creationism
tfk | October 1, 2008The inimitable DaveScot, lord of Billy Dembski's blog, thinks that "Public Interest in Global Warming [has] Evaporate[d]."
I've added an item to his graph:
By this same standard, you'd find a decline in interest in gravity, which has generated almost identical number of searches as global warming over the same time span.
I have relatively few nice things to say about what happens at Uncommon Descent, but at least they keep me laughing.
pharyngula | October 1, 2008Texans can stand a little taller now — their scientists have organized into the 21st Century Science Coalition and are speaking out loud and clear.
The 21st-Century Science Coalition is putting politicians on notice that the science community in Texas will accept nothing less than the best education for our kids. We will not allow politics and ideology to handicap the future of our children with a 19th-century education in their 21st-century classrooms.
Any other scientists in Texas should sign their statement. The rest of us should give a clenched fist salute and promise to be as forthright…
razib | October 1, 2008During a conversation with Nick Matzke he asserted that Creationists weren't less intelligent necessarily. I contended that they were less intelligent. I based on this on snooping through the GSS when I was posting about the association between lower educational attainment and intelligence and religious fundamentalist & Biblical literalism. There are several variables in the GSS which ask respondents about their views on evolution, and the more intelligent and educated a person is the more likely they are to accept evolution. But this prompts a question: is this association simply due…
pharyngula | September 30, 2008The Brunswick school district in North Carolina was hurtling towards a lot of pain…and it's all thanks to the intransigent arrogance of the ignorant. There are some signs that they're going to see the light of reason, but there are holdouts, and as is usual in these cases, it's a few uninformed individuals possessing only a furious conviction and the certitude of religion who are causing the problems. Joel Fanti seems to be one of the instigators of this stupidity, and he's surprised that so many have been opposing him.
"It just amazes me some of those responses, how venomous they have been…
pharyngula | September 29, 2008No, that's not right. It would be selfish for us as individuals to take advantage of this incredible windfall.
A controversial creationist who successfully campaigned for Richard Dawkins' official website to be banned in Turkey has offered a multitrillion- pound challenge to scientists.
Adnan Oktar said that he has "issued a call to all evolutionists" that he will give "10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution" - a sum roughly equal to £4.4trn.
I had to look up the exchange rate. That's $8,010,890,000,000. Eight trillion, ten…
pharyngula | September 28, 2008A reader just informed me that he saw that the Institute for Creation Research is advertising on Fox News. This is not at all surprising — all it takes is money, and these groups are always buying up ad space anywhere they can get it. There is some amusement in the ad, though: I didn't realize that you could subscribe to ICR's quarterly Acts & Facts magazine for free; I'm tempted, because it is always a source for hilarity. They also have a distance learning program in which you can get an Official Creationist Worldview Professional Certificate. I would love to have one of those…
pharyngula | September 25, 2008The Discovery Institute has been gearing up to pollute classrooms across the country with a new 'textbook' called Explore Evolution, which is to replace their old propaganda of choice, Of Pandas and People (which had its sorry creationist origins exposed in a little trial in Dover, Pennsylvania). John Timmer of Ars Technica has now reviewed the DI's masterwork and…well, I hate to give the ending away, but he didn't like it.
But the book doesn't only promote stupidity, it demands it. In every way except its use of the actual term, this is a creationist book, but its authors are expecting that…
mikethemadbiologist | September 24, 2008Five, actually. This showed up on a listserv I'm a member of:
NCSE and The Panda's Thumb are recruiting scientists named Steve, or Stephanie, or Stephen, or Esteban, et al. to join Project Steve, a tongue-in-cheek response to creationists. All members of Project Steve agree with the following statement:
Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there…
pharyngula | September 24, 2008I linked to that interview with Adnan Oktar in Spiegel Online the other day, but I linked to the original German text — I should have known that Spiegel has its own English edition with a complete translation.
pharyngula | September 23, 2008Roger Ebert has revealed the purpose behind the peculiar creationist Q&A he posted the other day. I had suggested it was either poorly done satire or his site had been hacked. Ebert has now confessed that it was poorly done satire.
He didn't say it was poorly done, of course. He says he was trying to show that people have lost their ability to detect satire, that we're unable to sense the 'invisible quotation marks' that surround such exercises, in the absence of overt declarations that it is satirical.
To sense the irony, you have to sense the invisible quotation marks. I suspect…
gregladen | September 23, 2008We're talking about the Minnesota Science Standards and we're talking about nothing less than the Pope Mobile.
