creationism
sa smith | July 14, 2008While Creationists get a free-pass to call scientists 'Nazis' and 'liars' and 'baby killers', Larry Moran gets a lot of crap for calling IDiots, 'IDiots'. While Ive always found that pet name more than apt, some people get their panties in a wad over it.
I think maybe what we need is a nice example of IDiot behavior to illustrate, for everyone, why 'IDiot' is such an accurate descriptor for the major proponents of Creationism.
Luckily, Casey Luskin has just provided me with just that! A perfect example to demonstrate what makes an IDiot an IDiot.
So we are left to decipher his jargon-…
pharyngula | July 14, 2008Nick Matzke, one of the world's leading experts in detecting absurdities in creationist texts, has discovered a real howler from Casey Luskin. Luskin is complaining that he, Junior Woodchuck lawyer for an intellectually bankrupt propaganda mill, can't find the wrist bones in Tiktaalik when Neil Shubin, world-class paleontologist, is directly describing them. This is, admittedly, a fairly high-level discussion by Shubin, but it's amusing that Luskin isn't tripped up by the science — it's his command of the English language that lets him down.
When discussing Tiktaalik's "wrist," Shubin says he…
gregladen | July 12, 2008From the NCSE:
Senate Bill 733, signed by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal on June 25, continues to draw criticism from scientists and political observers across the political spectrum.
In the New Scientist, Amanda Gefter reports (July 9, 2008), "The new legislation is the latest manoeuvre in a long-running war to challenge the validity of Darwinian evolution as an accepted scientific fact in American classrooms." Since the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, where intelligent design creationism was found to be nonscience and unconstitutional to present in science classes, Gefter explains that "…
gregladen | July 12, 2008From the NCSE:
As reported in last week's Evolution Education Update, Chris Comer, the Director of Science at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) who was forced to resign over a dispute involving intelligent design, filed suit in federal court, seeking an injunction against TEA's "policy of neutrality with respect to the teaching of creationism in the Texas public schools."
According to the Dallas Morning News (July 3, 2008), Comer's suit alleges "that she was terminated for contravening an 'unconstitutional' policy at the agency. The policy required employees to be neutral on the subject of…
gregladen | July 12, 2008"At a contentious public meeting in Mount Vernon, Ohio, the district school board scheduled a hearing on whether to fire teacher John Freshwater. Freshwater has been accused of teaching intelligent design in his biology classes, and of using a piece of lab equipment to brand a cross on a student's arm."
.... from an NCSE press release. More:
The Columbus Dispatch reports (July 7, 2008) "The Mount Vernon eighth-grade science teacher who has been under scrutiny for focusing on creationism and intelligent design in his classes will contest his planned firing at an Aug. 26 hearing. The date…
pharyngula | July 11, 2008One of the best things about following the antics of creationists is that it gives you a better appreciation of the creative power of the human mind…which isn't anywhere near as powerful as reality. Here's another example of creationist rationalization that doesn't hold up well under even casual inspection.
With the notable exception of the American Bison most mammals have two separate pleural or lung cavities. As we all know, one side of our chest can be penetrated collapsing that lung, but the other side remains intact and the remaining lung can support life. The bison has what is called an…
sa smith | July 10, 2008OMG YOU GUYS! You wont BELIEVE the incredible traffic spike I got from a front-page UD link!
AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
WE.
ARE.
SCREWED!!
Game over, guys! Game over! RUN AWAY!!!!
gregladen | July 10, 2008We made this site to spread the word about our effort to combat Creationism in Louisianan Schools.
You may be aware that yesterday(June 28) Governor Jindal signed bill 733 into effect. This bill will allow Creationist material, specifically from the Discovery Institute, to be used in classrooms to 'inspire critical thinking'. It will also allow teachers and students to spread ridiculous religious ideas at will.
What's wrong with that, you might ask? ....
Check it out.
laelaps | July 10, 2008Although creationists try hard to be media-savvy, relying on rhetoric to make their arguments, I can't help but laugh at who qualifies as a star in creationist circles. While documentaries about evolution often feature people like Liam Neeson and Kenneth Branagh, z-listers like Kirk Cameron and Ben Stein are the best creationists can get, apparently. Apparently Charlton Heston did his part for the creationist cause, too, as I discovered while surfing YouTube this morning;
A planet where apes evolved from men dinosaurs lived with humans? According to the "scientists," yes, even though the…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, flatfish, Amphistium, Heteronectes, transitional fossils, missing link, Matt Friedman
During the development of extant flatfishes, such as this plaice, Pleuronectes platessa, one eye has migrated round the head to lie on the same side as the other. So these fishes have an 'eyed' (up) side and a 'blind' (down) side suitable for their bottom-dwelling lifestyle.
Image: KÃ¥re Telnes.
Flounder, turbot, sole, halibut and plaice (pictured above) are more than just a tasty slab of flesh on your plate. They are flatfishes that spend their adult life lying…
laelaps | July 9, 2008The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach features a few thoughts from Gordy Slack on AiG's Creation Museum, which just passed the 1-year mark back in May. The controversy surrounding it has largely died down in the last year, particularly given the shenanigans involved with the release of Expelled, but Slack thought it profitable to take another look.
