creationism
sa smith | April 4, 2009If you happen to have a spare 3.5 hours.... OMFG TEH VIDEOZ!
BIG thank you to Doug for taping and subsequently 'dealing with' a shitload of video, just for readers of ERV. Least you all can do is clicky over to his site to see his gorgeous photography. You can also watch his short films at YouTube :)
evolvingthoughts | April 3, 2009Oklahoma lawmakers are singling out the visit by Richard Dawkins to talk about evolution on campus at OU, but they're not censoring it, right? Just making academics fear for their funding, and perhaps jobs, but seeking all documentation about the visit. Just this visit, mind. Piers Hale, a historian of science at OU, is interviewed in the TV story (which means he gets about sixteen words to express a complex subject.
sa smith | April 3, 2009HT to the Queen of AtBC, Kristine.
lol Ben Stein sucks so hard. So like, you know how Dawkins is one of the worlds most famous living biologist, and 'charges' $30K for speaking engagements, but waived/waives it for educational institutions?
And like, Ben Stein is like, an actor or comedian or something, who charges $60K for speaking engagements? Well because of the budget crunch hitting colleges and universities in the US, a Stein speaking engagement at Emory (ugh, yes, he was supposed to speak at Emory) had to be canceled because they didnt have the money to pay him anymore.
Stein is such…
pharyngula | April 3, 2009I confess, we residents of the USA sometimes have a bit of an inferiority complex when we compare our citizenry to those of other nations of the world — we look like such a collection of idiots next to places like Iceland and Australia and New Zealand and Germany and England and Canada and etc. (at least we feel a bit wiser than Turkey). Of course, none of those other countries are entirely exempt from having dumbasses pontificating on science, so we can still occasionally take a cheap, desperate shot at some furrin' loon. Here's a Canadian who has done his part to bolster American egos:…
sa smith | April 2, 2009Helpful hint to Creationists:
Never mention HIV-1. Just dont. It will make your lives much easier if you just see the word "HIV" and associate it with an ass whooping. You dont really understand what HIV-1 is or how it works, so just shut up, cause you look like a worthless IDiot.
On the Discovery Institute Blog, EN&V, David Klinghoffer wrote a nice TARDalogue about how EXPELLED victim Ralph Seelke does research that proves evilution is a lie and Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior:
Seelke's work tests evolution's power to produce two necessary mutations in a case where the mutations,…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2009Well yes it was a joke. But it was based on the inappropriate manner in which the well-known work on lateral transfer was reported by New Scientist as showing that Darwin was wrong. That genes occasionally cross over taxonomic borders among single celled organisms by transduction (viral exchange), conjugation (sharing plasmid DNA) and transformation (reuptake of naked DNA in a medium) has been known for a while. What this showed was that gene trees and taxa trees don't exactly coincide. But for the animals and plants Darwin mentioned, evolution still runs in trees.
The other thing I was…
sa smith | March 31, 2009BEHOLD!
The awesome power of Intelligent Design Creationists explanatory filter!
Or CSI.
Or, like, their irreducibly complex flagella... something science related!
Evilution cannot survive scientific proof of the Christian god like this!!
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2009A new study into the transfer of genetic material laterally, or across taxonomic divisions, has shown that evolution does not proceed as Darwin thought, and that in fact the present theory of evolution is entirely false. Instead, it transpires that lateral genetic transfer makes new species much more like Empedocles' "random monster" theory over 2000 years ago had predicted.
Publishing in the Journal of Evolutionary Diversions, the major journal in the field, Professor Augustus P. Rillful and his colleagues of the paragenetics laboratory at the University of Münchhausen in Germany have shown…
pharyngula | March 30, 2009…Houston Friend, a student at ASU who got a bad grade on a paper and wrote in to blame the whole culture for it.
Last week, I got back a graded essay, which happened to be worth a significant portion of my grade. I got a C and was immediately upset because I had been somewhat proud of my work when I was writing it.
I soon perused the plethora of red marks throughout the paper and began to notice generally why I did poorly.
