Religion & Law
Thoughts in a Haystack 
Advocating against promotion of creationism in public education.
Post Frequency: 3/day Last Entry: November 20, 2009 at 01:01:00 Recent Entries: 850
By John Pieret
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Ken Miller's Ankles Are In Danger
Posted on November 20, 2009Oh, my goodness!The Discovery Institute's attack chihuahua, Casey Luskin, is actually taking a page out of Answers in Genesis (and about every other young-Earth creationist organization's) book. It is the ol' "we are using the same evidence but just interpret it from different starting points" ploy...
Boundaries
Posted on November 19, 2009Massimo Pigliucci has, I think, an excellent post at his blog, Rationally Speaking, entitled "On the difference between science and philosophy," that nicely captures most of my objections to the attempts by some atheists to smudge the very real lines between science and philosophy and/or to denigrate philosophy...
Peas In a Pod
Posted on November 18, 2009Here's something I did not know before.Anti-vaccination denialists share more in common with creationists than just a disdain for science. Of course, I knew that they shared many of the same tactics: appeals to a nonexistent scientific "controversy;" argumentum ad populum; claims of scientific "elites" choking off "debate;" etc...
Putting On a Dogma and Pony Show
Posted on November 17, 2009The board of trustees of La Sierra University in Riverside California is asking the impossible. After voting last week unanimously to endorse Seventh-day Adventist beliefs that the world was created in six 24-hour days, it:... also proposed that all 15 North American Adventist universities develop a curriculum that includes a "scientifically rigorous affirmation" of Adventist creation beliefs...
Duane Gish Rides Again!
Posted on November 15, 2009The Rev. Charles Welch, pastor of the Meadowbrook Church in Howard, Wisconsin, has an article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette, "Scientific fact or philosophy?". It is a classic example of a "Gish Gallop," a series of bogus (if not outright dishonest) arguments that take much longer to debunk than to make...
Eye Problems
Posted on November 14, 2009Here's a good one*:"You can't teach creationism or intelligent design without getting into a little bit of trouble in the public schools, which is a shame," said former Green Bay East High School science teacher Jim Kraft of Allouez. "What's being promoted in the public schools is really atheism...
Mirages In the Mirror
Posted on November 13, 2009David Klinghoffer is peddling inanity again but in a hilariously un-self-aware fashion.Once more, he is promoting David Berlinski's Argumentum ad Poetica, where Keats' line (still mangled by Klinghoffer) about "Beauty is truth, truth beauty ..." is somehow supposed to be a measure of scientific theories...
Analogized
Posted on November 12, 2009PZ Megahertz on the dangers of argument by analogy:We know that human beings build penis-shaped objects; that does not imply that Bill Dembski's penis is made of silicone and has an on-off switch, let alone that someone made it in an injection-molding machine...
Striving to Be the Worst
Posted on November 12, 2009This may be the stupidest example of brain-damaged ramblings to ever be posted to the internet. I know that is an extremely high ... or low, depending on how you look at it ... bar to meet but Steve Kellmeyer has made a mighty try at exceeding it. It's no surprise that his efforts are sponsored by Alan Keyes' RenewAmerica website, giving him an enormous running start...
Lying Liars Lies
Posted on November 11, 2009Casey Luskin's lips are moving again.This time he is claiming that Intelligent Design Creationism is not merely a negative argument and accusing Ken Miller of "misrepresenting" (i.e. lying about) its nature. I'll summarize his "positive" arguments (with the sources he gives: Michael Behe, Scott Minnich and Stephen Meyer:"[W]e recognize design by the purposeful arrangement of parts" and "parts appear arranged to serve a purpose" (Behe); "irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role ...
Religion Conflicted Science
Posted on November 10, 2009A (filtered) thought:Alvin Plantinga, a John O'Brien professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, traveled to UNLV Thursday to present his lecture "Science and Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies."The event, which was co-sponsored by the UNLV philosophy department, the Thomas Aquinas Catholic Newman Center and the UNLV geosciences department, outlined naturalism, evolutionary theory and the relationship of those ideas with the idea of theism...
Unlearning Center
Posted on November 09, 2009According to this story, "Lutheran camp plans creation-science learning center," the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and its Lutheran Island Camp in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, is planning to open the first creation-science environmental learning center in the state and possibly the country:"There are 64 environmental learning centers that are run by the state of Minnesota or the federal government...
Stupidity Prime
Posted on November 08, 2009Pity poor ERV.Everyone has to live somewhere but it has to be a extra burden to live in Oklahoma:NORMAN, Oklahoma ? A stimulus-funded research project at the University of Oklahoma has some people questioning how stimulus money is being spent.The study is titled "Research, Education and Capacity Building ? Genomic Structure of Native Peruvian Populations," and is a 5-year, $650,000 project...
Blowing It
Posted on November 06, 2009Eugenie Scott's reply to Ray Comfort's moronic objections to evolutionary theory has been posted at U.S.News & World Report's blog, God & Country. Scott's reply is more temperate than my own but, nonetheless, devastating. Scott features one of Comfort's more lunatic claims:Consider Comfort's view on the evolution of sex: "No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery...
Say Amen!
Posted on November 06, 2009The Undiscovery Institute has told us that Intelligent Design has nothing to do with religion; it's only interested in science. Let us then consider this report of William Dembski's visit to The Baptist College of Florida in Graceville, Florida: After a time of musical praise and worship, Dembski took the stage and began a clear, concise analysis of the necessity for Intelligent Design studies...
Only In Britain
Posted on November 05, 2009... would they have a new policy on sex education announced by a Schools Secretary named Ed Balls.A more serious point is that Britain is light years ahead of American "abstinence only" sex "education."Not only is Britain taking away the right of parents to opt their children who are 15 years old or older out of sex education, but:Faith schools will not be able to opt out of any part of the new curriculum, although they will be able to teach topics within the "ethos of their faith"...
Dishonesty Institute
Posted on November 05, 2009.In a comment to a post a while back about the Discoveryless Institute's attempt to hijack the reputation of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, "Rhology" asked:Also, I don't get why you keep throwing out the word "dishonest". Maybe they just disagree...
Philosophy, Science and Law
Posted on November 03, 2009Michael Ruse has a piece in the Guardian that is not very good. Russell Blackford neatly (and humorously) deconstructs it.But Russell, himself a (non-American) lawyer, as well as a philosopher, defers to Jerrry Coyne on one point that at least needs expanding on...
Darkest Stupidity
Posted on November 03, 2009PZ could only make it two paragraphs into Ray Comfort's moronic reply to Eugenie Scott's prior dismantling of him. But, because PZ took care of those two, I could make it to the third ... just to find this: Nor does any evolutionary believer adequately address the fact that all those 1...
Goin' North
Posted on November 03, 2009.The Elitist Bastard has sailed again, from Decrepit Old Fool, this time to the frozen climes.Just to show that bastardry is no respecter of party, here is Cujo at Slober and Spittle invoking something that is near and dear:The DNC is using guilt by association as the basis for its counter-argument...
Constitution Avenues
Posted on November 02, 2009A thought:The epistemological problems generated by supernatural theism necessitate the faith commitments required of believers. The insufficiency of human cognitive faculties for knowing the supernatural demands willful assent without conclusive evidence?faith?from those who seek temporal meaning in a transcendent reality...
Relief Pitching
Posted on November 01, 2009The Yankees are playing tonight so just read this nice article about Richard B. Katskee's visit to Susquehanna University. Katskee was the lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State at the Kitzmiller case. This, from Katskee, is nice:Katskee said this minority believes that the planet is heating up because we are moving closer and closer to Armageddon as described in the book of Revelations in the New Testament of the Bible...
Counting ... and Holding ... Noses
Posted on October 30, 2009Anika Smith, the the tankwoman in pink of the Discovery Institute, is at the DI's Ministry of Misinformation, touting the results of the recent Ipsos MORI poll showing that, even in Britain, a majority think that "other possible perspectives," such as intelligent design and creationism, should be taught alongside evolution in science classes...
Streetwalking
Posted on October 29, 2009Oooh!David Klinghoffer has gone from merely being inane to being a sycophant of epic proportions.One can only hope that Jonathan Wells and David Berlinski had full body condoms available to protect the various body parts that Klinghoffer was trying to insert his tongue in...
The Mongering Hordes
Posted on October 28, 2009Charles C. Haynes, a prominent First Amendment scholar has an article, "Say what you want, hate-crimes bill protects free speech," on why the lunatic right wing's tizzy about the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which adds sexual orientation and gender identity (along with disability) as categories covered by federal hate-crimes statutes, is insane...
They Recognize Their Own
Posted on October 27, 2009Jesus Creed is discussing a white paper commissioned by the Biologos Foundation that surveys evangelical Christian theologians as to what barriers they perceive to be the greatest to accepting "theistic evolution" (i.e. evolution at all). Besides being a fascinating insight into the thinking (or lack thereof) of evangelicals, the study's author, Bruce Waltke, described by one of his book publishers as a "leading Old Testament evangelical scholar" providing "conservative commentary" on Genesis, had this as one of the "barriers" he was asking about:Apologists such as those of the Intelligent Design Movement, fathered by Phillip E...
And Now for Something Not Even Very Original
Posted on October 26, 2009It seems the Seventh-day Adventists are aping the Clergy Letter Project's Evolution Weekend program. They just held their first Creation Sabbath, where such startling presentations were made as:... evidence for the biblical account of a worldwide flood, including turtle fossils in the United States and whale fossils in Peru that are in the same state of decay, indicating they were likely buried at the same time...
British Reserve
Posted on October 25, 2009Wow ... just wow:More than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schoolscience lessons ? a proportion higher than in the US.An Ipsos Mori survey questioned 11,768 adults from 10 countries on how the theory of evolution should be taught in school science lessons...
Philosophy and Philosophers
Posted on October 25, 2009I had started on a fairly long response to Russell Blackford's reply to Massimo Pigliucci's blog post "On the scope of skeptical inquiry." But much of it has been overtaken by Russell's comments here. Specifically:As for the claim about the age of the Earth, the ultimate answer I want to give is that rational inquiry rejects 6000 years as the correct age and settles on 4 to 5 billion years...
Philosophy and Scientists
Posted on October 24, 2009.Uh, oh!Jerry Coyne is "doing" philosophy again.Predictably, the results are not unlike what happens when other activities are described as "doing" something.Not to put too fine a point on it, Coyne is claiming that atheism is a scientific position.The specific occasion for Coyne's assault and battery on philosophy is the post by Massimo Pigliucci, "On the scope of skeptical inquiry," at his blog Rationally Speaking, that I recently quoted:[L]et us turn to atheism...
Philosophers and Science
Posted on October 23, 2009A thought:Darwin expected theologians, people untrained in scientific investigation, and even those scientists who were strongly religious to object violently to his theory of evolution. He had also anticipated the skepticism of even the most dispassionate scientists...
Boundaries
Posted on October 22, 2009A thought:[L]et us turn to atheism. Once again: it is a philosophical, not a scientific position. Now, I have argued of course that any intelligent philosopher ought to allow her ideas to be informed by science, but philosophical inquiry is broader than science because it includes non-evidence based approaches, such as logic or more broadly reason-based arguments...
Plan Design from Outer Space
Posted on October 22, 2009Remember John Lynch's article a while back, "The Roots of ID," about the Discovery Institute's claim at its faith + evolution website (set up to counter the Biologos Foundation's efforts to convince more Christians that evolution and faith are compatible) that the Intelligent Design Movement wasn't born in the immediate aftermath of Edwards v...
The George Orwell Was a Pussy Award
Posted on October 21, 2009Sheriff Jim R. Schwiesow, Ret. (you're going to be soooo relieved by those last three letters) "thinks" that the Order of the Illuminati have taken over the United States (and, almost as an afterthought, that Barack Obama is a Kenya-born commie) that achieved that end with ...
Muslims Quoting PZ
Posted on October 20, 2009... and favorably at that!Sheila Musaji, in The American Muslim, reviews The Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya (otherwise known as Adnan Oktar). She notes: Yahya has offered a huge sum of money ($10 trillion Turkish lira or $8,010,890,000,000. Eight trillion, ten billion, eight hundred and ninety million dollars) to any scientist who can bring forward an intermediate fossil, however, it is doubtful that there is any scientific evidence that he would accept...
The World Is About to End
Posted on October 20, 2009This is for Yankees fans.Jorge Posada stole second.... then got caught in a rundown that the umpires blew the call on ... the third bad call but, so far, its been a wash.
Wilkins World Tour Meets Howlerfest
Posted on October 18, 2009John Wilkins' World Tour arrived with much pomp and circumstances in New York where he was waylaid by a group of Howler Monkeys (and one refugee) from the talk.origins newsgroup and forced to consume copious amounts of beer and dead animals against his will...
Waiting on Wilkins
Posted on October 18, 2009I started blogging because of the 2005 New York visit of the Antipodian Philosopher ... the bastard!Tomorrow I should be seeing him again at Chris Thompson's place.Between that and the Yankees, I'm not very focused on blogging tonight.Take a look at John's last visit instead...
Flaming Straw
Posted on October 16, 2009Kelly Boggs, a columnist for Baptist Press and editor of the Baptist Message, newsjournal of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, is trying to play the guilt card:According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus the word "liberal" is defined as: respectful and accepting of behavior or opinions different from one's own...
Ice Skating
Posted on October 15, 2009A thought:From the late nineteenth century on, religious people who have thought hard about the Darwinian view of the history of life have found it deeply troubling. George John Romanes, author of books on religion and works of science, found Darwin's vision agonizing...