Slack starts off the piece by identifying what all the hubub is really about. While claims of creationists, like Tyrannosaurus rex lived alongside Adam & Eve and ate coconuts in Eden, are little more than delusions the…
tfk | July 8, 2008Disco. Inst. flack Rob Crowther is crowing about a grant they gave to Guillermo Gonzalez. Gonzalez was the Iowa State University astronomer who got tied in with the ID creationists at Disco. and with the old-earth creationists at Reasons To Believe, then was denied tenure when his publication rate dropped precipitously. Disco. responded to the tenure denial by insisting simultaneously that Gonzalez's ID research was powerful evidence of the scientific validity of their theological views, and that it was improper for ISU to consider this supposedly scientific work ("viewpoint discrimination…
pharyngula | July 8, 2008I've been outclassed. Every scientist in the world is a modest little mouse in comparison. All of you readers: humble, demure, and retiring. Ray Comfort has just compared himself favorably to Einstein, saying that he has made a discovery more important than E=mc2. He even has a painfully vainglorious animated image on the page showing his face morphing into Einstein's.
I think Ray Comfort tried to look up "humility" in a dictionary once, but after slowly sounding out as far as "h - u -", he got stuck and settled for "hubris" instead. Close enough for a brain-dead Christian, after all!
pharyngula | July 8, 2008Perhaps you've been wondering how creationists handle new research in biology. We've already seen how Conservapædians cope: by denial, bleating for the data, and threatening lawsuits, basically by putting on a freak show to distract from the evidence. Facing the same data from the Lenski lab, Answers in Genesis plays a different game: we knew it all along. It isn't what scientists say it is. We'll just use the scientific explanation with a few of our buzzwords tossed in.
Here's AiG's conclusion about the work of Richard Lenski on evolution in E. coli. It misses the main point — the…
pharyngula | July 7, 2008Sometimes you just have to sit and stare dumbfounded at the appalling stupidity creationists will state with absolute conviction. Here's an example that will leave you awestruck, too: a site that declares there is a Darwin conspiracy, and cites three fatal flaws that they claim conclusively prove that evolution is wrong. You might expect that such a grand claim would be accompanied by arguments that are at least impressively sophisticated … but no, we get two claims that kids should learn the answers to in high school, and a third that is just flaky and weird.
Wow, but these are amazingly…
laelaps | July 7, 2008For H.A. Reid, the secretary of the State Academy of Sciences in Des Moines, Iowa, evolution and Creation fit perfectly together. Writing in the Kansas City Review of Science and Industry in 1881, Reid echoed the sentiments of Thomas Jefferson that it was impossible to look at the natural world and not see evidence for some kind of Creator;
The very nature and constitution of the human mind is such, that no man can talk or even think about his own existence and that of the visible world of objects around him, without assuming, even though he may deny it in words, the idea and the fact of a…
mikethemadbiologist | July 6, 2008I'm surprised that I haven't seen a spate of posts from certain quarters proclaiming that the Lenski-Schlafly dustup is good for creationists. I think the assessment by RationalWiki is right on target:
Mr. Schlafly certainly intended that his letters to Prof. Lenski would have the effect of somehow discrediting his work or discomforting him in some way. In the event the consequences couldn't have been more different.
*As a result of Mr. Schlafly's tomfoolery he has raised the status of Prof. Lenski's evolution-demonstrating paper from the status of "Highly Significant" to "Internet Science-…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 Cletus From the National Center for Science Education:
Over the protests of leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Louisiana's governor Bobby Jindal signed Senate Bill 733 into law, twenty-seven years after the state passed its Balanced Treatment for Evolution-Science and Creation-Science Act, a law overturned by the Supreme Court in 1987. News of Jindal's approval of the bill was buried in a press release issued on June 25, 2008, in which Jindal listed seventy-five bills he…
pharyngula | July 4, 2008Andy Schlafly is one persistent fool. After harrassing Richard Lenski not once, but twice, prompting one of the best smackdowns on the intertubes, Schlafly now wants to take some vague sort of legal action against Lenski to get his own copy of every bit of data Lenski has generated in 20 years … data that he wouldn't understand, and which would include bacterial samples that he couldn't maintain, and requiring so much effort to collect (can you imagine having to go through 20 years worth of stored bacterial samples to create a copy?) that it would disrupt research in the lab to an…
gregladen | July 3, 2008Christina Comer is suing the Texas Education agency. Here is a copy of the law suit. From the Dallas News:
AUSTIN - A former state science curriculum director filed suit against the Texas Education Agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott on Wednesday, alleging she was illegally fired for forwarding an e-mail about a lecture that was critical of the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.
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Christina Comer, who lost her job at the TEA last year, said in a suit filed in federal court in Austin that she was terminated for contravening an unconstitutional policy…