creationism
pharyngula | March 24, 2009The Texas Board of Education is led by Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist and plagiarist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.
Just stop there and savor it. The man who wants to dictate what all of the children in one of the largest educational systems in the country should learn about science believes his pathetic and patently false superstition supersedes the evidence and the informed evaluation of virtually all the scientists in the world. There is no other way to put it than to point out that McLeroy is a blithering idiot who willingly puts his incompetence on display. His…
pharyngula | March 24, 2009Last week, I wrote about the spectacular Cretaceous octopus fossils, and I made a blatant prediction.
Accustomed as I am to the workings of the minds of creationists, though, I'm sad to say that I also immediately saw how this find will be abused. I guarantee you that Harun Yahya is grabbing these images and planning to stuff them into his next bloated and repetitive tome, with a caption that announces that there has been no change in octopuses over 95 million years, therefore evolution is false.
After explaining the differences between these fossils and modern forms, and showing a chart…
pharyngula | March 23, 2009It's too bad my Viking blood does not confer upon me the ability to read Norse, because the Norwegian media is lighting up with the tale of a school that is denying evolution in the enlightened land of Scandinavia. I've found one account in English, and at least it looks like the creationists have been slammed silly with a widespread negative outcry. I guess I'm not the only one with a little Viking ferocity left in me.
The one thing I got from the article is that apparently the crazy creationism proponent tried to argue that there is good evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Has…
sa smith | March 23, 2009Is this is what Creationists mean when they put forth 'Academic Freedom' legislation?
Sure enough, I just received confirmation today in a letter from the Open Records Office at the University of Oklahoma. The letter confirms that on the day of Dawkins' speech, Oklahoma State Representative Rebecca Hamilton requested substantial information relating to the speech from Vice President for Governmental Relations Danny Hilliard. Representative Hamilton's exhaustive request included demands for all e-mails and correspondence relating to the speech; a list of all money paid to Dawkins and the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 23, 2009After reading these two posts by ScienceBlogling Sheril (and the many comments) about scientific literacy, I suppose I'm in the minority about what scientific literacy. Unlike most of the commenters, I think scientific literacy revolves primarily around a core set of knowledge, and not 'critical thinking skills.' More importantly, to combat anti-science, facts are vital.
Now, that core set of knowledge should include a basic understanding of what hypothesis testing and the scientific method are. But, in my experience, stupidity regarding science (no need to be polite about it) stems…
pharyngula | March 23, 2009This is an amusing tale of creationist hypocrisy. Ken Ham is complaining that one of his staff members was "ambushed", because he wasn't given a solo interview, but had to share the discussion with a critic (meanwhile, Ham has no compunction about "ambushing", in the same sense, scientific discussions). What I found most interesting, though, were Ken Ham's complaints about the BBC.
This past week, Dr. Jason Lisle--our astrophysicist*—was invited to be on a BBC radio program out of Southampton , England (where I spoke a couple of weeks ago). We were told that it was just going to be an "…
gregladen | March 22, 2009
Leo Berman, Republican State Rep in Texas, has proposed a bill that would allow the Institute for Creation Research to issue advanced degrees in Creationism. The faux educational institution, which moved from California to Texas several years ago hoping to dupe the Texans into exactly this sort of idiotic thing, was previously denied this right by the proper regulatory agency. Berman's act is cynical, anti-democratic, and terribly embarrassing for all Texans.
There is a news report here:
A Texas legislator is waging a war of biblical proportions against the science and education…
gregladen | March 22, 2009How to spot a hidden religious agenda
As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I'd share…
pharyngula | March 21, 2009Also, Casey Luskin demonstrates his inability to comprehend a science paper, again. Creationists are obsessed with the idea that every nucleotide in the genome (and now the transcriptome) must have a function, an idea that is actively rejected by the available data, so Luskin reads a Nature paper on RNA and gets it completely backwards. Larry Moran has a quote from the paper that directly and plainly contradicts Luskin's misinterpretation. Once again, we can all laugh at the inanity of the Discovery Institute.
gregladen | March 20, 2009This is why we love Genie Scott:
The NCSE now has a channel on You Tube, and at this time you can see most, probably all, of Genie's testimony in Texas. It is very instructive.
GENIE SCOTT IS A MACHINE!!!
Here you'll find reports from the evolution/creationism wars -- footage of contentious testimony, landmark and illuminating speeches, conference coverage, excerpts from television appearances, and presentations. In the future, look for classroom videos, tutorials for teachers, videos contributed by NCSE members, and much more.