Converse Sneakers
Posted on October 15, 2009.In my last post, I pointed out that Michael Behe, despite all his and the Discovery Institute's denials that ID is either religious or creationism (the latter based on a claim that "creationism" is only properly applied to YEC), is peddling ID as part of a series of lectures presented by The International Institute for Culture, a "non-profit educational and research center dedicated to Catholic cultural renewal...
Birds of a Feather
Posted on October 13, 2009Of course Intelligent Design is not religious. Neither is it creationism.The fact that Michael Behe is participating in a lecture series organized by The International Institute for Culture, which describes the series as: Leading Catholic scientists, ethicists and cultural analysts will present information that supports the event's theme: "Latest Scientific Discoveries Challenge Darwinian Evolution's Fitness to Survive...
Druthers
Posted on October 12, 2009This is why I like PZ Myers much more than Jerry Coyne.When PZ decides to talk about philosophy, he at least manages to be very much in the ballpark, while Coyne has difficulty differentiating his gluteus maximus from his ginglymus.Not only does PZ cite my favorite, much underlined, article of Stephen Jay Gould's, he creates this lovely metaphor of the relationship between science and philosophy:Philosophers, sweet as they may be, are most definitely not the "arbiters" of the cognitive structure of science...
The End
Posted on October 11, 2009Due to "real life" (including such things as baseball playoffs), I've been remiss in getting to Nick Smyth's last two responses to criticisms of his article, that he characterizes as:7. You keep using this word "Science". But you say science is indefinable! How can you keep using it? (John)8...
The Two Faces of DI
Posted on October 10, 2009And it gets funnier!Robert Crowther is at the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation further kvetching about the cancellation by the California Science Center of a screening of the Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion. It's the usual PR spin not worth much attention...
Taking In the Viewpoint
Posted on October 09, 2009Heh! I reported before that the IMAX theater at the California Science Center in Los Angeles had been rented to show the Discovery Institute's pet piece of propaganda Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion.Not so fast!It seems that the Center has cancelled the screening and accompanying prayer tent meeting, entitled "The Darwin Debates: A Forum for Dialogue...
TruthTM
Posted on September 30, 2009To continue with Nick Smyth's response to criticisms, Nick asks:I have come to accept that we shouldn't dwell on the semantics of the prefix "pseudo", here, but rather that we should just ask ourselves how we would feel if we were the target of this kind of accusation...
Constitutionally Ignorant
Posted on September 29, 2009Well, the long anticipated response of Nick Smyth to criticisms of his article at 3Quarks Daily is up at his own blog and I can't muster much enthusiasm for another round of discussion about it. There's not much new there and what there is, at least in the case of my criticisms, suffers from a lack of understanding of the original critique...
We're Gonna Be Here a While
Posted on September 29, 2009There's nothing like a challenge to get me moving. Nick Smyth showed up here and laid some snide on me:I can't help but suspect that you can't think of ways to respond to my specific critiques aimed at your points. I made three (three!) in the new response and there is nothing about them here...
Stone-Cold Winner
Posted on September 28, 2009Double Woo Hoo!Brian Switek of Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking has announced that his first book, Written in Stone, will be coming out next year:In it I tell the stories of some of the most magnificent evolutionary transitions in the vertebrate fossil record, such as the evolution of birds from feathered theropod dinosaurs and whales from land-dwelling ancestors, and I use the history of science to sketch our changing understanding of these major events in vertebrate evolution...
Save the Planet ... Believe in a Fuzzy God
Posted on September 28, 2009Robert McCredie May, Lord May, the president of the British Science Association, a former President of the Royal Society and a former British Government chief scientific advisor thinks the world is on a "calamitous trajectory" because of its failure to coordinate measures against global warming ...
Designing Science
Posted on September 28, 2009In something that may be related to the dustup with Nick Smyth, I present the Intelligent Alien Intervention Institute!______________________________Via John Lynch .
Carnival of the Elitist Bastards XVII
Posted on September 28, 2009.The Elitist Bastard has sailed again, proudly sporting its new bumper sticker (I didn't even know ships had bumpers!)..
Dust's Up!
Posted on September 27, 2009Nick Smyth has been continuing the discussion of my criticism of his article at 3 Quarks Daily, entitled "Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks," in the comments here.The gist of his claim is that "science" is impossible to define and, therefore, there is no basis for denying anyone the right to call whatever activity they want "science...
Misguided Missal
Posted on September 26, 2009The Dishonesty Institute has released a "College Student's Back to School Guide on Intelligent Design."All you need to know about this piece of crap is that, within two short paragraphs, it perpetrates a quote mine of Darwin:Part I: Letter of Introduction: Why This Student's Guide?Welcome to College, Goodbye to Intelligent Design?The famous Pink Floyd song that laments, "We don't need no education / We don't need no thought control," is not just the rant of a rebellious mind; it is also a commentary on the failure of education to teach students how to think critically and evaluate both sides of controversial issues...
Specific Density
Posted on September 25, 2009Whew!Jerry Coyne is not only somewhat crippled in his ability to address the subject of religion rationally, he seems to lose his ability to comprehend the English language when the subject comes up. His latest is dubbing the following from Josh Rosenau as part of some "Hall of Shame":If the goal of this blog is to be at all educational, one hopes that a vigorous defense of analogy will serve some salutary effect in the difficulties people have with analogical thinking, whether they be religious fundamentalists bent on Biblical literalism, or atheists bent on insisting that literalism is the true form of religion...
Bozo Goes to College
Posted on September 24, 2009In another sign of the coming Apocalypse, there is an actual indication that Ray Comfort can learn ... or else yet another creationist is lying through his teeth depending on what audience he is speaking to, which would be a sign that everything is normal...
There's Bullocks In Philosophy, Too!
Posted on September 24, 2009Nick Smyth has posted an article at 3 Quarks Daily, entitled "Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks," that John Wilkins calls "infuriating but thought-provoking." I confess that I find it mostly confusing. Smyth wants to replace any talk about a demarcation between science and non-science/pseudoscience with a demarcation between "truth" and "bollocks...
This Is a Tribulation?
Posted on September 22, 2009PZ Myearshertz on the aftermath of the Rapture:Have any Christian friends or neighbors? Go knock on their door. If no one answers, they're in paradise ? help yourself to their house, their car, their jewelry, that nice TV in their living room. Traffic on your commute should be a little lighter in the morning...
One Order of Gander Sauce, Please!
Posted on September 22, 2009Here is PZ Myers discussing the new report on that 15% of Americans who responded "No Religion" to the American Religious Identification Survey that shows that only 10% of the "nones" identify as atheists:Those "Nones" don't believe in a Bearded Ape of Cosmic Proportions, they aren't propping up the local priestly den of ignorance with donations, and Pat Robertson is still confident that every one of them will burn in hell...
The Long Goodbye
Posted on September 21, 2009PZ Megahertz already had this but I just thought I'd say goodbye to all my friends and readers who are going to be raptured today ... assuming I have any that qualify..
May the Farce Be With You
Posted on September 21, 2009Not much comment necessary:Daniel Jones, founder of the religion inspired by the Star Wars films, says he was humiliated and victimised for his beliefs following [an] incident at a Tesco store in Bangor [Wales].The 23-year-old, who founded the International Church of Jediism, which has 500,000 followers worldwide, was told the hood flouted store rules...
I Have a Theory
Posted on September 20, 2009A thought:In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"?part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory...
I Knew That!
Posted on September 19, 2009And so it continues.There is a lot of rational discussion being had about Josh Rosenau's piece on different "ways of knowing" and Jerry Coyne, as usual, is adding nothing to that discussion. His latest is a pep rally for Jason Rosenhouse's post on the subject...
When Pigs Fly
Posted on September 19, 2009. Miss Porky Pig flies through the air during the Pig Racing and Diving show at Melbourne Showgrounds, September 18, in Melbourne, Australia. The Show has been taking place in Melbourne since 1848 and is Victoria's largest and longest running annual public entertainment event, expected to attract around half a million visitors in 2009...
Bonus Shot!
Posted on September 19, 2009Abbie at ERV has pointed out the announcement that the powers that be at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History have listened to the science-friendly blogosphere (or, just maybe, being highly intelligent people themselves, were working on it all along)...
Arcane Discovery
Posted on September 18, 2009In no surprise at all, the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation is claiming that it is being subjected to "Suppression and Censorship" because the science-respecting part of the blogosphere is upset about the screening of the DI's propaganda film, Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History...
Code Blue
Posted on September 17, 2009I've long known about Cornell University biologist Allen MacNeill's blog, The Evolution List, but have not, for some reason, followed it. It hasn't been updated in a while (which I hope is related to the summer break) but it's well worth reading back through it...
Vote For the Nut!
Posted on September 16, 2009.In the category of campaign ads that might need to be rethought:.
Not Bad
Posted on September 16, 2009The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History has issued a statement on its website about the Discovery Institute's screening of the propaganda film, Darwin's Dilemma, at the museum's Kerr Auditorium:Although the museum does not support unscientific views masquerading as science, such as those espoused by the Discovery Institute, the museum does respect the religious beliefs of all people...
Equivalences
Posted on September 16, 2009Jerry Coyne is once again displaying for all to see the entire depth of philosophical reasoning and discourse he is capable of.Naturally, that involves name-calling and passing the buck to others to do the heavy lifting, in this case, Ophelia Benson (not necessarily the best choice) and her commentariat...
W. T. F. ?
Posted on September 15, 2009According to Reuters:Darwin's Dilemma will be screened at Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr...
Too Crazed for CPAC?
Posted on September 15, 2009In a development that promises that pigs will soon sprout wings:[O]rganizers of next year's Conservative Political Action Conference ? the country's biggest annual meeting of activists on the right ? said last week that they had rejected a request to schedule a panel on whether Obama was a native-born U...
A Journey Only Begins With One Step
Posted on September 15, 2009In response to yesterday's post about the debut of the propaganda film by Intelligent Design creationists, Darwin's Dilemma, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, a comment was left by Linda Coldwell, of the SNOMNH:You are correct that the Sam Noble Museum is not endorsing this film or this school of thought...
To Everything There Is a Season
Posted on September 13, 2009Randal Rauser, and his Food for the Soul blog at The Christian Post, is back at the ol' ID stand peddling nonsense, as he has done before. The interesting part is that, much as he did in criticizing Expelled, he is doing it under cover of reasonableness:What I find most interesting, and disturbing, about the current health care debate is the way that advocates of a public option in health care are marginalized with the accusation that they harbor a "socialist" or even "communist" agenda...
A New Place to Hang Out
Posted on September 13, 2009The Axis of Evo is a new blog.Michael Barton of The Dispersal of Darwin informs us that the blog belongs to Colin Purrington of Swarthmore College, a biologist and creator of the Charles Darwin Has a Posse movement.Give it a look..
Primeval Philosophical Simplicity
Posted on September 12, 2009The Wall Street Journal has dueling essays from Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins.PZ Myers has looked upon what Dawkins hath wrought and saw that it was good. PZ actually adds something to the debate but Jerry Coyne, predictably, acts like the toady to the schoolyard bully, proclaiming his "victory" even after his hero tripped over his own feet while trying to catch his latest victim...
Damn It, Toto, Who Wants to Be in Kansas?!?
Posted on September 11, 2009Hopefully, most of the residents of Alameda, California don't:I'M BEGINNING TO feel like Dorothy when she and Toto landed in Oz. I don't think I'm in Alameda any more.No, it feels more like Kansas"... or Texas, or any of the other states where the religious right tried to take over school boards in the 1990s...
Deep in the Heart of Texas
Posted on September 11, 2009Ed Brayton already has it but there's no way this isn't going to be in my blog:"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love...
The YEC Cure
Posted on September 09, 2009Well, we're in for another round of "Darwin fathered Hitler" crap from the Discovery Institute droids. Richard Weikart's new book, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Process has been published (Amazon wants $53.96 US for it, so it may have limited impact among non-Discoveryoids)...
Burned By Chestnuts
Posted on September 08, 2009I do wish Jerry Coyne would stick to biology, at which he is great, and leave philosophy, at which he is, to say the least, not great, alone. At a minimum, he could refrain from sneering at that which he does not understand.Coyne's latest stab (in all senses of the word) at philosophy is in response to an article at The Daily Dish by Jim Manzi entitled "In Defense of Robert Wright against Jerry Coyne...
Word Play
Posted on September 07, 2009Hah!The things you run into when poking around in your own blog!In preparing a post on Jerry Coyne's latest mugging of philosophy (which I may or may not complete, given the size it threatens to expand to) I stumbled on a usage of "faitheism" well before Coyne ran his contest to find a new pejorative for atheists who are insufficiently militant in Coyne's eyes (Dawkins' "Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement' school" apparently not being "snappy" enough)...
WTF?
Posted on September 07, 2009Most of my select readership will have heard about the furor over Bloggingheads, which recently featured, first, young-Earth creationist and Discoveryless Institute drone, Paul Nelson, and, then, equally discoveryless Michael Behe. Nelson's appearance (with the otherwise excellent historian of creationism, Ronald Numbers) was particularly egregious, since it was a "Science Saturday" episode and Numbers was not interested in debunking creationism and its doppelganger, Intelligent Design...
Ignorance as Moral Authority
Posted on September 06, 2009"Canada Has Religious Nutbars, Just Like America" ... or so says LiveLeak of this story from the National Post:Christian parents who objected to their children being taught about other religions in a mandatory new Quebec school course have suffered a serious setback with a ruling this week that the teachings do not infringe their religious freedoms...
