creationism
laelaps | May 26, 2008If you happen to be reading this blog, chances are you have at least heard of the "Watchmaker Argument" or "Argument From Design" before. The concept has a long philosophical history, but it is most often discussed in connection to William Paley who invoked the argument to open his book Natural Theology. For those unfamiliar with the work, Paley states that if you were to happen across a watch as you were crossing a field you would immediately recognize it as the product of a designer. So too, Paley argues, is design manifest and detectable in nature. I am not as concerned with Paley's watch…
sa smith | May 26, 2008
This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that!
I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;)
Poor Behe. Its a hard-knock life, for kooks. Another HIV-1 paper came out today that utilized the evolution of Vpu to make their experiments work better. So I thought Id better move this post over so you all could enjoy it again :)
August 2, 2007, over six months ago, I…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2008
Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it.
evolvingthoughts | May 24, 2008
Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell his name) and me talk about Stuff at Bloggingheads.TV. The video is terrible (that's my fault; we should have recorded our own video and sent it to the editors, instead we recorded each other by way of an Australia-USA link that was routed, I fear, via Mongolia and Finland, using packets carried by mules). I'm out of sync. But it doesn't matter - it's voice with some moving pictures, that's…
pharyngula | May 24, 2008Don McLeroy is the deranged creationist dentist who was appointed to the chairmanship of the Texas State Board of Education, and who is responsible for the recent purge and intimidation of people who support good biology — he's trouble all the way through. Take a look at his latest stunt.
The State Board of Education's debate on new English and reading standards took another rowdy turn Friday as members approved a never-before-seen version of the lengthy document which materialized less than an hour before the board was to take a final vote.
After a wacky and terse debate on the new…
pharyngula | May 23, 2008This will be handy around here: The Hovind Scale. It's a metric for calculating the craziness of a creationist's comment from 0 (scientific and honest) to 100 (dishonest insanity). There's even an online calculator to simplify it for you!
I did a quick spot check on a few of our local loony commenters, and found that 16s were pretty common, and a few of the egregious old trolls who've been banned got up into the 40s. Unfortunately, the scale is flawed by one subjective measure: you have to interpret whether the kook is knowingly lying or not. I tend to view most of them as stupid but sincere…
pharyngula | May 22, 2008Some people practice their own special brand of Christian tolerance.
In learning about Central Valley Cafe Scientifique, we stumbled upon a startling incident that may or may not reflect on the scientific climate in the Valley.
The cafe’s next speaker, Fresno State professor Dr. Ryan Earley, found his car tire punctured this week and with a nasty note on his windshield saying: “Fuck you Darwinist. Take your car to heaven.”
Which side in this argument believes in turning the other cheek again?
gregladen | May 22, 2008Update on the Ono Law Suit ...
As you most certainly know, Yoko Ono and her two sons have sued the producers of Expelled! for their use without permission of the song Imagine by John Lennon.
Well, it appears as though a ruling from the court is imminent. AP is lubing the shoots with a retrospective summary of the suit.
Ono is not asking that the film be pulled, but rather, that the song she controls the rights to not be used.
At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan this week, the filmmakers' lawyer, Anthony T. Falzone, said that if the judge granted Ono's request for an…
pharyngula | May 21, 2008Our local evangelical radio station is about to dump a load of tripe on the Twin Cities. I'm going to be tied up in domestic duties for a while, but if anyone else wants to tune in to KKMS (short for Khristian Krap for Mendacious Scoundrels) in about a half hour, here's the drivel you'll get to hear:
5:00 Hour - "Understanding the Science of Creation"
Dick Fischer, Founder and President of the Genesis Proclaimed Association joins us to explain some of the scientific facts that support the creation story found in the book of Genesis.
I'm going to try to catch some of it, but 5-6 is family…
pharyngula | May 21, 2008Apparently, a New York judge has upheld the injunction against the movie, so there will be no new showings, and DVD rights are in limbo.
