creationism
mikethemadbiologist | December 9, 2008
The Surgeon General urges that creationist dumbitude only be viewed through the StupidVu 9000 or other approved viewing device
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson is a very ignorant man. Sorry, he might get offended by that. Allow me to be more accurate: he's a creationist. Oh boy:
Johnson -- not a Ph.D. scientist -- received his bachelor of arts degree in biology from Taylor University, "an evangelical, interdenominational covenant community committed to advancing life-long learning and ministering the redemptive love of Jesus Christ to a world in need." His…
pharyngula | December 9, 2008I've been wrong. I've argued that destroying America's educational infrastructure and promoting stupid ideas like creationism will inevitably erode our country's competitive standing in the world marketplace. I've always thought the only way to correct that was to improve public education — but there's an alternative. Make other countries stupider!
Romania's withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts…
gregladen | December 9, 2008Draft 2 of the Minnesota Science Standards for K-12 is out, and once the current standards are approved, that's it until 2017. So now is your last chance for input for a very long time.
You could be childless, get pregnant over the next year, and have a child in school with these standards in effect. Even if you don't live in Minnesota, you may end up here. You never know!
HERE is where you go to comment.
pharyngula | December 7, 2008Cynthia Dunbar has written a book. It's typical wingnut nonsense: it "refers to public education as 'a subtly deceptive tool of perversion' and calls the establishment of public schools unconstitutional and 'tyrannical.'" It goes further and says that…
…she believes public schools are unconstitutional because they undermine the scriptural authority of families to direct their children's education. Her own children have been privately educated and home-schooled.
Typical and unsurprising so far. It's a shame that she's abusing the intellectual development of her own children, but unfortunately…
pharyngula | December 6, 2008A columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer is quite irate about the fact that we squelched the zoo/creation museum deal. If you read his article, you'll discover a theme.
The live Nativity at the Creation Museum will have an actual, living, cud-chewing camel. Frightening.
There will also be goats and sheep. Terrifying.
Cuddly lambs might seem harmless to the average visitor, but some people are scared witless by the possibility that some innocent, devout secularist could accidentally wander onto the grounds of the Creation Museum and get exposed to radioactive Christianity or other dangerous…
pharyngula | December 6, 2008Seth Godin is a marketing guy, and he recently turned his eye to the evolution-creation wars and offered a marketing perspective. That's useful, but I don't think he looked deeply enough, and his suggestions don't really help much. In particular, he compares the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution to Newton's "law of gravity" and tries to extract a message about why one is unquestioned and the other is not.
1. If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.
Nobody had a seriously described theory of gravity…
clock | December 4, 2008Those interested in the struggles against infusion of Intelligent Design Creationism into public schools, have followed, with great interest, the highly publicized trial in Dover, PA a couple of years ago. At the end of it, Judge Jones not just made the right decision, but also wrote one of the best and most scathing indictments of IDC in our legal history. So, you may be interested in the latest interview with Judge Jones, just published in PLoS Genetics:
Taken to School: An Interview with the Honorable Judge John E. Jones, III:
"My call to the Judge's chambers in request for an interview…
mikethemadbiologist | December 4, 2008When I read that film critic Roger Ebert was going back to work despite a bout with cancer, I wrote about my hope that he would turn his sights on the creationist screed Expelled.
Many people may not know that he has been a long time, vocal opponent of the idiocy that is creationism. So I was thrilled to see his recent evisceration review of Expelled:
Intelligent Design "scientists" in "Expelled" are offended by being called ignorant. When Stein points out that "Catholics and mainstream Protestant groups" have no problem with the theory of Evolution, he is informed by an ID advocate, "…
tfk | December 4, 2008Bob Reich is rarely wrong, and here he makes a very important point:
Teachers are being laid off and new hiring frozen, after-school programs cut, so called "noncritical" subjects like history eliminated, schools closed, and tuitions hiked at state colleges and universities.
It's absurd. We're bailing out every major bank to get financial capital flowing again. But we're squeezing the main sources of our nation's human capital. Yet America's future competitiveness and the standard of living of our people depend largely our peoples' skills, and our capacities to communicate and solve…
gregladen | December 3, 2008On Change.org, the site where you can submit ideas and/or vote on ideas and then Obama has to do them ... or at least listen ... a college student named Griffin Jeffrey has suggested that we create nationalliy required science standards.