Dance With Dissonance
Posted on September 05, 2009Massimo Pigliucci has an interesting post at his blog, Rationally Speaking, about the differences between "skepticism," "cynicism," "gullibility" and (although Professor Pigliucci doesn't mention the term) "personal incredulity" of the sort so often appealed to by creationists...
When In Doubt, Punt
Posted on September 04, 2009Ohhh!Can I get my official Dr. Strange Junior Seer badge now?I predicted that Casey Luskin study would soon be attempting -- at interminable length -- to refute the recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows that protein-transporting systems in eucaryotic cell are not irreducibly complex...
Mutant Creationist Arguments
Posted on September 04, 2009Dr. Steven Novella of Neurologica Blog has a nice post that connects a new study (nicely explained by Larry Moran), using the latest genetic sequencing techniques to give a more accurate estimate of the mutation rate in humans, and creationist claims that the majority of mutations are harmful and, therefore, evolution could not occur by natural selection for lack of sufficient viable variants to select from:Creationists, as they often do, habitually misunderstand the nature of "mutations...
Show and Tell
Posted on September 03, 2009Texas is famous for cows and yellow roses.... Oh, and crazed politics.Governor Rick (the South will rise again) Perry doesn't think the President of the United States can be trusted to give a speech to the state's kids. About President Obama's plan to speak directly to school children across the nation over the web on the importance of education, Perry had this to say:While President Obama talking directly to school children could be a memorable moment in their young lives, I am troubled that local school boards and superintendents were not involved in the process...
Mythic Morality
Posted on September 02, 2009A thought:Historically, moral and political policies have been based either upon mythologies of the supernatural or else mythologies involving nature. The belief in the special creation of species, in God's providential care for the world and everyone and everything in it, and in compensation for unjust suffering and retaliation for unpunished wickedness in the next life, are examples of moral supernaturalism that tend to promote ethical complacency and resignation where social inequality is concerned...
Blue Theology
Posted on September 02, 2009Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a post up about Pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, who is praying for the death of President Barack Obama and one of whose parishioners showed up outside Obama's Phoenix event carrying an assault rifle and a handgun...
Intelligent Climate Change
Posted on August 31, 2009Eoin O'Carroll of the Bright Green Blog at the The Christian Science Monitor makes an interesting connection between climate change denialism and evolution denialism (otherwise known as "creationism"). Discussing the US Chamber of Commerce's proposal that the Environmental Protection Agency hold a public hearing, in the nature of a new ?Scopes monkey trial? to defend its finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants that pose a threat to public health and welfare, O'Carroll notes:Both groups willfully ignore mountains of firmly established scientific evidence...
Carnival of the Elitist Bastards XVI
Posted on August 31, 2009The Carnival has sailed again from Quiche Moraine with Stephanie at the helm.And this time it has a tale that, to me, explains the meaning of the Carnival in such a perfect way that it has to be noticed ... the man with a telescope.There are many lessons that can be drawn ...
Devolution
Posted on August 30, 2009.I don't think evolution should be associated with our school.- Sherry Melby, Sedalia Missouri School District teacherThe Smith-Cotton High School band had a theme. Like most such exercises, it didn't seem to make much sense ... "how brass instruments have evolved in music from the 1960s to modern day...
All Hands on Deck!
Posted on August 29, 2009Ya gotta love creationists!If there is some way to twist facts so as to mislead, they'll find it. Today's example is from Bill Belew, a particularly dense example who blogs at Examiner.com. As seems to be frequently the case with Belew, he doesn't really blog but cuts and pastes, which is just as well, since the few examples of his own writing that I've seen tend to be incoherent in the extreme...
Uhhh ...
Posted on August 28, 2009Jerry Coyne on the New Yorker piece by James Wood ? "God in the Quad":[Quoting Wood] What is most repellent about the new atheism is its intolerant certainty; it is always noon in Dawkins's world, and the sun of science and liberal positivism is shining brassily, casting no shadow...
It's a Mann's World
Posted on August 28, 2009I have been having a spiritual Mannifestation.The signs are eerie. Words and concepts change meanings without rhyme or reason and without warning -- "science" becomes "secularism;" "secularism" transmutes into "worldview;" "methodological naturalism" morphs into "philosophical naturalism;" "supernatural causation" mutates into "scientific explanation;" and, most of all, "separation of church and state" transfigures into "allowing Christians a level playing field to teach their theology as science...
Ready ... Aim ... Comedy
Posted on August 27, 2009Uh, oh! Now they've done it!Before long we'll have another of Casey Luskin's attempts on science (like an attempt on someone's life ... except where the attacker winds up hurting only himself).Wired Science is reporting on a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows that protein-transporting systems in eucaryotic cell are not irreducibly complex:"This analysis of protein transport provides a blueprint for the evolution of cellular machinery in general," write the researchers, led by molecular biologist Trevor Lithgow at Australia's Monash University...
School Learnin'
Posted on August 27, 2009The Spencer (Iowa) School Board, as reported by The Des Moines Register, is apparently pulling its hand off the stove before it gets burnt too much. Only licking a couple of singed fingers, the board has abandoned a policy that almost undoubtedly would have resulted in a constitutional challenge and diverted scarce resources into a lawsuit that could have been better spent on their real job, education, rather than half-assed efforts at social engineering...
Out and About the Intertubes
Posted on August 26, 2009Talking Tautology:Wilkins continues his series on the contention that the concept of Natural Selection is a tautology:The tautology problemtautology 1a: correctionsTautology 1b: ButlerTautology 2: The problem arisesTautology 3: The problem spreadsTautology 4: What is a tautology?Talking Science:Like any elusive prey, young minds may have to be snuck up on...
All Wet
Posted on August 25, 2009Casey Luskin is a puddle.Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise...
Fooling With the Bible
Posted on August 24, 2009Stultorum infinitus est numerus. (Ecc. 1:15)There is a Letter to the Editor in the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser that is all but biblical in the proportion of foolishness it packs into a small space. It comes in response to an article by James Evans, pastor of Auburn First Baptist Church, recommending the Clergy Letter Project and not only contradicts the experts in science but those who have, presumably, some expertise in theology...
Ganders Need Not Apply
Posted on August 23, 2009Jason Rosenhouse offers a defense of sorts of A.C. Grayling's ignorant portrayal of Jesuits. Jason doesn't put much effort in it -- seemingly limited to an exhaustive search of one Wikipedia article -- and it shows.Worse, Jason begins hauling Grayling's goalposts around, as ThonyC demonstrates...
Making Gaines
Posted on August 23, 2009Jim Gaines gets mail.His column in the Bowling Green, Kentucky Daily News excoriating Ken Ham's Monument to Ignorance drew predictable ire from the "Bronze Age science is good enough for me" crowd. Happily, Jim now reports that most of the reaction was positive...
Heartless
Posted on August 22, 2009There is a new culinary creation being test marketed in the American midwest that contains a secret sauce between slices of Pepperjack Cheese and Swiss Cheese topped by two slices of bacon and with two filets of fried chicken that serve as the "buns" of the "burger...
Get Plucked
Posted on August 22, 2009Ouch!A.C. Grayling, one of the "New Atheists," in the course of an otherwise well-deserved bashing of William Dembski's bogus requirements for his classes at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, takes off after Jesuits:In the aftermath of the Reformation in the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuit Order as an army of defence against the attack on the One True Church...
Checking Reality
Posted on August 22, 2009Randal Rauser, associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, has finally gotten around to following up on his article of a couple of months ago concerning how the admittedly execrable Expelled misrepresented Intelligent Design. He has two complaints so far:Ben Stein considers Francis Crick's attempt to explain the apparent design of DNA...
Welcome to Salem
Posted on August 21, 2009Jim Gaines of the Bowling Green, Kentucky Daily News wrote a column about an embarrassment in his back yard. Here is a nice representative sample:[Ken Ham's Creation "Museum"] devotes a huge amount of its 70,000 square feet to justifying a literal worldwide flood, and to explaining away the extensive geologic evidence of a 4...
Out and About the Intertubes
Posted on August 20, 2009Fit PhilosophyOne of the creationists favorite arguments is that Natural Selection is a tautology ... that organisms that are fit survive and "fitness" is defined as that which enables organisms to survive. Perhaps more than most creationist arguments, this one raises some interesting philosophical problems and John Wilkins is tackling them, starting off with a history of the tautology claim...
Incoming!
Posted on August 20, 2009Now here is a useful new usage.For all those occasions when Casey Luskin or Michael Egnor or Joseph Farah deliver a hypocrisy, deception or plain cluelessness so massive that the usual terms seem to pale into insignificance against the brightly burning stupid, Ed Brayton has come up with a term that won't, at least, be lost in the glare...
Natural Rights
Posted on August 19, 2009Bruce Ledewitz, Professor of Law at Duquesne University School of Law, is in The Huffington Post dicussing a panel debate at the Netroots Nation Convention entitled: "A New Progressive Vision for Church and State: How I Learned to Accept "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and Stop Losing Elections...
Clueless Googolplex
Posted on August 19, 2009What more can you do except point and laugh/weep?Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of WingNutDaily has got a little list:Obama seeks to use his power to impose policies that have, like it or not, a striking resemblance to those Hitler promoted in the 1930s...
Stoned
Posted on August 18, 2009Casey Luskin is engaged in another of his endless multipart screeds rehashing one of his previous endless screeds in which he tries to make a convoluted case that Ken Miller misconstrued Michael Behe as making a claim that the entire blood clotting cascade (BCC) was irreducibly complex, when Behe supposedly only claimed that a part of it was...
Fire Break
Posted on August 17, 2009Ow! Ow! Ow!How do you treat third-degree irony burns?The Discovery Institute's highly skilled meat cutter, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back and committing neuron arson at an alarming pace. Just consider this opening paragraph: Much of the debate about evolution turns on language, and there is much misrepresentation, mostly on one side of the debate...
Of Bulls and Arguments
Posted on August 16, 2009Josh Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas and the National Center for Science Education has a take-no-prisoners article up on "bullshit" in public discourse that includes William Dembski, "birthers," "truthers," and "death squaders." However, a major focus of the post is the ugly conflict between the "New Atheists," particularly Jerry Coyne, and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum...
Friendly Advice
Posted on August 15, 2009How to do Intelligent Design research:1. Accuse the entire scientific community of being wrong ...2. Design poor-quality experiments that are almost guaranteed to show your hypothesis is true whether it really is or not. ...3. Keep using arguments that have been thoroughly discredited...
What Do These Posts Share In Common?
Posted on August 14, 2009"Francis Collins' Hear-No-Evil, See-No-Evil Approach to Persecution of ID Proponents" by Casey Luskin"Michael Ruse's WhingeFest: atheists very, very bad for evolution" by Jerry Coyne.....
Of Scientists and Evidence
Posted on August 14, 2009Jerry Coyne (endorsed by PZ) has repeated his claim that, empirically, accommodationism has failed because "American?s attitudes to evolution have been relatively unchanged (with 40+% denying it) for twenty-five years." Actually, it is considerably longer than that the numbers on this issue have been stable...
It Came From ...
Posted on August 13, 2009... University of California Press. I am now a proud owner of a Wilkins First Edition and I'm counting on all the rest of you to make him a famous author in hopes that someday my copy, carefully guarded, will be worth a bundle.But even if that does not eventuate, there is much to gain:This is an essay in the history of ideas (although I prefer the term conceptual history), and in particular of the ideas that came before and might be demonstrated or fairly thought to have contributed to the ideas in play in biological thought about species and classification...
Bring Back Bing
Posted on August 13, 2009Mike Haubrich of Tangled Up In Blue Guy managed to ship his thirteen year old son off to Japan for the summer. There's just a little problem now ... getting him back home. As Mike explains:Bing has made new friends in Japan, but they want to keep him there...
One Shell of an Argument
Posted on August 13, 2009Mark Chu-Carroll has a good post up on Stephen Meyer's smoke and mirrors "evidence" for design ... specifically, Meyer's use of equivocation in the meaning of the term "digital." As Mark points out, there are:Three possible definitions of digital information: 1...
Scientific Philosophy, Philosophical Science
Posted on August 12, 2009Glenn Branch has a nice review, entitled "Philosophers, Creationists & Serious Brainiacs," of the new edition, edited by Michael Ruse and Robert Pennock, of But Is It Science?, originally published in 1988.But Is It Science? is evidently intended as a sourcebook for university classes in philosophy, the history of science, science and religion, and so forth, and as such it succeeds admirably...
Is the Word Incalcitrant or Recalcitrant?
Posted on August 12, 2009The Undiscovery Institute's John West is kvetching about "the outlandish new 'study' evaluating state science standards published by two officials of the National Center for Science Education ... [in] a journal devoted to the one-sided teaching of evolution" [i...
Law & Epistemology
Posted on August 11, 2009.A thought:The epistemological problems generated by supernatural theism necessitate the faith commitments required of believers. The insufficiency of human cognitive faculties for knowing the supernatural demands willful assent without conclusive evidence?faith?from those who seek temporal meaning in a transcendent reality...
The Best They Can Do
Posted on August 10, 2009The Discovery Institute has announced in a press release (where else?) a new animation of the interior working of a cell -- in particular the copying of DNA and protein synthesis -- that supposedly "dramatically illustrates the evidence for intelligent design within DNA, as described in Stephen C...
Ride 'Em
Posted on August 10, 2009There is simply nothing to be said about this ...(except maybe that you should click on the picture and look closely at the tie.).
