creationism
gregladen | May 5, 2008I'm talking about the May 4th Podcast of Atheist Talk, from the Minnesota Atheists. The first half was an interview of Lois Schadewald, editor of her brother's posthumous work "Worlds of their Own" ... a book of essays on pseudoscience.
The second half was an interview of Yours Truly by Mike Haubrich on "Academic Freedom" and stuff.
You have to understand that I did this interview against the advice of medical professionals, with a severe case of near-laryngitis. ... so no, that is not actually my voice .... plus I had a fever and was heavily drugged. And not enough coffee. And I was…
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2008Darksyde rightly skewers Ben Stein and his creationist fellow travellers for claiming that evolutionary biology led to the Holocaust:
Religion and science are different species of course. But one thing they share in common is both can be used for great good or nightmarish evil. Particle physicists developed the theories underpinning everything from PET/CAT scans to the device you are reading this post on. They also brought us the hydrogen bomb. Biochemists developed antibiotics, saving the lives and limbs of countless millions of suffering people. The same science produced Zyklon B, a…
pharyngula | May 4, 2008Yeesh — I don't think this game is going to take the world by storm. It's calledCrevoScope, and it's a "text-based massively multiplayer game", which somehow is supposed to simulate the evolution-creationism debate, without actually requiring players to learn or know anything. It's got some weird mechanics which I haven't puzzled out in any detail at all, but apparently you can acquire "knowledge" by clicking on a "library" link — you don't actually learn anything, a number for your character goes up — and then you get to go "debate" someone, and somehow the various scores help determine…
mikethemadbiologist | May 4, 2008Several of my fellow ScienceBloglings have noted that the increase in measles cases is due to idiots who refuse to get vaccinated. Beyond the obvious health threat this represents, there is a more subtle, yet equally murderous effect of all of this anti-vax woo.
It distracts us from other vaccination programs that we need to institute. Every year, roughly 36,000 U.S. residents die from influenza--the 'boring' kind. Why this isn't viewed as a major health crisis, while breast cancer, which kills approximately the same number annually, is escapes me. Not because breast cancer isn't an awful…
pharyngula | May 2, 2008Fast political action is needed to stop another anti-science bill in Louisiana. Below is a message from Barbara Forrest, who says it all better than I can.
Friends, fellow educators, and concerned citizens,
First, please accept my thanks to those of you who helped in the effort to stop SB 561, especially those who went to the Capitol to testify. Second, action is needed IMMEDIATELY to ask members of the House Education Committee to kill HB 1168, which is the House twin of SB 561. As far as I know, no newspapers have carried the story of its being filed on Monday, April 21. The bill could be…
gregladen | May 2, 2008I've been laid up with a nasty disease the last few days, so I've not been doing much productive. But I have gotten some TV watching in.
Just in time, too. Has anyone else noticed that House (last night) and Numbers (tonight, in fact, airing this very moment) contain thinly veiled attacks on Intelligent Design, Expelled, and/or Ben Stein?
pharyngula | May 2, 2008Florida delivers some good news: their nasty little academic "freedom" bill is dead. Now we just have to worry about similar bills in Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, and Louisiana.
pharyngula | May 2, 2008And it's a classic!
It starts off with a little boy getting a lesson in "evolution" from his mother. This version of evolution has nothing to do with what biologists teach, of course — it's bizarrely teleological, with everything striving towards becoming human.
After having evolution explained to him, the little boy turns into an "atheist" (one who's planning to become a god — Chick isn't quite clear on what the whole atheism thing means), and it all means you get to be as evil as you want.
There's the usual stereotypical Chick interlude where a cute little girl tells the little boy all…
laelaps | May 2, 2008Over at Darwinian Conservatism, Larry Arnhart recently wrote a post about how Michael Behe, the scientific "star" of the ID movement, seems to have fallen out of favor with the Disco Institute. Almost a year ago his book The Edge of Evolution was published, yet it seemed to have little impact within ID circles (or anywhere else). Behe's previous book (Darwin's Black Box) was a major hit, making it all the more shocking that Behe was absent from the recent creationist propaganda piece Expelled. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll know that Behe was interviewed for the film. Don't…
pharyngula | May 1, 2008This is actually somewhat interesting, and I'm not going to reject all of it out of hand. The Fair Use Project of Stanford Law School is going to defend the use of Lennon's song "Imagine" in the movie Expelled.