The principle reason I got a C was because I didn't have enough "evidence," as this particular paper required a certain amount of references to sources read throughout…
pharyngula | March 30, 2009Legislators in the fine state of Oklahoma continue to gnash their grim and yellowed Christian tusks in frustration that Richard Dawkins was ever allowed to speak. He not only spoke openly, but was allowed to leave the state unscathed — not a single rusty thumbscrew was employed, nor was he burned at the stake. The university thinks that is just fine, but these cornpone dullards pretending to be representatives of American freedom just don't get it.
In a phone interview Thursday, Thomsen said the university has a right to bring any speaker it chooses, but is accountable to taxpayers. On behalf…
tfk | March 30, 2009For those in Canadia, you might stop by the Redpath Museum auditorium tomorrow for any of the events in McGill University's symposium on Islam and Evolution. I'll be presenting at 11, and it promises to be a fascinating day of talks and discussion among panelists.
tfk | March 30, 2009John West is gloating about the new Texas science standards, and in doing so, he's lost track of the truth:
Evolutionists typically cast themselves as the champions of secular reason against superstition, but in Texas they tried to inject religion into the debate at every turn.
Indeed, this past week it seemed that they couldn't stop talking about religion. They boasted about their credentials as Sunday School teachers and church elders. They quoted the Bible and appealed to theology. And, of course, they attacked the religious beliefs of their opponents, branding them religious…
pharyngula | March 30, 2009I thought that silly Intelligent Design blog, Uncommon Descent, was going to have a new and enlightened comment policy, in which people would be allowed to criticize ID without risk of deletion. That's what they said, at least. You knew it couldn't be true: they're already sharpening the knives to get rid of a persistent critic.
Someone by the name of skeech is cluttering up UD with impervious sophistry and wasting a lot of our time.
His/her latest thesis is that "according to biologists…" there is a "credible possibility that small incremental changes could have developed massive increases…
razib | March 28, 2009So I'm reading/hearing about something flaring up in Texas again in regards to Creationism. I always get these strange "articles" in my RSS for the "evolution" query on Google Alerts where an uninformed columnist rambles on how the theory has been disproved or brought into doubt. These arguments are not my brief, I'll leave that to Josh Rosenau et al. Nevertheless one of the interesting things about the discussion in regards to Creationists has been the reality that the United States is swarming with them, though there are Creationists elsewhere, especially in the Islamic world. It is a…
pharyngula | March 28, 2009How did Texas screw up public education? It's complicated. The rational members of the board managed to exclude the 'strengths and weaknesses' language, which would have invited an immediate assault by the ignorant on a well-established scientific principle, but at the same time the ignorant members of the school board managed to hammer in several amendments:
analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations in all fields of science by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those…
tfk | March 28, 2009Berlanga and Nuñez voted against the final TEKS, the other 13 voted to approve them. Texas has new science standards. Those standards are better than the old ones, but those old standards really did suck. As the Fordham Institute put it, giving the standards an F in 2005, "Thematic unities, so persuasively urged in the national guides, have an effect here opposite to that advertised. They produce breadth of assertion instead of depth of understanding. … In the science discipline content here reviewed, Texas provides, by way of scant substance or careless writing or plain errors, something…
pharyngula | March 27, 2009It's terribly unfair. Not only are the paladins of evolution handsomer, wittier, more charming, and with a deeper grasp of the truth than the orc-like hordes of creationism, but even our ancillary skills are wielded with more effortless panache than our opponents' primary talents. Here's a beautiful example: Richard Dawkins, a mere biologist, wrote a clear, simple program in BASIC about thirty years ago that has had the Isaac Newton of Information Theory scratching his head in puzzlement. How did a program running a simple selection algorithm turn a random text string into the specific string…
pharyngula | March 27, 2009Texas is getting all this attention — they've got Don McLeroy! Reviews of curricula with creationists chipping away at them word by word! Insanity reigns, and everyone just acts as if it were standard operating procedure!
I think Florida was feeling neglected, so that state slipped in another creationist education bill. It's like this is a competition for craziest, most ignorant state in the union.
It's a good try, Florida, and you'll always have a place in my heart as the home of so many wackaloons, but you've got a long ways to go to beat Crazy Ol' Uncle Don. Don't feel like you've got to…