In the Land of the Inane
Posted on August 10, 2009Can David Klinghoffer become any more intellectual inane?Given his starting point, that is a close question, but there is no doubt that he's in there giving it the good ol' college try.His latest attempt is contained in a post at his blog, Kingdom of Priests, entitled "Charles Manson, Evolutionist...
The God Balloon
Posted on August 09, 2009Free Inquiry magazine has published (pdf available here) a report on a new survey of 6,000 self-identified atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonreligious Americans. This is the summary from the article:To summarize, relative to the religious or churched segment of the population, the nonreligious are distinguished both demographically (more likely to be male, highly educated, never married or cohabiting) and by their personality (more open to new experience and intellectually oriented, less agreeable [defined as: "a quality of being amiable or nonconfrontational as opposed to skeptical of others"])...
Late Nights
Posted on August 08, 2009New York Yankees 2, Boston Red Sox 0, 15 inningsHome Run, Alex Rodriguez
Theological Revelations
Posted on August 08, 2009Heh!The Discoveryoids are in a theological dispute with the "theistic evolutionists" that, quite appropriately, clearly reveals the religious roots of Intelligent Design Creationism. The latest feeble bow shot is by David Klinghoffer, who once again demonstrates that he has an intellectual range that is both an inch deep and an inch wide...
Widespread Mediocrity
Posted on August 07, 2009Barrett Brown, co-author of Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism & Intelligent Design, has a nice takedown of Wild Bill Dembski and his blog, Uncommon Dissembling ... er ... Dissent ... er ... Descent.Brown recounts Dembski's misadventures with flatulence and Homeland Security, and Dave ("DaveScot") Springer's imperviousness to self-irony...
The "Pros" from Dover
Posted on August 07, 2009The Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation is bewailing the mean ol' "Darwinists" again:The anti-ID crowd has an old canard about there being no serious scientists who doubt Darwin, let alone any that support intelligent design. And they like to say that there is no science being done by ID scientists...
Origin of Species
Posted on August 07, 2009John Wilkins' exceptionally pretty and no doubt highly informative book is just about available.According to the University of California Press, the book is expected to ship August 11th, though the official release date remains September 1st. If I were you, I'd order my copy right away, since the demand will surely be J...
Through a Glass Darkly
Posted on August 06, 2009The National Center for Science Education has now got the entire collection available at its site of its Creation/Evolution Journal, begun in 1980 and continuing until 1996, when the journal was merged with its Reports of the National Center for Science Education...
Casting a Vex
Posted on August 05, 2009Joel Hendon is vexed in his spirit.I become vexed at the wads of crabgrass and dandelions which keep showing up in my lawn. My dogs, whom I love with little reservations, vex me with their lack of prudence in performing their daily routines, also on my lawn...
The Dangers of Dictionaries
Posted on August 04, 2009Heh!It's time to review the definition of "petard" again.Ed Brayton links to WingNutDaily's publicizing of an anonymous YouTuber who claims Biblical evidence that Barack Obama is the Antichrist:His 4-minute video focuses on the direct quote: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven...
Everything's Up to Date ...
Posted on August 03, 2009Tina Brown... is a Christian who is married to a pastor. Together, they have 7 children and homeschool 6 of them. They reside in Richardson, TX.She also has "reviewed" The Astronomy Book by Dr. Jonathan Henry which is "written from a God created viewpoint ...
Of Geese and Ganders
Posted on August 02, 2009Jason Rosenhouse is continuing his review of Chris Mooney's and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book, Unscientific America. I'm not much interested in the book but Jason's arguments against Mooney's and Kirshenbaum's positions are another matter. Jason says this:They put a lot of weight on the distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism, apparently thinking that the New Atheists are confused about the distinction...
Religious Education
Posted on August 02, 2009A University of Michigan Institute study has purportedly found that College students who major in the social sciences and humanities are likely to get less inclined towards religion while those majoring in education are likely to become more religious...
Counting Noses
Posted on August 01, 2009Jim Lippard has taken one for the team and sat through Creation Ministries International's "documentary," The Voyage That Shook The World. You can see his review/debunking here.Jim notes that the film at one points sets up a novel opposition between evolution and creationism in that evolution supposedly argues for the fixity of species while creationism is in favor of their mutability:The film suggests that the religious view is that the wide diversity and geographic dispersal of living things emerged in the last few thousand years since the flood of Noah, which entails a rapidity of evolution that evolutionary scientists would reject as implausible...
Ophelia Swoons
Posted on July 31, 2009Ophelia Benson has been making much of some commenter at Chris Mooney's and Sheril Kirshenbaum's blog, going by the 'nym "TB, stating that Benson was "lying" about Mooney and Kirshenbaum not having evidence for their assertions in their book. Benson has even demanded that the comments be removed by Mooney and Kirshenbaum and, in a different instance, Sheril apparently ...
Montezuma's Revenge
Posted on July 30, 2009A thought:It was clear to Paley and to other defenders of the organismic design argument that the intelligent designer who built organisms must have been far more intelligent and efficacious than any human being could ever be. This is why the organismic design argument was for them an atgument for the existence of God...
The Eyes Have It
Posted on July 30, 2009There is a point-counterpoint in the Los Angeles Times between Francisco Ayala and Michael Shermer over the appropriateness of Francis Collins' appointment to head the National Institutes of Health. The most notable thing is this from Ayala:Do I expect Collins to use his office as NIH director to promote religion? No...
Cultured Journalism
Posted on July 30, 2009A couple of months ago, after Larry Moran had announced that he was attending the "Two Cultures" meeting in New York, I stumbled across Mike Treder's (of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) live blogging of the event. Mike described a panel discussion on "How to More Effectively Communicate Science Issues to the Public" where an unnamed "scientist and educator" asked why all of the panelists in the session were science journalists and expressing the dismay many scientists feel at the job that science journalists do...
Scientific Sleuthing
Posted on July 28, 2009Ian Musgrave has a good post up at The Panda's Thumb on William Dembski's science envy. What caught my eye was Ian's responce to Dembski's claim that there is a "powerful new caste of scientists who have appointed themselves the guardians of humanity and the priests of a new social order," based on the scientific community's consensus about anthropogenic global warming...
The Day the Argument Stood Still
Posted on July 27, 2009Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are in Time humping their book Unscientific America (nothing wrong with that -- good ol' American free enterprise) when they just about ended any chance I'll like the thing.Part of your book talks about the depiction of "mad scientists" in Hollywood films...
Ground Control to Major Tom
Posted on July 26, 2009Craig Nelson, author of Rocket Men ? The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, on conspiracy theories that deny that American astronauts landed on the moon:"Those people have a religion and no facts will undo them," Nelson said. His favorite response to conspiracy groups comes from Armstrong who said it was easier to just go to the moon than it would have been to fake it...
Bastards On the Beach
Posted on July 26, 2009The Fifteenth Carnival of Elitist Bastards is lounging about the beach at The Coffee-Stained Writer.Stephanie Zvan at Quiche Moraine has an interesting take on the framing/accommodationist/incompatiblist debate that centers on the claim by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future:Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount?that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot...
The First Plagiarism on the Moon
Posted on July 25, 2009Gary Peach, a retired British scientist who was working at the Tidbinbilla satellite tracking station near Canberra, Australia at the time of the Apollo lunar landing, claims to have come up with astronaut Neil Armstrong's famous statement upon setting foot on the moon: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind...
Insulted Insulter
Posted on July 24, 2009David Klinghoffer is whining again ... and, as usual, in a totally clueless fashion:In a post with the exquisitely ironic title "Why Darwinists Have a Hard Time Being Civil," he compounds his insulting use of "Darwinists" with even worse incivility:What you have to understand about these people -- I mean, those committed to Darwinism -- is that many operate in a world of academics, would-be academics, and failed academics...
Setting the World on Fire
Posted on July 24, 2009Ow.I think it takes more faith to believe in evolution and the increasing order of things in the universe than creationism. Evolution directly opposes the repeated, scientifically-proven Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything moves from a beginning state of highly organized order (which supports intelligent design) to a latter state of random disorder...
False Spring
Posted on July 23, 2009Michael Barton has a very interesting post at his excellent blog, The Dispersal of Darwin about an instance of multiple quote mining of John Tyndall, the 19th century Irish physicist and prominent supporter of evolution and Darwin. In the usual fashion, a scientist is made to look like he opposes evolution when, in fact, the opposite is true...
The Fall of Mann
Posted on July 22, 2009I just wanted to note this for future reference. A recent (and probably temporary) addition to my commentariat (hat tip: Dr. Isis), one Daniel Mann, an instructor at the New York School of the Bible, going under the nym "Mann'sWord," has again made the connection between ID and religion clear...
PARTEE!
Posted on July 22, 2009It's time for Carnival!Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, that is! We've got a short month this time and entries are due this Friday, July 24!Given the little uptick in traffic I've had of late, I'm going to take this opportunity to urge everyone with a blog or webpage friendly to bastardly elitism to scour the place for suitable take-downs of stupidity, cupidity and general mopery or, if you prefer, affirmations of the good things that a little education and erudition can bring to life...
Spittake!
Posted on July 22, 2009Steven Pinker responded to Stephen Meyer's dishonest attempt to hijack Thomas Jefferson as an IDeologist by pointing out that Judge Jones (a conservative Republican) after a six-week trial where the IDers were given every chance to defend ID's supposedly scientific status, ruled that it is religion in disguise...
God Slinging
Posted on July 21, 2009Well, the Spencer (Iowa) School Board is back at it, further discussing a Draft Policy on Religion that is bound to get them in trouble. School Board member Rev. Barb Van Wyk, one of the drafters of the policy, went so far as to say:"We are looking for common ground here, not battle ground," added Van Wyk, one of the policy's writers...
"Modern" Intelligent Design
Posted on July 20, 2009Not content with the Discovery Institute's attempt to hijack Thomas Jefferson into the ranks of IDeologists, despite his death some 33 years before he could consider Darwin's first exposition of natural selection as a mechanism to explain evolution, David Klinghoffer has decided to go medieval...
Get Writing
Posted on July 19, 2009Uh, oh.The new atheism is over and done, and its angry tone of voice will not be missed. That's according to Byron R. McCane, Albert C. Outler Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Wofford College. According to Dr. McCane, the new atheists ignored important facts about religion in America today: First, they dramatically overestimated the number of unbelievers...
Celebration
Posted on July 18, 2009Well, here it is at last! The creationists are about to deliver at last on their old (old, old, old, old, old) promise of the demise of evolution. It is:The Book That Changes Everything!That would be Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute's own Stephen Meyer...
Catching the Religious
Posted on July 17, 2009In no surprise whatsoever, Jerry Coyne has also endorsed Sean Carroll's attempt at a de novo philosophy of science, without regard to the work of generations of philosophers and scientists who have come before. Coyne's adoption of Carrollism has some amusing aspects...
Contrasts
Posted on July 16, 2009PZ Myers points to Sean Carroll's article as if it is a good thing, demonstrating that Carroll is not alone among scientists who concurrently do not understand philosophy but, nonetheless, deride it -- much as Ray Comfort treats evolutionary biology. Interestingly, PZ also points to Daniel Dennett's article on the belief in belief...
Good Science, Bad Philosophy
Posted on July 15, 2009[Sigh!]Here we go again. Scientists are justly upset with people who have no experience or knowledge in their field nonetheless presuming to lecture them on science. For some reason, scientists who have obviously never put much effort into studying philosophy think themselves competent to babble on about it...
Designing Design
Posted on July 14, 2009Okay, this is just cute:"There have been 23 elephant-like animals in history, and yet only two survive today (and we add, they're not doing very well). Clearly, this is the mark of an all-powerful creator who is stuck on the same stupid idea and can't figure out why the hell they keep dying off...
Skilling the Messenger
Posted on July 14, 2009Okay, I've made my case for the overreaching of the "incompatiblists." Now it's time to turn to the "accommodationists," in particular Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. At their blog, The Intersection, they say this:Science and religion are not mutually exclusive and must not continue to be portrayed as such...
Of Methods and Madness
Posted on July 13, 2009Here is a bit more on the "incompatiblist" position on religion and science. An "Anonymous" commenter [Konrad Scheffler] on my last post stated this:As often with this sort of debate, it seems to come down to quibbling about definitions. The word "science" is commonly used to denote at least four distinct concepts: 1...
Blogflation
Posted on July 12, 2009Thony C., the longtime and generally rational commenter on John Wilkins' blog, Evolving Thoughts, has taken the deeply irrational step of starting his own blog, The Renaissance Mathematicus -- the intellectual equivalent of owning a boat, i.e. a hole in the water into which you pour all your money...
Joint Philosophies
Posted on July 12, 2009That well-known New Agnostic, Larry Moran, has once again entered the Accommodationist-Incompatiblist fray with at least something new (to me, that is, as far as my memory goes), the so-called "Doctrine of Joint Belief." Larry cites to a short piece by Clay Shirky at The Edge on "Religion and Science" that asserts that:The idea that religious scientists prove that religion and science are compatible is ridiculous, and I'm embarrassed that I ever believed it...
Novel Religion
Posted on July 11, 2009Sometimes I think David Klinghoffer is more un-self-conciously honest than the other Discovery Institute drones because he is more literary and, therefore, cannot help but reveal himself through the stories he uses as tropes. The latest, and perhaps the funniest, is his "argument" against Simon Conway Morris' claim, adopted as well by Ken Miller, that the well-known cases of convergence in evolution (multiple evolutionary origins of eyes and wings, for example) suggest that an intelligent creature was bound to arise somewhere in the universe through evolution...