The movie is dead anyway, so it doesn't seem to be a significant decision. It's not as if theater distributors are lined up clamoring for more copies of this stinker. Although, to be honest, I would like the rights cleared up, because the only way I'm ever going to see it is if I can rent the DVD from my local store.
laelaps | May 21, 2008I've been using the phrase "textbook cardboard" a lot lately. I first picked it up after reading Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, but the concept had been made clear to me even before Gould provided me with something to call it. All too often scientific legends are passed down as fact (i.e. Richard Owen was a creationist, Cuvier rejected uniformitarianism, Huxley debated Wilberforce at Oxford), and a recently published paper in PLoS follows this trend in invoking the example of the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial."
The paper (Berkman et al. 2008) produces a picture of John Scopes, the…
mikethemadbiologist | May 20, 2008For one brief moment, the editors of the Washington Post have rejoined the Coalition of the Sane:
NO ONE would think it acceptable for a teacher to question the existence of gravity or to suggest that two plus two equals anything but four. It's mystifying, then, that a movement to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology is attracting some support. Equally perverse is that this misguided effort is being advanced under the false guise of academic freedom....
What's insidious about these measures \is that at first blush they appear so harmless. Isn't everyone in favor of academic freedom…
pharyngula | May 20, 2008Here's the most depressing thing I've seen all week (and I'm grading genetics exams): it's the result of a national survey of high school biology teachers.
At least 16% of our high school teachers are young earth creationists. Furthermore, 12% our our teachers are using biology classes in public schools to teach creationism in a positive light. The majority are still pro-science, but even in the good cases, relatively little time is spent on teaching evolution.
The news isn't all bad. One constructive discovery is that it is neither legal battles nor demanding state standards that determine…
pharyngula | May 19, 2008Robert Bakker is one of the good guys, a paleontologist who really does an excellent job of communicating enthusiasm for science. I saw him talk at St John's University a few years ago, and he clearly inspired the kids in attendance — I greatly enjoyed the talk too, even though one of his hooks was to incessantly emphasize the religious backgrounds of famous dinosaur hunters. It's a strategy, all right? If he can get more kids to follow through on science, more power to him.
However, he also illustrates another unfortunate phenomenon: religion turns even good scientists' brains to mush. In a…
pharyngula | May 19, 2008I knew this would happen: creationists are pleased with the media coverage of the platypus genome, since it reinforces their misconceptions. The Seattle Times published a couple of letters from local creationists. Need I say that they are ridiculous?
It is rather sad to see the evolutionary spin doctors try to put a positive face on something like the platypus. "Bizarre DNA of Platypus tells a story about us" [Times, News, May 8] did not offer any plausible evolutionary scenario for such a creature's existence. This is because there is none.1
The platypus has long given the evolutionists…
sa smith | May 17, 2008God put proteins that kinda sorta might look like Chinese characters in cells so that PROVES DESIGN AND JESUS.
hehehe.
ID Creationists are hard at work proving design (unlike real scientists that state a hypothesis and accept data whether its for/against their original idea). The stagnant cyber-squat 'Biologic Institute' has finally been updated with links to TOP NOTCH Creationist research like:
Are there universal principles of complex design? What are they? What stamp, if any, do they leave on things manufactured according to a complex design specification? Are any of these stamps present…
pharyngula | May 16, 2008You've got another of those wretched "academic (non)-freedom" bills in your state. They're like lice, crawling out everywhere.
Senate Bill 1386, introduced in the South Carolina Senate on May 15, 2008, and referred to the Senate Committee on Education, is the newest so-called "academic freedom" bill aimed at undermining the teaching of evolution, joining similar bills currently under consideration in Louisiana, Michigan, and Missouri. Similar bills in Florida and Alabama died when the legislative session in those states ended. The South Carolina bill contends that "[t]he teaching of…
sa smith | May 16, 2008Lots of new readers since the move to SciBlogs-- So while Im still out of town, here is a repost of my presentation to Americans United this past March!
Posted below the fold for slow loaders :P
pharyngula | May 15, 2008Today is this semester's last final exam, and this is the last big push of the semester, so I'm going to be mired in work for most of the day…but once I level the administrative mountain, I've got some new squid science to share. Until then, you'll just have to chew over some of the usual American lunacy for a while.
Obama is gearing up to drape himself with Christian trappings. This will not make me happy. I'm planning to vote for him, but if he turns into yet another Christianist airhead, I will not be campaigning for him.
The reason Obama can't lose my vote but can lose my enthusiasm…