When you visit our YouTube channel, check out a couple of…
pharyngula | March 20, 2009I'm trying figure out how this insane bill could even get a hearing. State Representative Leo Berman (R, of course) was peeved that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ruled that the Institute for Creation Research would not be allowed to grant degrees. So, he came up with an amazingly stupid idea: pass a law that would allow private, non-profit education institutions to grant degrees without the board's permission. Which, if you think about it, is actually kind of brilliant in the sense that it's hard to imagine a worse solution.
If it were to pass, though, I'd like to move to…
pharyngula | March 19, 2009The media are all agog at the fact that the Creation “Museum” has an exhibit on natural selection. Whoop-te-doo, I say — anybody who has been following creationism at all knows that they happily trot out this claim all the time. We've got all kinds of concrete examples of observed evolutionary change in lizards and insects and birds and fish, so their argument has always been that they accept a small amount of change, but there are magical limits.
A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection -- Darwin's explanation for how species develop new traits…
tqa | March 19, 2009
Denyse O'Leary is nattering on over at Uncommon Descent - and several other places - about some sort of connection between "Darwinists" or perhaps "Darwinism" and the recent and tragic case where a pet chimpanzee attacked and mutilated one of the owner's neighbors. A large portion of the various posts seems to revolve around Denyse's love of the tautology "only people are people." The rest seems to consist of an attempt to find some way to blame the attack on the scientific community as a whole, or at least on "Darwinists."
Frankly, I'm having an even harder time understanding O'Leary than…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2009Ian Musgrave has a brilliant post showing that Dembski's revisiting of the old creationist canard that Dawkins' 1984 Weasel program, designed to show that random variation and selective retention can "evolve" a target phrase, in this case Shakespeare's "Methinks it is a weasel" (oops; I nearly had my own mutation there - I typed "methings"), is a load of old cobbler's. Of course we expect nothing less from Ian*, and nothing better from Dembksi.
* But my title is better than his.
tfk | March 18, 2009
It was a tremendous honor to be the first speaker at a session on evolution education last February. The session included such luminaries as Ken Miller, Olivia Judson, Neil Shubin, and David Deamer, who each presented a marvelous overview of how evolution illuminates our understanding of biology, from the origins of life to the behavior of beetles, from the workings of the cell to peculiarities of the human body.
While I could not hope to speak with authority matching those great scientists on those particular fields, my opening talk set the stage by showing that, 150 years after the Origin…
pharyngula | March 17, 2009Hovind's followers, however, are still treading the long and candy-sprinkled road of self-delusion. I've been sent a letter pleading for help in his case — they want to take it to the Supreme Court. I will be very surprised if this gets anywhere.
Greetings from Adrienne Gilbert in Kentucky...
An alarming situation with Dr. Kent Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism is putting every American's first amendment rights in jeopardy. I have been following this case since its beginning, so I wanted to share with you briefly what needs to be done and why.
Summary of situation: Dr. Kent Hovind is in…
pharyngula | March 17, 2009The Globe and Mail has a pointless poll, no doubt inspired by l'affaire Goodyear.
Do you believe in evolution?
Yes
48%
4199 votes
No
50%
4360 votes
I won't answer a question about my religion
2%
170 votes
Spank that puppy, won't you? It's a stupid question, anyway.
pharyngula | March 17, 2009We other Americans, the ones down south in the United States, have been wrestling with this problem for a long time. Sometimes, you just get flaming idiots in charge of important bureaucracies. Sometimes they even get handed the keys to the administration of important scientific institutions. And then they open their mouths and show off how stupid they are, and we poor peons get to sit back and watch the spectacle of money being shoveled into the hands of the incompetent for a while.
Canada has Gary Goodyear, the chiropractor who has been vaulted into the position of minister in charge of…
pharyngula | March 16, 2009And with that hypocritical announcement, the Intelligent Design creationist blog bans DaveScot, for writing a comment that points out that anti-evolutionists have a history of using Christian ideas to advocate racism.
I am greatly amused.
pharyngula | March 16, 2009Feel in need of a purgative? Watch this video of Michael Shermer interviewing a creation "scientist" at the Creation Museum. I could only make it halfway through before closing it in disgust.
Ugh. Georgia Purdom is a blind weasel: for example, she berates Christian evolutionists for "interpreting" the bible instead of reading it literally, and then says, "We know from scripture that the earth is no more than 6000 years old:. The bible says nothing of the kind. That is a product of peculiar interpretations of the book.
Then when Shermer presses her on what kinds of experiments she would do…