Compatible Education
Posted on July 10, 2009PZ speaks:I recommend something different. Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited...
Peter Principle
Posted on July 10, 2009Are we supposed to take Jerry Coyne seriously?I understand that he is a great scientist but what are we to make of his primitive philosophy and un-self-aware and contradictory statements on science, religion and atheism? Quite apart from the embarrassment of having Martin Cothran at the Discovery Institute Ministry of Misinformation pointing out his philosophical errors, now there is this on the appointment of Francis Collins:I expect Collins to resign from BioLogos if he wants to maintain any scientific credibility...
Moving On?
Posted on July 09, 2009Is a perhaps surprising defection in the works?Stephen M. Barr, a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware and a "theistic evolutionist", has been having a running argument with John West of the Discovery Institute, proving the uncomfortableness of the middle...
Next!
Posted on July 09, 2009The Sensuous Curmudgeon has been following the tentative steps of the Spencer (Iowa) School Board as it prepares to wade into the deep waters of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. The Des Moines Register has provided a copy of the Board's Draft Policy on Religion which can be downloaded here...
Alien to Truth
Posted on July 07, 2009Matt Zeitlin a sophomore at Northwestern University and an editorial intern at Campus Progress, an online magazine affiliated with the Center for American Progress, has a nice takedown of the Discoveyless Institute's Stephen Meyer and his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design...
The Theology of Incompatibility
Posted on July 06, 2009There is an interesting exchange (that may well continue) in the Chicago Daily Observer. A Catholic priest, Fr. Robert Barron, a self-described "Catholic evangelist," has responded to Lawrence Krauss' Wall Street Journal article which took, for the most part, the incompatibilist view of science and religion...
The Theology of Incompatibility II
Posted on July 06, 2009Jerry Coyne has reinforced my impression that the nature of claims by "scientist-atheists" (as Coyne calls them) concerning the supposed incompatibility of science and religion are really assertions of the incompatibility of atheism and religion. Coyne claims that Francis Collins, as Ken Miller before him, have allowed "their scientific statements and beliefs to be infected with religion...
Pledging In the Creationist Fraternity
Posted on July 06, 2009There is an advantage to having a curmudgeon around, sensuous or not. Curmudgeons have a need to read stupid stuff to exercise their curmudgeonerliness on. Thus, the rest of us are spared the pain of reading really stupid stuff but still get the chance to laugh at the sillier bits...
Dear Abbot
Posted on July 05, 2009The Sensuous Curmudgeon has begun a new feature to which he has exclusive world rights: Dear Mentor?. Mentor, who has devoted his life to studying the science of creationism and the catastrophic errors of evolution, will be answering questions for the faithful on evolution and how to deal with its moral consequences...
Scientists and Philosophy
Posted on July 04, 2009Francisco Ayala is an unrepentant Popperian.From Ayala's his recent contribution to the Sackler Colloquium: In the light of evolution III: Two centuries of Darwin, entitled "Darwin and the scientific method":The requirement that a scientific hypothesis be falsifiable has been appropriately called the criterion of demarcation of the empirical sciences because it sets apart the empirical sciences from other forms of knowledge (13, 14)...
Oooooh! Scary!
Posted on July 03, 2009Camp Dawkins ... opps ... Camp Quest has apparently got some British Christians' knickers in a knot.The Christian Institute has criticised a new atheist summer camp for children that has been set up in Somerset to offer a "godless alternative" to religious camps...
The Virgin's Strategy
Posted on July 03, 2009.Sarah Palin made a splash in last year's presidential election primarily because she was a political virgin on the national level. Unfortunately for McCain, she couldn't be kept out of the public eye enough to prevent her cherry being popped.Now Palin is trying to restore her virginity by resigning as governor of Alaska...
Duty and Country II
Posted on July 03, 2009The Discovery Institute is repeating its history by distorting the country's history on this Fourth of July eve, as noted by The Sensuous Curmudgeon and John Lynch. Therfore, it's only fair and right that I repeat my post from last year:Hey, kids! What better way could the Discovery Institute have to celebrate the Fourth than to discover that Thomas Jefferson was an IDer?John West is over at the DI's Ministry of Misinformation claiming that "Jefferson not only believed in intelligent design, he insisted it was based on the plain evidence of nature, not religion...
Philosophy and Naturalism
Posted on July 03, 2009I recently took some interest in Alvin Planting'a evolutionary argument against naturalism, posting here, here and here on it.British Philosopher Stephen Law has taken on a portion of Plantinga's argument, that Law calls the belief-cum-desire component, and, I think, neatly demolishes it...
Truth In Advertising
Posted on July 02, 2009Those of us with a respect for the language have difficulty writing "Creation Museum" without a plethora of scare quotes, (sic)s, parenthetical asides and the like.Whatever else Ken Ham's theme park for the proudly ignorant might be, it is not a "museum" of creation...
Running It Up the Zogby Poll
Posted on July 01, 2009Ho, hum. The Discovery (sic) Institute is humping its poll showing ... well ... what?Just a few months before the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design...
Knot Making
Posted on June 30, 2009Woo hoo!John Lynch at a simple prop has some follow-up on Creation Ministries International's "documentary" about Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, The Voyage That Shook The World and the lie of omission the producers perpetrated. He links to CMI's "defense" that has some amusing squirming...
Word Play
Posted on June 30, 2009As long as I'm talking about new coinages, here's one from John Wilkins that I like: "indifferentialism."John has coined this as a description of a position I've taken in the past, that that the non-religious should not care about the theology of the religious or their internal struggles with it, that is set out nicely by The Sensuous Curmudgeon (and why wasn't I told about this blog before, eh?):Our position is to totally disregard what we consider to be a sectarian disagreement among various denominations about whether scripture should be read in a manner to deny verifiable information about reality...
The View From the Other Side
Posted on June 29, 2009Jerry Coyne started the Great Accommodationist-Incompatiblist Flap by, in part, accusing the NCSE of improperly taking sides as to the compatibility of science -- in particular, evolutionary theory -- with religion.Now comes a well-known expert on religion and science -- Casey Luskin -- with another view...
Evil Designer
Posted on June 28, 2009According to this article in The Christian Post, the late Dr. Ralph D. Winter, described as one of the most influential missiologists* of the 20th Century, had a slightly different take on Intelligent Design:Those Christians who support Intelligent Design, not surprisingly, identify that "intelligent cause" to be God...
Carnival Of Elitist Bastards Fourteen
Posted on June 28, 2009ARRRGGGG![cought ... hack ... moan]What day be it?What? Blistering barnacles!The Bastard t'were supposed to set sail on yesterday's tide!Pirates have birthdays too 'n yesterday be mine. A modest celebration t'were planned but ended as such things always do, with all 'n sundry hanging out the scuppers...
Stonewall
Posted on June 28, 2009Forty years of progress to be proud of ...Forty years of progress that has not yet been enough.
PZ Explains
Posted on June 26, 2009PZ Myers has a good post up on the accommodationist/incompatibilist flap that is, despite the unnecessary slap at "feeble accommodationist claptrap," a reasonable attempt at clarifying matters that I can agree with in large part.That word, "incompatibility", is a problem, though...
Dissembling For God
Posted on June 26, 2009David Klinghoffer is trying to claim that even a "deist" like Thomas Jefferson supported Intelligent Design. He bases this on a quote mine that I've already addressed:I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition...
Now We Know
Posted on June 25, 2009Some people are in thrall to cephalopods. Now we know why ... at least in the case of the grown-up boy on the right..
I Say Agnostic ...
Posted on June 24, 2009John Wilkins has a nice post up about the taxonomies, such as they are, of "atheists" and "agnostics" and why John self-identifies as an agnostic (as do I). John discusses the attempt by atheists to pull, and theists to push, agnostics into the atheist camp via the now popular "definitions" of "strong atheism" and "weak atheism," with agnostics put, rather unflatteringly, the latter category ...
Yuummm!
Posted on June 24, 2009PZ Mxyzptlk is psychic!No sooner does PZ suggest, in response to whining by Ken Ham, that, for the price of a plane ticket, he'd come and personally tour Ham's "museum," along with a small group of "mouthy, obnoxious, and culturally prominent godless scientists" and let Ham point out the supposed misconceptions PZ has about the place...
Religious Science
Posted on June 23, 2009Christopher Schoen of u n d e r v e r s e makes an excellent point about how little the incompatibilist "atheist-scientists," as Jerry Coyne calls them, actually use empiric fact or science when describing the religion they deride.Specifically, Chris, in a post titled "Is Neo-Atheism a Pseudo Science?" discusses physicist Sean Carroll's piece at his blog, Cosmic Variance, and Coyne's laudatory post at Why Evolution Is True and how they characterize "typical" religious belief in vague terms, without any appeal to actual studies of religion and the nature or effect of religious belief:To the extent this kind of work is done at all it tends not to support the "incompatibilist" position...
Two Faced Book To Match
Posted on June 23, 2009PZ Myearshertz took notice of Ray Comfort's latest exercise in stupidity: an abridged Origin of Species with a 50 page "'Special Introduction" by Comfort himself. Comfort or someone in his pay must read PZ ... well ... religiously because, within hours Comfort issued a press release that notes that the edition is "getting raving reviews from evolutionists" and quotes PZ:It's like a book with multiple personality disorder ? two parts that absolutely hate each other, an intro that is the inane product of one of the most stupid minds of our century, and a science text that is the product of one of the greatest minds of the author's century...
WWJD?
Posted on June 22, 2009I previously mentioned the new "documentary" about Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, The Voyage That Shook The World, from Creation Ministries International and the fact that it includes interviews with two of the best historians of evolution, Peter Bowler and Janet Browne, along with a number of legitimate scientists...
Science, Philosophy and Law
Posted on June 21, 2009In which I agree more than disagree with Jerry Coyne.Coyne quotes a blog post by Andrew Brown (who, with Michael Ruse, has recently drawn the ire of Coyne), the relevant part of which to me is:But the American courts have never been asked to decide whether science is the negation of religion: in fact the defenders of evolution and of science teaching in schools have gone to great lengths to ensure that the question was not asked...
Now It Gets Interesting
Posted on June 21, 2009It seems that there isn't just the accommodationists and the incompatiblists. There are the True Incompatiblists? and the not-so-true incompatibilists.According to Larry Moran, Jerry Coyne (and, presumably, PZ Myers, who has taken a similar position) are not the real sort of incompatibilists:If [under the US Constitution] the proper teaching of science promotes a "religious" point of view, namely atheism, then science can't be taught in public schools...
Motivation
Posted on June 21, 2009It's one week until the next voyage of the H.M.S.* Elitist Bastard.But the deadline is earlier than that: midnight (or there abouts) this coming Friday, June 26th. Send your links in to elitistbastardscarnival@gmail.com.Since it will be here, I'll take it as a personal affront if there is not a plethora of material...
Clown Philosophy
Posted on June 19, 2009Oh, drat!The accommodationists have well and truly lost now.Dr. Michael Egnor has come out on their side:We are entering an era in which a substantial and loud minority of atheist scientists and philosophers are claiming that science validates and depends on atheism and materialism...
A Pretty Pickle
Posted on June 18, 2009You may have heard (from A list blogs like Pharyngula and Respectful Insolence) about Zicam, a homeopathic ?medicine? for colds that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued an advisory against using because it can cause a long-lasting or permanent loss of sense of smell (anosmia)...
Default Philosophy
Posted on June 18, 2009.A thought:The Dialogues are a criticism of the argument from design in the form in which that argument was current in Hume's time - a form in which it persisted into the nineteenth century in the writings of Paley and so many others, and which survives in popular and semi-popular forms to the present day...
Coyne Buys Back the Store ... Sort Of
Posted on June 18, 2009Jerry Coyne has backed away from his previous claim that science is a "world view":o.k. let me clarify this for everyone who seems to have misunderstood it. I don't know if I'd call SCIENCE a world view in itself. But that's irrelevant. What I meant is that the scientific ATTITUDE of requiring evidence for what one believes is incompatible with the religious ATTITUDE of requiring no evidence beyond revelation and dogma...
Holocaust Reliers
Posted on June 16, 2009John Wilkins has an important post on Herbert Spencer, "Social Darwinism" and the alleged complicity of Darwin and science in the Holocaust:When I first started to read philosophy and history I heard about this demon. His name was Herbert Spencer, and he was famous for three things:1...
Coyne Gives Away the Store
Posted on June 16, 2009Jerry Coyne has responded to Ken Miller's piece (parts of which I though were less than fair) and, in doing so has expressed a view of science which, if accepted by American courts, would guarantee that science could not be taught as true in our public schools, but could only be taught as a one philosophy out of many or in comparative religion classes...
Taking Things Two Ways
Posted on June 16, 2009Two Danish schools are under suspicion:Brændstrup Christian School in Rødding and Adsbøl Christian School in Gråsten were both inspected by the Board of Education last week, resulting in the Board raising concerns about their belief that the schools are using science classes to teach alternate theories of origin, including creationism...
The Cruelest Cut
Posted on June 15, 2009The Discovery Institute is bucking for another entry in Glenn Morton's list: "The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism," right along with its director, Stephen Meyer, in his about-to-be-released book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design...
Not Helping
Posted on June 14, 2009From the American Family News Network's site, OneNewsNow:Finn Laursen is executive director of Christian Educators Association International, of which [John] Freshwater is a member."I am pleased to see a public school teacher like John Freshwater willing to go outside his comfort zone and fight for the religious freedoms our forefathers guaranteed is through the U...