National standards on the teaching of Evolution and the origins of life, decided on and created by top scientists from significant scientific organizations, should direct curricula of all schools nationwide, overriding any state laws on the subjects.
We want this. Go vote for it. Here.
gregladen | December 3, 2008I absolutely love this:
I've been accused of refusing to review Ben Stein's documentary "Expelled," a defense of Creationism, because of my belief in the theory of evolution. Here is my response.
Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong…
pharyngula | December 3, 2008Yeah, poor Ken — he's still distressed that his attempt to prop up his credibility with the Cincinnati Zoo's was foiled. He's also complaining about an "atheist (a professor from the University of Minnesota-Morris)" who engineered his defeat. I wonder who that might be?
Even more foolishly, though, he cites an online poll to back up his claims.
The news website NKY.com (http://nky.cincinnati.com/) ran an online poll on the controversy. They gave the following options:
YES--The museum promotes a religious point of view that conflicts with the zoo's scientific mission.
NO--The promotion does…
pharyngula | December 2, 2008I hadn't realized that Roger Ebert had so far neglected to review Expelled, but he has now belatedly rectified that omission with a wonderfully scathing sneer at the movie. Here's a taste:
The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn't even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we…
gregladen | December 2, 2008A new paper by Kevin Padian of UC Berkeley is just out in Comptes Rendus Biologies, a French peer reviewed journal, on American creationism.
Padian summarizes the history of creationism in the US. From the abstract:
The history of anti-evolutionism in the United States begins only in the early decades of the 20th century but has evolved considerably since then. Various versions of the movement ("equal time" for creationism, "creation science", "intelligent design") have developed over time, but they have made few positive contributions to serious discourse about science and religion. Their…
pharyngula | December 2, 2008I know there are a lot of smart people at UW Madison who will be a bit dismayed to hear this: an IDEA chapter is forming in Madison. The IDEA clubs are the sad little organizations that the Intelligent Design wackaloons form on college campuses to spread their nonsense. They don't seem very effective — they produce people like Casey Luskin and Sal Cordova, so one might argue that they actually help us by dumbing down the opposition — but they are kind of embarrassing to have around.
Anyway, this group is going to show some silly ID movies, "Where the evidence leads" (irreducible complexity…
pharyngula | December 2, 2008We have made Ken Ham very sad. Yay, bonus!
"We are disappointed with the zoo's decision and its impact on the families and visitors to the region who would have enjoyed taking advantage of this opportunity to make this a truly memorable Christmas," said Answers in Genesis and Creation Museum founder and president Ken Ham. "Both the Creation Museum and the Cincinnati Zoo have put together spectacular Christmas displays, and we were excited to partner with them to promote these events in a combination package that would have been of great value to the community."
"My family and I have been…
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2008
The chair of a course on religion, philosophy and ethics at the University of Gloucestershire (being English, they'll pronounce that "glostersheer"), David Webster, is calling for people to give the worst argument in Britain. Go leave yours. Caveat: They already have the full complement of creationist nuttery, and anyway most of it's American, which is too easy.
Personally, I think that, as there are an infinite number of ways to mess up an inference, there is no single "worst" argument, so this is really about aesthetics.
pharyngula | December 1, 2008It's remarkable. Comfort gets something right.
The contention between Darwin's theory of evolution and the Bible's account of creation is extremely significant. This is because if evolution is true, the Bible is a fallacy.
I know, it's unbelievable. Comfort's remarks usually set the bar for stupidity, so it's astounding to find two sentences in his usual babble that actually make sense — yes, it is a significant conflict, and yes, the Bible is fallacious.
It would be nice if we could just stop there, allow the poor man a moment of glory, and leave him to bask self-contentendly in the belief…
pharyngula | December 1, 2008We have a couple of comments from people who phoned the Cincinnati Zoo that suggest that the shameful pairing of the zoo with the Creation Museum is going to be revoked. I suspect that this was a case of an overzealous person in the marketing department grabbing an opportunity that sounded like good financial sense, without considering its implications to the educational and research mission of the zoo, and that the higher-ups with a bigger picture of their goals are a bit horrified, and are rapidly correcting the problem.
It has been verified: zap, the combo tickets on the zoo's ticketing…