Consider the following statement currently part of the proposed Minnesota Science Standards:
The student will be able to explain how scientific and technological innovations as well as new evidence can challenge portions of or entire accepted theories and models including but not limited to cell theory, atomic theory, theory of evolution, plate tectonic theory, germ theory of disease and big bang theory.
Think about this for a moment. The standard is asking that the basic, minimal…
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2008...John Bircher? By way of ScienceBlogling Ed Brayton, I came across this Salon article describing Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's claim that she is a young earth creationist (or, at the very least, believes that human and dinosaurs lived at the same time, which is fucking stupid enough). But it gets even more insane. From Dave Neiwert, we learn that she very well might be a John Bircher:
What's striking, as Michael points out, is the article in front of her: It's a piece about the "Con Con Call" -- one of those hysterical non-issues that conspiracy theorists of the far right in 1995…
pharyngula | September 23, 2008There's goofy stuff coming out of the lunatics following Ian Paisley—the chair of the Education Committee is a creationist, apparently, that wacky party is trying to get creationism taught in the schools, claiming "it can stand scientific scrutiny", and what's this about trying to label the Giant's Causeway with a creationist explanation? The Pagan Prattle has the links. This is not a good path for Northern Ireland to be taking.
gregladen | September 23, 2008Good morning! I have important news, and COOKIES!
First, the cookies:
These are serious cookies. These are Ana cookies. If you want one, you better hurry, because they are NOT going to last long.
Now on to the important news: Melanie Reap has dropped something in my inbox indicating that the Rochester meeting to discuss the science standards went pretty well, and that this bit about biology being part of Middle School and not High School is not real. We are to read the standards thusly: If you see a "9" read it as "9-12." The coding system they used requires a single number in that…
razib | September 22, 2008I was browsing RedState today and I noticed an advertisement for the National Geographic special on the Neandertal genome. At first I was surprised at the appearance of this on a right-wing website; after all, there is a bias toward Creationism on the modern American Right. Then I realized that the ad was probably part of a network and RedState was just one of many sites which were automatically included in some package. Nevertheless, it got me thinking about the Right and Creationism. Why is there this association on a deeper level? A survey from several years back showed that in…
pharyngula | September 22, 2008There is a very peculiar article at Roger Ebert's movie review site. It may not last long, so I've put a copy below the fold. It's a straight-faced recitation of creationist claims, all nonsensical, all typical, presented as if they were Ebert's opinion. It could be an exercise in Poe's Law, I suppose, or it could be the consequence of a little web hacking.
Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:
Q. When was the earth created?
A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654…
pharyngula | September 22, 2008Adnan Oktar/Harun Yahya has been interviewed in Spiegel Online (that's in German; you might want to read this short paraphrase in English). He says a number of, umm, interesting things.
He dislikes Intelligent Design intensely, and sees it as a dishonest form of creationism.
The Islamic terrorists aren't actually Muslim—they are all foreign-educated Darwinist atheists. That includes Osama bin Laden.
In the 2009 Darwin year, he plans to celebrate the collapse of Darwinism. I don't think so.
He claims that he can finance sending out free copies of the Atlas of Creation because he doesn'…
gregladen | September 22, 2008Members of the Public: Now is your only chance to comment on Minnesota's new Science Standards. My suggestions: Take out the woo, dampen down the special interests, and please, consider NOT removing biology from the High School standrds!!!!!
To comment, go to this web site and read the context, the standards, and use the resources available there. And/or visit one of the public meetings listed on that site.
Overall the standards are probably an improvement on prior standards. A few questions to consider:
Looking at these standards, it seems as though High School Biology has been removed…
evolvingthoughts | September 21, 2008
Many people are confused about what counts as a fallacy, including teachers of critical reasoning. Opponents of science often accuse pro-science writers of "the fallacy of authority" or "the ad hominem fallacy" when they are noted for having made silly and false claims before. I thought some words about what a fallacy actually is might be to the point.
According to Archbishop Richard Whately, whose book The Elements of Logic, first published in 1828 from an encyclopedia article revitalised the modern study of logic in the English tradition,
By a Fallacy is commonly understood, "any…
evolvingthoughts | September 19, 2008
Actually I'm not. The Sea of Faith In Australia crowd are very nice and easy to get on with folk, and many of them are your garden variety humanists, atheists and skeptics. Lawrence Krauss is a very nice guy with a good patter in anti-ID; nothing I haven't heard before but, and this surprised and educated me, something that few of the audience seemed all that familiar with.
One thing that has been very useful to me is to get a cross bearing on what interested and intelligent folk know and do not know. That will help me be a little more clear in the future. My talk is tonight, so we'll see…