Rally 'Round the Flag!
Posted on June 14, 2009.Demonic forces intent on destroying the American way of life are attacking!We are being invaded! ... overrun! ... assaulted on our own shores! ... by a foreign power trying to force its alien values upon us!Worse, they are being led by a shadowy figure who sends his minions orders over the internet our own former vice president invented...
Hopes and Desires
Posted on June 13, 2009.A thought:Whether God exists is a metaphysical question. But there is also a neglected evaluative question about God's existence: Should we want God to exist? Very many, including many atheists and agnostics, appear to think we should. ... Some remarks by Thomas Nagel suggest an opposing view: that we should want God not to exist...
Exegesis Excavations
Posted on June 13, 2009David Klinghoffer is playing the 'Darwinism causes people to do bad things, so don't believe modern evolutionary science' card again.It started this time with his post "James von Brunn, Evolutionist" at his blog, Kingdom of Priests at BeliefNet. Von Brunn is the lunatic white supremacist who shot up the Holocaust Museum, killing a guard...
Caught In the Middle
Posted on June 12, 2009Two highly polarized camps agree on one thing: anyone who is trying to steer anything like a middle course and pragmatically achieve the socially possible, while attempting to move the debate in a progressive direction, is to be scorned.No, I'm not talking about the reaction of both IDers and "incompatiblists" towards theistic evolutionists...
Plumbing the Depths
Posted on June 12, 2009Alan Keyes' Renew America site is a low-rent version of WingNutDaily entered in the ongoing limbo contest of "how low can you go" among the Rabid Right "media." One of Renew America's regular contributors is Rev. Michael Bresciani, self-described as a Christian author and a columnist for several online sites and magazines whose articles "are now read in every country in the world...
Tilting At Evolution
Posted on June 10, 2009Creation Ministries International, the young-Earth creationist organization that broke away from Answers in Genesis while accusing Ken Ham of various financial irregularities, has come out with its "documentary" about Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. According to this article/press release:CMI is a non-profit organization comprised of people who are both Christians and scientists committed to explaining that Christian belief is not divorced from scientific discovery...
Kidding Who?
Posted on June 10, 2009In the Food for the Soul blog at The Christian Post, described as "A blog about books, news and other forms of Christian media matter important to the faith community," one Randal Rauser, associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, complains about "How intelligent design is misrepresented by its friends...
Full Court Press
Posted on June 10, 2009John Freshwater, in a move that will surprise no one, has sued the Mount Vernon City School District for various violations of his constitutional rights, including freedom of speech.A quick skim of the complaint shows that he is alleging pretty much the same claims he's made during the course of the administrative hearings as documented by Richard B...
Idiotocracy
Posted on June 09, 2009You've probably already heard of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce. Who could help but like a book that includes the greatest quote to come out of the anti-evolution coterie, as noted by Stephen Amidon in this review: The pastor from Pennsylvania put it best...
Targeting Religion
Posted on June 08, 2009John Wilkins is an unreconstituted antipodian, a philosopher and an author of books with pretty covers (buy one! ... they're not all that expensive, will look good on your coffee table and cannot help but amaze your less discerning friends with your erudition)...
Steaming Irony in Piles
Posted on June 07, 2009Whew!Orac must have had his irony meter heavily shielded.The folks at woo ubermeister Age of Autism have awarded it's Commenter of the Week T-Shirt to one Jack Russell for this:This whole "science has spoken" business is absurd and misses the point of what "science" is supposed to be...
I'd Hammer In the Morning ...
Posted on June 06, 2009Abbie at ERV has a nice demonstration of why ID can never be science because, assuming as it does (no matter how much it denies it) that the "Designer" is omnipotent, ID can accommodate any result. In a post deliciously entitled "Having your Ford Pinto and Crashing it Too," she notes a new press release from the Biologic ("Press Releases Are Our Most Important Product") Institute: The latest entry, written by 'staff' (aka Casey Luskin, Prince of Tits?), highlights how perfect biology is: For decades enzymologists have recognized that certain enzymes are catalytically perfect--meaning that they process reactant molecules as rapidly as these molecules can reach them by diffusion...
Northern Lights
Posted on June 05, 2009"Atheism: a threat to civilization."Now, what might you think an article with such a title could be?That's right! It's an extended complaint about how "the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others who want to slam religion ...
Faith In Public Relations
Posted on June 05, 2009David Klinghoffer agrees with Jerry Coyne.It's become clear recently, with the launch of the DI's faith + evolution site and the glee with which the attacks on "accommodationism" are greeted in the ID camp, that the anti-science crowd fears the theistic evolutionists far more that they do atheists...
Ancient Lies
Posted on June 03, 2009John Lynch has justly received notice of his post The Roots of ID from John Wilkins, PZ Myers and Richard B. Hoppe at The Panda's Thumb.The Discovery Institute has offered a history of the design argument as evidence that Intelligent Design Creationism wasn't just fashioned as a Constitution-evading ploy after the Edwards v...
Dead Ideas
Posted on June 02, 2009The next battleground in the culture wars involves the leftover embryos from fertility treatments ... not so much about the ones that get used in stem cell research but the ones that don't:The woman, a hairdresser who was married to a mechanic, had had one child and then triplets -- all born after successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments...
Removing Nuts
Posted on June 01, 2009I've blogged before about the American River College Student Counsel, which gained some notoriety last year by supporting Proposition 8, California's anti-gay-marriage Constitutional Amendment.I noted and encouraged the attempt to oust the old counsel and here, somewhat belatedly is news of the results...
Design By Plantinga
Posted on June 01, 2009TomS, in a comment, has made an important point about Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism:I would suggest that Intelligent Design, as it refuses to make any statement about the intelligent designer(s), would have the same problem that evolution supposedly has...
The Ballad of Non-Reading Gaol
Posted on June 01, 2009Only WingNutDaily would think to publish a long, somewhat favorable story on Kent Hovind and his legal troubles. I have some little interest in Hovind, I must admit, so I was prompted to wade through the effluvia.The article amusingly wavers between all but declaring Hovind a tax protester evading the law and portraying him as an innocent waif and dupe...
Carnival of Elitist Bastards 1101
Posted on May 31, 2009Lucky Carnival of Elitist Bastards 13 is walking under a ladder at En Tequila Es Verdad. To demonstrate the true value and importance of science and the critical thinking skills that Elitist Bastardry celebrates, there is this recipe for life on a research vessel:The tools you need are simple: an electric drip coffee maker with hot plate, a coffee filter, 2 1-liter sample jars, 2 handkerchiefs, 2 rubber bands, and a source of clean (preferably R/O) water...
Death By Fanaticism
Posted on May 31, 2009. Dr. George TillerAugust 8, 1941 ? May 31, 2009Victim of religious terrorists..
Evolution, Naturalism and Theism
Posted on May 31, 2009For those interested in Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, the Wikipedia article I referenced before mentioned that Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober had criticized Plantinga's Bayesian argument. I've found the article online at Professor Sober's website...
Of Philosophers And Scientists
Posted on May 30, 2009PZ Mxyzptlk has a post on Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, as summarized in an article at Christianity Today.I think PZ underestimates the philosophical sophistication of the argument (which, of course, does not mean it is either correct or true)...
Unuseful IDiots
Posted on May 29, 2009Here is another admission by the Discovery Institute that it perceives theistic evolution as a real threat to its version of creationism within its target audience. David Klinghoffer writes:This [TE] is just what the Darwin Lobby needs, people of faith complacently casting their vote for a cultural force that undermines faith...
Good News ... Sort of
Posted on May 28, 2009From the Texas Freedom Network:The Texas Senate today failed to confirm Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education. The 19-11 vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for confirmation. Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller is releasing the following statement:"Watching the state board the last two years has been like watching one train wreck after another...
Non-Vintage Whine
Posted on May 28, 2009Donald James Parker is back and his whine is not aging well. It seems that, when confronted with the contradictions in his position that Intelligent Design Creationism is science suitable for teaching in public schools, he retreats into ever tightening circles of self-contradiction...
Fire and Maneuver
Posted on May 27, 2009One of the main arguments of the "incompatiblists" is that "accommodationism" hasn't worked. They point to polls on acceptance of evolution in America that have stayed pretty constant over the last 50 years or so. Rarely, if ever, do they mention the great increase in membership of conservative Christian churches at the expense of the more liberal, evolution friendlier, "mainline" Protestant denominations, over the same time...
A Leg Up
Posted on May 26, 2009Here's an interesting claim:Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose...
I Knew Him When
Posted on May 26, 2009Woo Hoo!Brian Switek of Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking has hit the big(ger) time ... specifically, the London Times!A little more than 55 million years ago there was a split in primate evolution. One branch contained the early relatives of lemurs and lorises, while the other was composed of the ancestors of tarsiers, monkeys, and apes (including us)...
The Stinker
Posted on May 25, 2009I just saw "The Link" and, like most such exercises, there was a lot of repetition, trying to stretch the material that can be understood by lay audiences into a show of over an hour and a half. I can forgive breathlessness and "gee whiz" gushing but there were some truly execrable things floated, such as Ida being the "earliest ancestor" of humans (which I think would have to be some protocell, if one could be identified at all)...
Doublethink Double Redux
Posted on May 25, 2009Okay, Donald James Parker is not Willaim Dembski. Heck, he's not even Casey Luskin. But as an advocate for Intelligent Design Creationism not steeped in the misdirection so meticulously crafted by the Discovery Institute, his arguments are, in many ways, more revealing than what we get from those stalwarts of ID...
Doublethink II.1
Posted on May 24, 2009Donald James Parker didn't like my pointing out his confusion of science and religion and dropped by to complain. He then disliked my reply to him here so much that he posted another article about it but without the courtesy of a link or even a mention of my name...
Doublethink II
Posted on May 23, 2009It seems examiner.com is becoming a hotbed of creationism. Here is another example by one Donald James Parker. He is complaining about a talk by Ken Miller he saw on YouTube (for reasons which will become obvious, I doubt he heard a word said). Here is the amusing bit:How the ID movement featuring a total focus on scientific arguments and a total exclusion of specific mention of religion from the agenda is confused with the Creationism movement is a real fascinating area of study...
Doublethink
Posted on May 23, 2009There is a fascinating (as in rubbernecking a car wreck) insight into creationist thinking at examiner.com in the person of one Clyde Middleton, including a truly lunatic "summation" of the theory of evolution that reveals an absolute absence of any knowledge of science...
Here We Go Again!
Posted on May 22, 2009Sigh!Are they just dumb or are they duplicitous?That's always the question with quote miners.Of course, they throw these quotes around with the pretense of understanding what they mean when, in fact, most of the miners have never read the source of the quote and few would understand it if they had...
A Family Affair
Posted on May 20, 2009A down and dirty bit of quote-mineontology:A certain John Herbst, in a Letter to the Editor in the Glenwood Spings (Colorado) Post Independent offers the usual "evidence" for Intelligent Design Creationism, amounting to "Golly gee, the world sure looks designed to me!" capped by this:All I can summarize with is, how much more evidence for intelligent design does one need? There is indeed more, for those honestly seeking truth...
Still Crazy After All These Years
Posted on May 20, 2009Our old friend, Yomin Postelnik, who said he had simple proofs of the existence of God that no atheist has ever been able to counter effectively, is back boasting that he, a business planner, is "far more familiar with evolutionary theory ... [and] the intricacies and rationale behind the theory ...
Fish Out Of Water
Posted on May 19, 2009Stanley Fish is not beloved of the science-oriented blogosphere.He may not be all that beloved of the readers of his own blog in the New York Times if, as he reports, 95 percent of the reaction to his article on Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution was negative...
Vestigial Minds, Junk Arguments
Posted on May 18, 2009You don't have to agree with Jerry Coyne's take on "accommodationism" to wonder about this:To the illuminati, a believer lumbers to the edge of every frontier of knowledge, poised to retire his investigations with "God did it!" contentment. Meanwhile, dead ends caused by their own faith in scientific materialism remain unexamined?the premature designation of "vestigial" organs and "junk" DNA being two examples...
Turtles All the Way
Posted on May 17, 2009The Billings, Montana Gazette has a write-up of David Quammen and, given this "Year of Darwin" and his self-described stint as "a tinpot Darwin expert," a nice thumbnail sketch of Darwin and his work.I particularly liked Quammen's take on Intelligent Design Creationism:We should teach it where it belongs ...
The Words "Ray Comfort" Mean ...
Posted on May 16, 2009... nothing more than "moron."The evidence:One in four professors in U.S. colleges and universities is either atheist or agnostic, and they are corrupting our youth. When Richard Dawkins visited an Oklahoma University earlier this year, he told adoring students, 'Evolution is a scientific fact, as secularly established as any fact known in science...
Thomist Talk
Posted on May 16, 2009Thomas Jackson, author of Darwin's Error: The Poet Who Died and who apparently thinks that Darwin was a better poet than scientist, has an interesting article in the Guardian, entitled "Thomas Aquinas would have loved genetics," about why Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, was wrong about Aquinas...
Multiplex Evangelism
Posted on May 15, 2009I can't say I thought much of the movie version of The Da Vinci Code (I don't think anything of the book, which I have steadfastly failed to read). I won't be shelling out ~ $10 to see Angels & Demons. But how can I not like something that gives The Catholic League and William Donohue such exquisite apoplexy?This also amuses:Father James Martin, the culture editor of America, a Jesuit magazine, said Mr...
Political Scholars
Posted on May 15, 2009Cambridge University dons are in a snit.The university recently amended its equal opportunities policy to stress respectfor religious or philosophical beliefs of all kinds and its opposition to discrimination. The policy now reads:The university's core values are freedom of thought and expression and freedom from discrimination...