On the one hand, they are using a very short clip — and I am not a fan of the kind of draconian enforcement of every second of a song that the music industry seems to favor. There are reasonable grounds for fair use of short clips of music … the question is whether this is one of those cases.
On the other hand, I think Premise is horribly dishonest, and this press release is personally…
pharyngula | May 1, 2008Even after sending out a prayer alert to summon down divine favor for the Florida academic "freedom" bills, the effort to reconcile the two versions and pass something has stalled out in the legislature. They've only got two days to get it together! It could die!
It is time to pull out the big guns. The Republican sponsors, the Disco Institute lobbyists, and the creationist supporters of this bill need to immediately embark on a two-day prayer retreat. Just go off to some isolated place, and pray and fast non-stop. It's the right thing to do.
sa smith | May 1, 2008This 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 ;)
Last summer, when Behe released his tome-of-TARD 'Edge of Evolution', I had absolutely no intention of reading it. If Dude had anything to say, he would publish it. But I kept hearing from friends that he was saying some crazy stuff about HIV.
He was.
I corrected him.
There is…
gregladen | May 1, 2008A Missouri House Committee has just approved for consideration of the House an Academic Freedom Bill drafted with the aid of the Discovery Institute.
The bill has a nice twist to it in that it prohibits the consideration of any boundary or difference between religion and non-religion in regards to what to teach or how to teach it. In other words, the bill requires that state agencies, school administrators, and teachers ignore the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in deference to state law. Therefore, challenges to this…
pharyngula | April 30, 2008After all the pious nonsense from certain quarters blaming scientists for the Holocaust and other atrocities, it seems appropriate to take note of the Anti-Defamation League's response:
The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.
Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness.
Using the Holocaust in order to…
sa smith | April 30, 2008I know Im not the only one who has eagerly anticipated the Discovery Institutes response to the ADL officially denouncing EXPELLED.
Well John Kwok is not one to sit by and wait patiently for a press release. He emailed dear David Klinghoffer, 'Jew', DI fellow, to ask about his position on EXPELLED:
Dear David,
The Anti-Defamation League issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of 'Darwinism' with Nazism in 'Expelled'. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design or belong to a…
pharyngula | April 30, 2008Last December, I mentioned the case of a creationist named Nathaniel Abraham who was fired from his job at Woods Hole — he had the gall to apply for a post-doctoral position in an evolution and development lab, and the PI dismissed him for being incapable of supporting the full range of "evolutionary implications and interpretations" of the work he would have to do. Abraham sued him for a half million dollars in reply.
The judge's decision has been delivered.
A Massachusetts federal court judge last week (April 22) dismissed the case against a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic…
laelaps | April 30, 2008This coming Friday will mark the beginning of the summer 2008 movie season, the first big-budget film to make an appearance being Iron Man. What does that mean for the unfunny and atrocious propaganda piece Expelled? If the theaters near me are any indication, it means that Stein's film flunked at the box office and is being expelled to make room for summer blockbusters. Of the three theaters that carried the film in my area, all of them are going to drop it this coming Friday, although I'm sure Expelled will soon re-appear on DVD.
The fact that Expelled is getting dropped from theaters doesn…
pharyngula | April 30, 2008Here's an interesting review of the movie that gets Carroll's perspective on it. It mostly gets it right, especially in its argument that this movie is an attempt to swiftboat science.
"If you have a losing hand, you're going to use every amount of rhetoric you can to distract people from the fact that you don't have any facts," Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his lab last week. "And that's what 'Expelled' is all about."
Carroll is little too generous here…
Carroll had similar advice for today's biologists: "The biology…
laelaps | April 29, 2008[Note: Just to put this post in context, today I was feeling extremely frustrated with the seemingly blind acceptance creationism receives because it makes some people feel comfortable. This is surely not my best work, and if anything it represents me trying to sort out the reasons why I keep coming back to the debate even though it can be aggravating at times.]
On a cold Sunday afternoon last February, I sat down to share a few slices of pizza with the man who had invited me to come speak about evolution to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Morris County, along with my wife and his…