creationism
pharyngula | June 9, 2008A while back, I said, "Somebody somewhere is going to have to someday point me to some intelligent arguments for gods, because I've sure never found them. And I know, someone is going to complain that I always pick on the weak arguments…while not bothering to tell me what the strong ones are."
In a fit of unwarranted hubris, the odious Theodore Beale/Vox Day rushed to arrange a debate on a local conservative radio show. Unfortunately, he didn't stop to think — how would debating Vox Day, christofascist misogynist, beneficiary of wingnut welfare, prominent freakshow participant, possibly rebut…
pharyngula | June 8, 2008Ron Bailey is a bit late to the funeral, but he does have a scathing review of Expelled.
Anybody ready to end the wake with a decapitation? Some garlic? How about a woodchipper?
pharyngula | June 7, 2008The introductory schtick to my talk at the Seattle Skeptics meeting last night was to take a Bible and read a bit of Genesis, making the point that it was vague, wrong, and useless (I also ripped out the page and waved the pathetic thing around a bit, which had several people asking if they could have the bible defaced by PZ Myers afterwards). Then, of course, I summarized some small bits of the story of eye evolution to demonstrate that science has a much deeper and more powerful origins story than that little scrap of piss-poor poetry that half this country wants to make the backbone of our…
pharyngula | June 6, 2008Under the malign influence of the wicked and silly Sally Kern, some Oklahomans were trying to pass an awful religious viewpoints anti-discrimination act, which would have simply given further privileges to majority religious views in the state.
Fortunately, Governor Brad Henry has vetoed the legislation, saying
Under current state and federal law, Oklahoma public school students are already allowed to express their faith through voluntary prayer and other activities. While well intended, this legislation is vaguely written and may trigger a number of unintended consequences that actually…
pharyngula | June 6, 2008Cool — I've been written up in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's a good story by a journalist, Tom Paulson, who I just met this week, and who seems to know what's up in the area. I've already had a relative call up and say she's glad I'm famous, so it's all just in time for the family reunion tomorrow — everyone will be prepared to take me down a peg and make sure I'm not too cocky.
Since I did say a few things about the Discovery Institute, he called them up and got their side of the story. This part is the typical creationist sidestep.
Not so, said John West, associate director of the…
pharyngula | June 6, 2008Sometimes my email contains a few good and sincere questions — and here's an example. This is probably the most common rock on which creationists founder: a profound misconception about what evolution says, and a natural human desire to see a guiding plan to the world.
I'm tormented.
I appreciate the struggle many creationists are having about evolutionary science. I find myself tormented as I observe the world around me.
What I seem to be focused on is how a plant or animal is self aware of it's need to evolve? How does a tree know how to "evolve" it's seed to fly on the wind? How would a…
sa smith | June 5, 2008You all might have heard about the new Douglas Axe paper trumpeted by the Discovery Institute. Well, it came out today on PLOS One.
I dont have anything to say about it. Im not a 'protein' person, and Im certainly not a 'computer modeling of proteins' person. And Im admittedly biased against computer models unless you can show me how it effects my real-world research (pretend to act shocked, but this DI paper contains no actual research).
But I will say this: Douglas Axe has created the best Creationist comment EVER!!!!!
The depicted group of genes encode vector proteins that mean: My fish…
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2008
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work.
Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not the first such attempt to use continuous characters in cladistics, and I would be interested if those who understand this topic comment on this attempt. It seems to me that the main difference between discrete and continuous data would be that the continua are an ordered set of otherwise discrete data points, so…
pharyngula | June 4, 2008One of the fun things about traveling to strange places like Seattle is getting to meet new and interesting people — or, at least, people who are made of meat rather than the more familiar bit patterns of the net. I've had a few occasions now to talk to Alan Boyle, who has just summarized my NWSA talk…and done a pretty good job of it, too.
One thing I want to expand on a little bit is something I brought up for the Seattle audience: I think the Discovery Institute is toast, and are going to be increasingly irrelevant. The Wedge document is dead and gone; their strategy of pretending to have a…
pharyngula | June 4, 2008At the last couple of talks I've given out here on the west coast, I've begun by introducing the appalling ignorance and illogic of creationist arguments. I think I have a new favorite example.
To summarize: God ordered the soldiers of the Hebrews to march around Jericho 6 times on 6 days, which means they would have traversed 6 * 360°, or 2160 degrees. The moon has a diameter of 2,160 miles. Therefore, God exists.