Good Books
Posted on May 13, 2009The Chaplain has the text of the resolution of Rep. Paul Broun (R- GA), seeking to have President Obama declare 2010 the "Year of the Bible," over at An Apostate's Chapel. Some highlights:Whereas deep religious beliefs stemming from the Old and New Testament of the Bible have inspired Americans from all walks of life ...
Accommodationists: Enemies of Religion
Posted on May 12, 2009Given the recent flap over "accommodationist" statements, including by the National Academy of Sciences, to the effect that "[a]cceptance of the evidence for evolution can be compatible with religious faith," the following is amusing:It is compromisers like [Michael Francis] Collins who cause people to doubt and disbelieve the Bible?causing them to walk away from the church...
Intelligent Bull
Posted on May 11, 2009Barbara Forrest is in The Panda's Thumb demolishing Francis Beckwith's claim that he is not an Intelligent Design supporter:Beckwith wants to have his cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, over a period of almost ten years (given the February 2009 talk in Baton Rouge, it's fair to include the present), he wants (sic) to articles and a book and make public appearances that any reasonable person would interpret as pro-ID, while on the other hand, he wants to deny that he is an ID supporter...
Tracking Down His Whereabouts
Posted on May 11, 2009Hmmm ....Larry Moran announced that he was off to New York City to attend a conference on The Two Cultures in the 21st Century to commemorate the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous lecture, entitled "The Two Cultures," on the divide he perceived between the sciences and the humanities...
Moron Liberty Commencement
Posted on May 09, 2009This from Ben Stein about Expelled is just wonderful ... if you like facepalms:"The name calling was beyond anything I had ever seen. And I worked for Richard Nixon. I have been called a lot of names." ..."But why were these people so angry. We basically wanted to have a dialogue...
Cons of Creationism
Posted on May 09, 2009Those are the "fraudulent" drawings of Ernst Haeckel that creationists expend such high dudgeon on. Doesn't look much like the familiar images of the embryos of fish, salamanders, turtles, chickens, pigs, cows, rabbits, and humans that they complain are still being used in biology textbooks, do they? The second set of drawings are simplified for pedagogical reasons, to highlight the similarities, but were not the drawings that were discovered to be a single woodcut nonetheless attributed to a dog, a chicken, and a turtle, that creationists claim somehow invalidates modern evolutionary theory...
No Degrees in Waste Management?
Posted on May 09, 2009Here are some scary statistics:Liberty University welcomed its largest-ever graduating class ? 6,350 students ? at 2009 Commencement exercises on Saturday, May 9. ...Of this year's graduates, 32 percent are residential students, and 68 percent received degrees from Liberty University Online...
We're Number 1!
Posted on May 08, 2009Where has American pride gone?We can't handle these piddly punks from Guantanamo? I'll put a good, old fashioned, USA born and raised, brain-eater against any of those motherf***ers. Any of them. USA! USA!.
Latin, From Dictare
Posted on May 08, 2009Angela Fletcher, for some reason, wants to advertise her ignorance of and disagreement with the American form of government. I find this confusing because, I'm fairly sure, Ms. Fletcher would be appalled to be labeled "un-American." But, nonetheless, that is precisely what she is...
Crusade
Posted on May 07, 2009There is a long and troubling article in the Santa Barbara Independent by Katherine Stewart on the methods of the "Good News Clubs," that openly seek to proselytize very young children in after-school meetings in public schools and to encourage those same children to proselytize theirs schoolmates...
Biological Competitive Capitalism
Posted on May 07, 2009A thought:While the nineteenth-century theory that some rose and some fell in society depending on their personal strengths and weaknesses is often referred to as "social Darwinism," we would be much more in agreement with historical causation were we to call Darwinism "Biological Competitive Capitalism...
PZ Myearshertz & World Domination
Posted on May 06, 2009Somewhere in a secret laboratory in Minnesota, nefarious plans are ... um ... afoot ...
Another Way to Foil Texas
Posted on May 05, 2009Here is an interesting possibility:An effort is gaining momentum to establish common academic standards for the nation's elementary, middle, junior high and high schools.If events occur as planned by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices, the states could see by the end of this summer a common set of standards for math and English/language arts in kindergarten through 12th grades...
Torquemada's Mistress
Posted on May 04, 2009Melanie Phillips won't let consistency stop her. Having made a fool of herself already, she proceeds to show that she can't keep an idea in her head all the way from the beginning to the end of her piece. Consider these statements she makes:ID is not in itself a scientific discovery...
Following Through
Posted on May 03, 2009A thought:Some romantics certainly went too far. This can be illustrated by the extraordinary example of Max Stirner, which may perhaps show what it is, in the end, that is valuable in romanticism, even for us today. Stirner was a Hegelian German schoolmaster who argued, quite correctly, as follows...
Tone Deaf
Posted on May 03, 2009Jerry Coyne, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, may be displaying at least part of real problem some people have with the statements by a number of scientific organizations concerning the compatibility of science and religion. Coyne points to PZ Myers's post on the recent decision in the case brought by Chad Farnan against James Corbett and the Capistrano Valley High School to the effect:"Corbett states an unequivocal belief that Creationism is 'superstitious nonsense,'" U...
Being Neighborly
Posted on May 03, 2009I was going to lay off of Larry Moran this time and not dredge up the proposed change to human rights legislation in the Canadian province of Alberta that would require parents to be notified when classes "include subject matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation," and give them the right to ask that their child sit out that part of the class...
Accommodating the Law
Posted on May 02, 2009The latest ruling on the religion-science front is by a Federal judge in California holding that a public school teacher who called creationism "religious, superstitious nonsense," violated a creationist student's First Amendment rights.The student, known only as "C...
What Was That About Reaping ...
Posted on May 01, 2009According to Chairman Mike Jackson of the Nominations Committee of the Texas State Senate, the confirmation of State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy is dead in the water.McLeroy's nomination will be left pending in committee because there is enough opposition on the floor of the Senate to block his confirmation, which requires approval of two-thirds of the senators...
Gandalf Shrugged
Posted on April 30, 2009Okay, I've never gotten into Ayn Rand and only know her work secondhand. But this is good snark (via Brian Leiter):There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world...
Accommodating Education
Posted on April 29, 2009Arri Eisen, director of the program in science and society and a senior lecturer in biology at Emory University's Institute for Liberal Arts, and David Westmoreland, a member of the Board of Directors of the Catamount Center for Geography of the Southern Rockies, have a commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Teaching Science, With Faith in Mind" that bears on the whole "accommodationist" flap...
Counting Religiously
Posted on April 29, 2009Here are some interesting numbers from Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director for the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. Professor Ecklund previously conducted the "Religion Among Academic Scientists" (RAAS) study in 2005-2007 that found that it wasn't true that scientists lose their religion upon professional training, due either to an inherent conflict between science and faith or to institutional pressure to conform...
Science Or Philosophy
Posted on April 28, 2009And so it continues ...Richard B. Hoppe has restated his position on "accommodationism" with, as he says, "(a little) less snark, fewer red herrings, and the admission of a change of mind in one respect." PZ and Jerry Coyne have responded graciously to Richard's restatement...
The Eldest
Posted on April 28, 2009... so far, at least.From NASA:NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen...
Inside the Third Clownatorium
Posted on April 27, 2009Dana Hunter points out this report in The New York Times:The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training...
Long Horns
Posted on April 26, 2009Jeremy Mohn at stand up for REAL science has a link to audio of the confirmation hearings for Don McLeroy, the creationist chair of the Texas State Board of Education, for another term. The Texas Freedom Network live-blogged the event and there sounds to be some interesting moments...
Blinded By the Light
Posted on April 25, 2009The Carnival of Elitist Bastards Partie Douze is up at Slobber And Spittle.For a real stunner,1 there is this:Science education was - how to put this gently - pretty weak at our kids' school. There was the teacher who informed the class that the reason it was warmer in Summer is that the Earth is closer to the sun...
We the People
Posted on April 25, 2009Jeremy Mohn at the excellent stand up for REAL science has a response to Jerry Coyne's latest post against "accomodationism" that I largely agree with. I see no reason that the NAS, NCSE and other science organizations shouldn't counter the propaganda, largely from the Religious Right but also from some atheists, that science and religious belief are necessarily incompatible...
Governor's As High As An Elephant's Eye
Posted on April 24, 2009Oklahoma is lucky to have Brad Henry.The state's governor has been willing to stand up against the wing-nut extremist religious right in the past, despite it's considerable political power in the state. He's done it again and, what is better, has made his action stick...
God, Inc.
Posted on April 24, 2009I previously mentioned John Micklethwait's and Adrian Wooldridge's new book, God Is Back, and quoted from an article of theirs in The Wall Street Journal. Hanna Rosin has now reviewed it in The New York Times. Some parts of it cannot be a comfort to secularists, much less atheists: [T]he book's strength is in dissecting exactly how God managed to morph and evolve and become indispensable to the world at a time when he should have faded away...
I Knew Him When
Posted on April 23, 2009John Wilkins' book draws closer and gets some pretty impressive blurbs:"Few topics have engaged biologists and philosophers more than the concept of species, and arguably no idea is more important for evolutionary science. John S. Wilkins' book combines meticulous historical and philosophical analysis and thus provides new insights on the development of this most enduring of subjects...
Endangered Specious
Posted on April 22, 2009PZ Myearshertz found a good lawyer (with more stamina than I) who waded deeper into the ICR complaint.Andrew at Evaluating Christianity is the stalwart soul and between him and a commenter there, Kurt Denke (particularly here and here), they've pretty well demolished the legal basis of this soon-to-be-short-lived suit...
Crash Landing
Posted on April 22, 2009Here's another little drive-by snarking at David Klinghoffer. I know ... but it's so easy and things are such in my life right now that I don't have the time or the energy to expend on anything more challenging at the moment.Klinghoffer is out to defend his latest attempt to blame every bad thing that's happened in the last 150 years on Darwin...
College Test
Posted on April 21, 2009The American River College Student Counsel gained some notoriety by supporting Proposition 8, California's anti-gay-marriage Constitutional Amendment, last year. Some of the more reality-based students are now seeking to oust the old counsel. Based on these statements by one of the incumbents, it is none too soon:Christian students feel like they can't speak their mind in class, said Viktor Choban, a student council member who is running for re-election as part of [incumbent president George "Yuriy"] Popko's slate...
Horse Race
Posted on April 21, 2009This baby is going to provide hours of fun!That would be the Institute for Creation Research's lawsuit ... that can only be described as possessing all the cogency and forceful logic of the ICR's science.If you want a serious treatment of the suit, you might want to go to Tony Whitson's curricublog for some links, not least of them Steven Schafersman's, where you can read the decision in all its overblown rhetorical glory...
Meltdown
Posted on April 20, 2009Crap!My irony meter melted ...... went straight through the floor boards... the concrete floor of the basement... and, based on a blast of steam that just went through my living room, is now China-syndroming its way through the water table beneath my house...
Moral Primacy
Posted on April 19, 2009A thought:To explain human behavior as a "mere" product of evolution, however, is often seen as insulting and a threat to morality, as if such a view would absolve us from the obligation to lead virtuous lives. The geneticist Francis Collins sees the "moral law" as proof that God exists...
Designing Theology
Posted on April 18, 2009It's never a surprise when any of the Discovery (sic) Institute drones admit that "The Designer" they are going on about is really God, though it's important to document the dishonesty. David Klinghoffer is the latest, though he does still waive a fig leaf in front of God's constitutional "naughty bits...
Heading to China
Posted on April 17, 2009Dr. Egnor continues to display his ignorance, not only of evolutionary biology, but of the law as well. He's still trying to dig himself out of the hole he excavated in his attempts to counter Timothy Sandefur's demolition of his position and, naturally, is succeeding in only making it deeper...
Bull
Posted on April 17, 2009Jen Pollard, a student at the University of Washington (in biology, no less), doesn't like the recent decision of the Iowa Supreme Court invalidating the state's marriage law, to the extent that it did not permit marriages between gays and lesbians, and complains about an earlier column in the student newspaper on the subject...
Pusher
Posted on April 16, 2009There is a review by Bryan Appleyard in New Statesman of Lewis Wolpert's new book, How We Live and Why We Die: the Secret Lives of Cells that prompted some early morning musings.Appleyard is already on PZ Myers' list of hack journalists who produce "smug blatherings of a truly stupid person...
Gaps In His Arguments
Posted on April 15, 2009Dr. Michael Egnor must imagine himself a Renaissance man.The evidence is clear that he feels himself qualified to lugubriously lecture experts in fields, such as evolutionary biology and the law, that he, himself, has no detectable expertise in.One of these days it may occur to Dr...
East Side, West Side
Posted on April 15, 2009Oh, just a word more on Dr. Michael Egnor's most recent outbreak of foot-in-mouthitis. In his "reply" to Timothy Sandefur a few days ago, Dr. Egnor insisted:The term creationist in this debate refers to young earth creationism. I?m not a young earth creationist...
Uh, Where? ...
Posted on April 14, 2009Hey, remember this outfit?The pro-evolution Clergy Letter Project currently has a list of nearly 12,000 ministers who affirm that evolution is true and that the Genesis record is a teaching myth like Aesop's Fables. Since 2006, they have successfully promoted the celebration of an Evolution Sunday in churches throughout the world...
