creationism
pharyngula | August 4, 2008I know many of you had your hearts set on a debate between me and Ray Comfort, but there has been a slight change of plans, for the better, I think. Instead of a debate, Comfort will be on tomorrow morning, Tuesday, at 10am Central time, and will express himself without fear of snorts of derision from me. I will then be on Wednesday, same time of day, to address the same topics. It's a better plan, since we all know Comfort is going to gallop through a scattershot collection of nonsense, and I'll be able to say something coherent in contrast the next day.
You can listen to WDAY radio live. I'…
pharyngula | August 3, 2008I know. It's WorldNutDaily, so it's guaranteed to be abysmally ignorant, but I had to comment on the opening bits of this dreadfully bad review of Wiker's book that blames Darwin for the Nazis.
As a prologue to this book review, I propose the question: Can an idea, a theory, even a delusion kill? A cursory review just of 20th century dictators who overtly or covertly embraced and applied Darwin's ideas about evolution, survival of the fittest and natural selection to humanity, resulting in tens of millions of corpses they left in their wake, lamentably beckons a resounding, Yes!
I agree that…
pharyngula | August 1, 2008I've agreed to another talk radio debate — this time it's not a Christian radio station, so there's hope of some ethical behavior on their part — on WDAY, AM 970 next Tuesday, 5 August, at 10am. We're supposed to debate intelligent design, and my opponent is…
My opponent is…
Really, I'm embarrassed to say it…
My opponent is…
Ray Comfort.
O Lord, could you please stop making my enemies so ridiculous? It's getting a little bit excessive.
clock | July 30, 2008PZ just had a book review published in Nature:
Science and evolution have an advocate in Kenneth Miller, one of North America's eminent knights-errant, a scientist who is active in defending evolutionary theory in the conflict between evolution and creationism. He has been at the centre of many recent debates about science education, most prominently testifying against intelligent design creationism in Pennsylvania's Dover trial, which decided that intelligent design was a religious concept that should not be taught in public schools. He is also a popular speaker, offering the public a grass-…
pharyngula | July 28, 2008What do you think of this "fossil"?
It's supposed to be a human footprint with that of an Acrocanthosaurus on top of it, showing that dinosaurs walked the earth after human beings.
Unfortunately, they both look ridiculously fake. The human print has toes like tubes and a wierdly dug-in big toe, and looks ridiculously fake. The dino print is even worse — it's basically a three-pronged flat plate, looking like it was modeled after the smooth bottoms of a plastic dinosaur toy. Here, for instance is a photo of a cast of an actual dinosaur print.
A fellow named Alvis Delk "discovered" this rock…
pharyngula | July 28, 2008It's the Expelled DVD…and wouldn't you know it, it's already got a pile of positive reviews from creobots. If you've seen it, maybe you'd care to go give it an honest review?
Don't forget to mention Expelled Exposed!
pharyngula | July 28, 2008Christopher Hitchens was impressed by the existence of blind cave organisms, and wrote that they argue against a linear progression in evolution. He's quite right; creationism doesn't explain why their god tossed in to salamanders and fish a collection of complex developmental mechanisms that the animals simply throw away and do not use. Evolution does — descent from a sighted ancestor explains how blind cave animals can still possess the machinery for a lost organ.
Do you think the Discovery Institute would let this challenge pass by? Of course not. They put their top man on the job, so…
gregladen | July 26, 2008Amy Binder and John H. Evans, associate professors of Sociology at the University of California at San Diego, have written a piece on efforts to force religion in the guise of Intelligent Design and Creationism down the throats of children in Texas.
A proposal before the Texas Board of Education calls for including the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution in the state's science curriculum. This initiative is understood by supporters and opponents to be a strategic effort to get around First Amendment restrictions on teaching religion in science class. The proposal is a new round in an…
mikethemadbiologist | July 26, 2008...are stupid morons together. Matt Taibbi, while discussing 9/11 Truthers, describes creationists perfectly (italics mine):
Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That's not to denigrate…
pharyngula | July 26, 2008While we were all distracted by the recent Crackerclysm, we shouldn't forget the shenanigans in Texas. The hearings have begun, led by the mad creationist dentist, Don McLeroy, and the Texas Board of Education is gearing up to dilute science education further, and introduce new silliness. Stand up for science with the Texas Freedom Network!
pharyngula | July 25, 2008The president of Baylor, John M. Lilley, was fired abruptly yesterday. He demonstrated insufficient dedication to their "faith mission", so of course he had to go. I'm sure the ID crowd will be pleased — by encouraging a stronger "Christian vision", the next president of the university will probably encourage more Intelligent Design nonsense…which, of course, is an entirely secular concept that is not reliant on faith or Christian visions. Right.
I also have to say that this diagram accompanying the commentary is spot on.
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"), which in that time include monkeys and what we now call apes indifferently, were distinct from humans in every meaningful way. As Cicero said after citing Ennius, the character is different.
But then along came a Swedish botanist turned generalist, Carolus Linnaeus, in the 18th century, and despite being a creationist, he put apes,…
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
A Floridan neighborhood was surprised yesterday when after heavy rain, catfish started walking around their street. Of course, the fish were quick to point out that this doesn't prove evolution is possible, as they all went to the local Baptist church...
tfk | July 21, 2008Last week, I mentioned that Billy Dembski is all worked up over a paper which he claimed was a peer-reviewed rejection of the climate change. The publisher, the American Physical Science, attached a disclaimer to the piece, noting that it was in fact not peer reviewed. Dembski now defends his own claims by touting a letter from the author of the APS article, in which the author claims to have engaged in peer review:
The editors … invited me to submit a paper … explaining why I considered that the warming that might be expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon…
tfk | July 19, 2008Billy Dembski, proud owner of a doctorate masters in theology, is very confused. In responding to Olivia Judson's argument that "Darwinism" is a useless phrase and that no sensible person ought to call evolutionary biology Darwinism (and, AFAIC, no sensible person does), Dembski picks out her claim that referring to:
[Darwinism] suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the “Origin.” He wasn’t, and it has. Although several of his ideas — natural and…
tfk | July 19, 2008Doop-de-doo, killin' time between sessions by checking the RSS feeds, and what do I find but Billy Dembski, the Heisenberg of cats, mouthing off on global warming. "So much for the 'scientific consensus' regarding man-made global warming," the boy adventurer expounds. "As I recall, there’s another consensus in science…something in biology about how we got here…"
He then links to the study discussed here. The paper about which Dembski gets all worked up is prefaced by this warning:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with…
pharyngula | July 19, 2008Massimo Pigliucci has posted the notes, parts 1, 2, and 3, from the Altenberg meeting that was unfortunately over-hyped by the creationist crowd (no blame for that attaches to the organizers of this meeting). It sounds like it was a phenomenally interesting meeting that was full of interesting ideas, but from these notes, it was also clearly a rather speculative meeting — not one that was trying to consolidate a body of solid observations into a coherent explanation, but one that was instead trying to define promising directions for an expansion of evolutionary theory. That's also the message…
sa smith | July 17, 2008heh.
You can still see EXPELLED in theaters if you dont mind paying $2,400.
heh.
heheheheheheheheheheheheheheheh.
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2008Since I've ripped into Olivia Judson before, it's only fair that I note Judson's good suggestion--eliminate the term Darwinism (although we definitely need to keep TEH DARWINSIMZ!!; italics mine):
I'd like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed. (The science would be in a sorry state if one man 150 years ago had, in fact,…