Bonus points! If you argue that the Hebrews would not have used "miles" as units (although I would have first pointed out that degrees and any linear measurement aren't directly…
pharyngula | June 4, 2008Wow. This guy is like Ben Stein on quaaludes — and just as wrong, wrong, wrong. The opening premise for his slo-mo diatribe is ridiculous:
True science only reports observable facts, rather than interpretations and assumptions.
Then he goes on with a tedious litany of examples: you are allowed to say that Archaeopteryx is a fossil of a winged animal, but you can't say it's transitional or intermediate characters, you can say Tiktaalik is a fossil of a skull and some limb bones, but you can't say it represents an intermediate between fish and amphibians, yadda yadda yadda.
Unbelievable. First…
laelaps | June 4, 2008Even though I said that I had more pertinent material to read than discourses about the perceived clash of science & Christian theology, I contradicted myself by picking up John Hedley Brooke's Science and Religion last night. As I have become increasingly aware during the course of my reading, the present climate of argument around science & religion carries a tone of conflict and warfare that has been maintained for over 100 years the more. It is fashionable to invoke such imagery, religion slowly crumbling under the weight of science, but a historical perspective reveals…
evolvingthoughts | June 2, 2008
Creationism is being pushed legislatively in Texas again. But this line is priceless, from State Board of Education vice chairman, David Bradley (yes, you guessed, a Republican):
Bradley said he doesn't foresee any successful effort to remove the “strengths and weaknesses” requirement from the science standards.
“There are issues in the evolutionary process that have been proven wrong,” he said. “Evolution is not fact. Evolution is a theory and, as such, cannot be proven. Students need to be able to jump to their own conclusions.”
After all, if the grownups can jump to their own…
sa smith | June 2, 2008Guess you all have heard by now Yoko lost (EMIs suit is still pending). Ah well, Yoko is appealing, this will go on forever, but this case reminded me of another part of Yellow 'Inner Life' that I wanted to blog about.
See, what I found odd about EXPELLEDs use of 'Imagine' is that it is completely gratuitous. Its like going on a rant about the lyrics to an Amy Grant song in the middle of a documentary about schizophrenia. I mean, you could draw a tenuous line through an Amy Grant lyric and Christianity and how they deal with mental illness, but really? Kind of an odd tangent.
Thus I was…
pharyngula | June 2, 2008I had mixed feelings about Yoko Ono's lawsuit against Expelled — fair use is a desirable goal, but I don't think Premise Media was exercising fair use, since their movie wasn't about Lennon's music or ideas — so I can't say that I'm at all surprised or upset that the lawsuit is likely to go down in flames. I'm also not appreciative of the fact that Lessig thinks this is a "great success"; it is at best a mixed result, because while it may support Lessig's principled defense of fair use, it is also a case where he's supporting people who are promoting lies and ignorance.
It really doesn't…
laelaps | June 1, 2008Those of you who stopped by this blog on Friday afternoon might have quickly glimpsed a post that is now missing. There's a good reason for that. I had noticed that in May at least three books about theistic evolution/the "theology of evolution" were released (Creation and Evolution: A Conference With Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo, The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal, and Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution) and I made a few snarky comments about them. Being that I haven't read any of them I didn't…
laelaps | May 30, 2008Like rotting, festering zombies, some creationist tricks just won't die. Even though every case of supposed "human tracks" found near dinosaur tracks in Mesozoic rock that I can think of has been disproved (the tracks often being little more than the result of some creative chiseling) the idea that traces of humanity have been found alongside non-avian dinosaurs continues on. The most famous case is that of the tracks found near Glen Rose, Texas (see the numerous Talk Origins pages about the find and the book Bones for Barnum Brown by R.T. Bird), the human tracks being sculptures or…
pharyngula | May 29, 2008Jerry Coyne recently gave a talk at Rockefeller University, which is now available on video. It's a good talk, making points familiar to most readers here about the absurdity of creationism/intelligent design, with clean examples to rebut their major arguments. The real treat comes at the very end, though, when Coyne goes off the reservation to state the obvious: that religion is the root of the problem here, and that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible.
I've been saying this for years. Will you believe me now?
gregladen | May 27, 2008The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum of Kentucky is planing to expand. Some of the expansion will be internal ... the construction of additional kiosks. Some will be external, including the construction of a playground. All of the planned expansion efforts will be targeted towards children.
Ken Ham, director of the museum, also indicated in a recent interview that the purpose of the museum was to convert people to Christianity. This is something that should be noted by any public schools planning on sending children to this facility.
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