It's the Arizona electorate's moment of shame. The earth has been here for 6000 years and we haven't destroyed it yet, so we don't need no stinkin' laws to protect the environment!
pharyngula | July 6, 2009Yes, Texas could. After ditching creationist dentist Don McLeroy as head of the state board of education, Governor Rick Perry is now considering Cynthia Dunbar for the job. Dunbar is the author of a book called One Nation Under God, and despises public education…just the person to put in charge of public education, right?
In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country's founding fathers created "an emphatically Christian government" and that government should be guided by a "biblical litmus test." She endorses a belief system that requires "any person desiring to govern have a…
razib | July 5, 2009I have posted Creationism as a function of geography before. John Lynch pointed me to a new poll of Argentina, China, Egypt, Great Britain, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain and the USA. Though the set of countries is smaller than in some surveys, the number of questions asked were much larger:
-Heard of Darwin
-Not Heard of Darwin
-Know a good/fair amountKnow a little/not much
-Know nothing
-Agree that scientific evidence for evolution exists
-Do not think there is scientific evidence for evolution
-Neither agree nor disagree there is scientific evidence for evolution
-Think it is…
grrlscientist | July 5, 2009tags: science, god, religion, creationism, humor, funny, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
This video provides an unbiased look at whether Earth's favorable conditions for life prove that a loving God planned it that way all along. (Hint: There's no other explanation.) [3:45]
pharyngula | July 2, 2009The British Council has carried out an international survey on people's opinions about evolution. I cringe at these sorts of things; they so rarely give me an opportunity to put on a big foam rubber hand and chant "WE'RE #1!". There aren't really any surprises here.
The results show that the majority of people polled have heard of Charles Darwin with the highest levels of awareness in Russia (93%), Mexico (91%), Great Britain (91%), and China (90%) whilst less than half of people polled in Egypt (38%) and South Africa (27%) saying they had not heard of him. Overall, the majority (70%) of…
gregladen | July 1, 2009If so, and if you are an American, you are in the majority. But 16% of your fellow Americans have not. If you are a citizen of the UK, where Darwin lived and stuff, 9% of your fellow citizens have not. Shocking.
These are perhaps the least noticed but in my view most amazing results of Yet Another Poll (YAP) about creationism and evolution that is skillfully analyzed by John Lynch at Just Another Prop. I agree with John's conclusion that a (too slim) majority of Americans are "theistic evolutionists." Add that to the a-theistic evolutionists and we have more people in the Evolution camp…
pharyngula | July 1, 2009Do you recall this incoherent tale of incest and racism I got a while back? Like almost 4 months ago? Well, the fellow seems to have just now discovered that we were laughing at him, and has sent me his rebuttal. It's only fair that I post it for you now.
There are people that are well educated and very smart. But they just don't have any common sense.
If God wanted Adam and Eve to have sex and create then there was absolutely no reason to create
the Garden of Eden. He would have given them the power to have sex and create like he did the…
gregladen | July 1, 2009Dear MSNBC,
I know it is appropriate to have a range of opinions among the talking heads representing a news agency, and MSNBC certainly does have a range. Pat Buchanan, regular commentator on two or three MSNBC news shows, probably serves at the most conservative individual in the MSNBC panoply.
But he has to go now.
This letter comes as a reaction to Buchanan's most recent column, which addresses Darwinian theory and evolution in an over the top intellectually dishonest, inaccurate, and offensive manner. I will not discuss the details of his absurd column; several of my colleagues on…
pharyngula | June 30, 2009The old fossil is Pat Buchanan, who has published a freakishly antiquated diatribe against Darwin. It's extremely old school — he uses arguments straight out of 1960s era "scientific creationism", trying to tar Darwin with guilt by association with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. He is apparently inspired by a "splendid little book," The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by a creationist crank named Eugene G. Windchy. You can get an idea of Windchy's level of scholarship by this quote:
That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable.
"…
pharyngula | June 29, 2009It's getting to be a regular feature—every year, the NY Times must do a story on that bizarre miseducation monument, the Creation "Museum". This time around, the story isn't too awful — it focuses on the recent NAPC meeting, in which several professional paleontologists paid a visit to the creationist carnival to be alternately appalled and amused.
Several people have asked when I'm going to visit Ken Ham's temple. It's been settled! It's all arranged, but no thanks at all to Ham. Here's the deal: I'm going to be speaking at the Secular Student Alliance conference in August, which is being…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2009Over the weekend, I had started writing a post titled "When Will [economist Paul] Krugman Have His Creationist Epiphany?" It was inspired by a comment left on a Krugman post about "the Great Ignorance which seems to have overtaken much of the economics profession -- the "rediscovery" of old fallacies about deficit spending and interest rates, presented as if they were deep insights, the bizarre arguments presented by economists with sterling reputations."
While Krugman argues this is due to flat-out ignorance, a commenter made a great point (italics mine):
This is a point I've kept making to…
pharyngula | June 28, 2009They're doing it again. There's a new movie being released, The Voyage That Shook the World, that you can tell from the tagline — "One man, one voyage, one book ignited a controversy that still rages today" — is creationist trash (hint: there is no scientific controversy anymore on this matter). Look a little further, and you'll find it's produce by Creation Ministries International, which tells you right there what their agenda is: to tell lies for Jesus.
Here's where the parallel to Expelled lies…in the lies. They got several Darwin experts (Peter Bowler, Sandra Herbert, and Janet Browne)…
gregladen | June 28, 2009Whenever I sat at Joseph and Mary's dinner table, Mary showed a great deal of interest in my work. In between her frequent forays away from the dining room table to get this or that food item, or to issue instructions to a servant, or whatever, she would sit at the table across from me and ask questions.
"So, have you found anything interesting?" which is a standard question to which the answer was always "no" ... we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. "So, what to the Pygmies think of your research." And so on.
I remember that during…
pharyngula | June 25, 2009The list of winners of iPods of various flavors from Creation Science Evangelism:
Third place: Kirby Hobley, who created a post on the atheist sub-group of Reddit.
Second place: Richard Haynes, of Atheist Nexus.
First place: PZ Myers of you know where.
Good grief, the atheists won a clean sweep! It's brilliant marketing, reaching deep into the very community that will most fiercely mock his message.
pharyngula | June 25, 2009Thanks to all of your helpful clicking, I have just received this message from Eric Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism:
Congratulations, you logged the most clicks to CreationMinute.com and won an Apple iPod Touch complements of Creation Science Evangelism.
Good work, gang! I hope it's full of creationist videos. I'll have to bring it with me on my trip to the Creation "Museum" in August (I'll fill you in on more details on that development later, when they've firmed up a bit more.)
pharyngula | June 24, 2009He seems a bit peevish. He now has a blog post up complaining about me and my "inaccuracies". His complaints are amusingly petty.
I object to the lies at the very heart of his "museum", and he thinks he is rebutting me by whining over petty details.
For instance, he quotes me as regarding the idea of "Noah's ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth", and then he primly informs his readers that that isn't true: it only carried every kind of "land-dwelling, air-breathing animal". Oh, well, that fixes the logistical problems of the ark right up, doesn't it? Here we have a…