Barely Armed
Posted on April 13, 2009Timothy Sandefur is at The Panda's Thumb/Freespace spanking Dr. Michael Egnor for his latest (successful) attempt to make a fool of himself, not least over his continuing habit of outright lies.But his other constant habit is making statements of illogic so truly breathtaking as to leave you gasping...
Found in the Warren
Posted on April 12, 2009Here's a perfect note for this day of egg-bearing Leporidae.The University of Cambridge's zoology museum has come across a long-forgotten egg that Charles Darwin collected during his famous voyage on the Beagle. The 4.7-centimeter-long egg (left), from a partridge-like bird, is cracked: "The great man put it into too small a box, and hence its unhappy state," according to records found with it...
A Tree Grows in Australia
Posted on April 11, 2009John Wilkins has a post on the origin of tree diagrams in taxonomy. As John notes:According to the received history, tree diagrams were either entirely new with Darwin or go back to Aristotle, depending on how you define things.John discusses an example by the German naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, in his Elenchus Zoophytorum (1766)...
Theocratic Marriage
Posted on April 11, 2009Ed Brayton, at Dispatches From the Culture Wars, takes Maggie Gallagher of National Review to task over her defense of opposition to gay marriage. In particular, Gallagher tries to avoid the comparison between resistance to gay marriage and anti-miscegenation laws:Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief -- not only Leviticus (disapproval of gay sexual acts), but Genesis (the idea that God himself made man as male and female and commanded men and women to come together in a special way to image the fruitfulness of God)...
109 Lives
Posted on April 10, 2009A thought:America has long stood out among developed countries for its religiosity. This has less to do with innate godliness than with the free market created by the First Amendment. Pre-Revolutionary America was not that religious, because the original Puritans were swamped by less wholesome adventurers -- in Salem, Mass...
Right and Righter
Posted on April 09, 2009Harry Collins, director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge Expertise Science at Cardiff University, had an essay in Nature decrying post-modernist and social constructivist criticisms of science. Collins himself had "contributed" to that criticism by "demonstrat[ing] that scientists could not always check a result by simply repeating it...
Paper Philosophy
Posted on April 08, 2009Boy, some people can certainly do more with less!David Brooks wrote an article in the New York Times of a mere 808 words that has certainly triggered a lot more in response. It didn't help that an editor slapped the title "The End of Philosophy" on it...
Say What?
Posted on April 07, 2009Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen is the ... not to put too fine a point on it ... buffoon who filed a resolution in the House opposing the invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at the University of Oklahoma. He's followed up that performance with this:Thomsen said he wrote the resolution because he felt he had a responsibility to his constituents to share his opinion as a state representative...
Boogie Insights
Posted on April 06, 2009Well, well ...I should have known. Atheism is all about sex ... at least according to Dinesh D'Souza:If you really look at the motivations of contemporary atheists, you'll find that they don't even really reject Christian theology. It's not as if the atheist objects to the resurrection or the parting of the sea; rather, it is Christian morality to which atheists object, particularly Christian moral prohibitions in the area of sex...
Coming in Second
Posted on April 06, 2009Well, Ben Stein has landed a gig for graduation season.You may remember that Stein had been invited to be the commencement speaker at the University of Vermont but backed out (with or without encouragement from the University's president) when the proverbial excrement hit the air movement apparatus...
Go Up Upon the Mountain
Posted on April 05, 2009Eric Rothschild is a prophet.But before we get to that, let's hear from some people who have become experts in Intelligent Design Creationism about their take on the new Texas science standards:Steve Stough was one of 11 parents who sued the Dover Area School District in 2004 after it required that ID be mentioned in high school biology class as "an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view" and recommending the cdesign proponentsists "textbook," Of Pandas and People...
Bulwark
Posted on April 04, 2009Okay, I'm officially embarrassed.It's one thing to have Massachusetts, California, New Jersey and Connecticut show up New York State's judiciary as backwards and unenlightened on the issue of gay marriage ... but when Iowa does it, I just about have to hide my face...
Give That Man a Star
Posted on April 04, 2009Brian Warren is a self-described "government employee" in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has some pithy things to say about ID in a Letter to the Editor that are worth repeating:ID's only research agenda is to attempt to undermine the teaching of evolutionary theory by distorting both the quantity and substance of the evidence that it explains; it doesn't generate new avenues of research, and in the end the answer to any question is: "We don't know, so stop trying to find out and insert God here...
Not All Oldies Are Goodies
Posted on April 03, 2009Intelligent Design advocates like to pretend that ID is "cutting edge" science, while "Darwinism" is worn out 19th Century thinking. It doesn't take much digging into ID, however, to realize that it is based, on William Paley's watch analogy, merely dressed up in new clothes, and that even Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity" was already an old idea, argued by Georges Cuvier, when Darwin penned the Origin...
Condemned to Repeat It
Posted on April 02, 2009The Nation has a reprint of an article By Rollin Lynde Hartt from July 22, 1925, entitled "Scopes Trial: What Lies Beyond Dayton."Nothing about America is more curious than its choice of fears. With the utmost ease any impostor can convince America that Jews are about to control us, though there are hardly three million Jews in the entire country...
Free Press
Posted on April 01, 2009The Associated Baptist Press has a perhaps surprisingly fair article on the recent Texas science standards kerfuffle by its managing editor and Washington bureau chief, Robert Marus, starting off with its (correct) comparison of "literal "young-Earth" creationism and its close relative, intelligent-design theory...
Pedagogical Malpractice
Posted on April 01, 2009Nouse, the student newspaper of the University of York, has an interview with Steve Fuller who has become, as the article put it, an "apologist for intelligent design theory." Some bits and pieces:Fuller is not motivated by any personal religious beliefs; he is motivated by a desire to improve the teaching of science which he thinks is impossible without a consideration of intelligent design theory...
Turning Blue
Posted on March 31, 2009Ooh! Ooh!Anika Smith, the tankwoman in pink of the Discovery Institute is all excited that a Harvard professor has criticized evolutionary theory.The fact that it is a professor of government, Harvey Mansfield, who has his own little problems with reality (having greeted Sarah Palin's choice as the anchor tied around John McCain's neck with "modified rapture" and having argued for a "mild affirmative action" for conservative professors at Harvard) doesn't bother her one bit...
The Wages of Stupidity
Posted on March 30, 2009Ed Brayton has already mentioned that a federal judge has ordered McCreary and Pulaski counties in Kentucky to pay the legal fees to the ACLU, after it won a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2005.The counties have been represented throughout by the ridiculous Matt Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of the law school of the equally ridiculous Liberty University...
Carnival of the Elitist Bastards XI
Posted on March 30, 2009The eleventh Carnival of the Elitist Bastards is up and about at It's the Thought that Counts.While the standard for being an elitist bastard has never been what it might sound like to those who do not aspire to the title, it's sad how low the bar has fallen in this country, as shown by this1:A close relative of mine was telling me a story about the place she worked recently...
A Sign of the Times
Posted on March 30, 2009There is a nice editorial about the recent battle in Texas in the Grey Lady:This was not a straightforward battle over whether to include creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design, in the science curriculum. That battle has been lost by Darwin's opponents in the courts, the schools and most political arenas...
Publishing World Agog
Posted on March 30, 2009John Wilkins, the relentlessly antipodian philosopher of science and world-famous punster, has his book, Species: A History of the Idea, on the veritable verge of publication.The complex idea of "species" has evolved over time, yet its meaning is far from resolved...
Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest
Posted on March 30, 2009.Here I was just saying "stupid is as stupid does" and YouTube pokes its head up and suspends the account of the James Randi Educational Foundation!Go here and follow the instructions to protest and help make this video go viral. PZ also has suggestions, namely, maybe it's time to avoid YouTube and look for substitutes...
Why Politicians and Education Don't Mix
Posted on March 29, 2009Here is Don McLeroy on "stasis" and "sudden appearance" in the fossil record during his "impassioned plea" to keep his amendment to the Texas science standards, which read: "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record":It's so scientific...
Forlorn
Posted on March 29, 2009In the category of things you never wished for and may not want:In what one might call a biblical move, Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson -- one of three major funders of the campaign for California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages -- has abandoned the GOP for the Democratic Party...
Hamming It Up
Posted on March 28, 2009I noted before the hypocrisy of Ken Ham complaining about one of his minions being "ambushed" by an expected radio interview supposedly being changed without warning into a debate with a creationism critic. Michael Zimmerman, head of the Clergy Letter Project, recounted Ham participating in just such an ambush of Professor Zimmerman with the added bonus of Zimmerman being told that a minor deception of this sort was acceptable in order to further God's wishes...
Hitchens Your Wagon
Posted on March 28, 2009Christopher Hitchens is in Newsweek with might be called A Modest Proposal to resolve the "teach the controversy" dispute:I certainly do not want it said that my side denies a hearing to the opposing one. In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following...
Understanding Creationists
Posted on March 28, 2009Jeremy Mohn at stand up for REAL science has an amusing discovery: Don McLeroy admitted yesterday that he didn't read all those books by "Darwinists" that he has been quoting lately, despite having said that that reading books about evolution was one of his hobbies and that he had been checking out three books a week on the topic of evolution from his local public library!So, basically, in the creationist lexicon, checking out books on the topic of evolution amounts to hunting through the library for works by creationists who quote mine snippets from actual books on evolution?Who woudda thunk it? ...
Movin' On
Posted on March 28, 2009With Texas out of the limelight for a while (there is still that bill in the Texas legislature to restore the "strengths and weaknesses" language to the science standards) our nation turns its lonely eyes, not to Joe DiMaggio, but to Florida for its next dose of dimwittery...
It Could Have Been Worse
Posted on March 27, 2009Much worse in fact. The "strengths and weaknesses" language is out of the Texas science standards. Moreover, Don McLeroy's amendment from January, which read:... "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record" ...
Gag Rule
Posted on March 26, 2009Laura Miller has a joint review of two new books: Matt Baglio's The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist and Peter Manseau's Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead. Both look like they are interesting, if at all, in that car-wreck-rubbernecking way...
Monty Pharyngula
Posted on March 25, 2009.Okay, this tickles me!:People like Richard Dawkins or P.Z. Myers turn purple shouting those who disagree with them down. If anything should convince the open-minded of the religious nature of their belief system, it should be the vicious nature of these attacks on the apostates...
Fire Breathers
Posted on March 25, 2009Another point about Don McLeroy's stunning article in The Austin American-Statesman is this bit of what has to be deliberate disinformation:Words ["strengths and weaknesses"] that were uncontroversial and perfectly acceptable for nearly two decades are now considered "code words" for intelligent design and are deemed unscientific...
Hi, Ho ... Hi, Ho ...
Posted on March 25, 2009About the quote mine of Stephen Jay Gould that Don McLeroy uses in his bafflegab piece in The Austin American-Statesman, Jeremy Mohn included it in his Collapse of a Texas Quote Mine. It is one of the quote mines McLeroy got from Genesis Park, which describes itself as presenting:...
Leading the Blind
Posted on March 24, 2009Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle has a refreshingly blunt piece on the fiasco threatening to happen this week in the Texas State Board of Education.Ever seen a cat-dog? Of course not! That just proves it's impossible for one species to evolve into another...
McLeroy Gives Away the Farm
Posted on March 24, 2009You really have to see this to believe it.Don McLeroy is in The Austin American-Statesman making some amazing admissions (as well as deploying some unamazing quote mines). It will take more time to deconstruct than I have tonight because it is such a muddle of disingenuousness and/or stupidity that it rivals the lunatic book he endorsed...
Jesus Christ, Super Liar
Posted on March 23, 2009That's apparently what Ken Ham thinks of Jesus.As recounted at Exploring Our Matrix and Clashing Cultures, Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project has taken note of Ham's complaint that the BBC "ambushed" one of his "scientists," Jason Lisle, by turning a scheduled interview into a debate with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education without informing Lisle ahead of time...
Department of Justice
Posted on March 23, 2009As reported by the National Center for Science Education, the Supreme Court has today denied, without opinion, Lawsuit Larry Caldwell's petition for a writ of certiorari, letting the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision stand, which had upheld the District Court's dismissal of the case...
Selection Against Darwin
Posted on March 22, 2009.A thought:The surge of enthusiasm for eugenics came at a time when the majority of biologists had turned their backs on Darwinism. Even when natural selection began to attract more attention in the 1930s, there was no direct link to eugenics. If R. A...
Finis
Posted on March 21, 2009Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority has noticed Casey Luskin, Gofer General of the Discovery Institute, quote mining a review article in Biochemical Journal by Kevin Padian and Nick Matzke. By all means, go to Mike's place to see the details. I'm interested in something a bit different; namely, another example of projection by a DI drone:It's always amusing how evolutionists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of intelligent design (ID) (i...
I Think We're Back in Kansas, Toto
Posted on March 21, 2009Texas State Rep. Leo Berman is the bright light who proposed an amendment to the Education Code to exempt:... a private educational institution, including a separate degree-granting program, unit, or school operated by the institution, that: (1) does not accept state funding of any kind to support its educational programs; (2) does not accept state-administered federal funding to support its educational programs; (3) was formed as or is affiliated with or controlled by a nonprofit corporation or nonprofit unincorporated organization; and (4) offers bona fide degree programs that require students to complete substantive course work in order to receive a degree from the institution...
Of Spills and Beans
Posted on March 20, 2009My, my! This is interesting.Solving Light Books announced today that Don McLeroy, controversial Chair of the Texas State Board of Education, has recommended "Sowing Atheism" (ISBN: 978-0-9705438-5-1) by Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr., to other board members and to the general public...
Singing From the Same Song Hymn Book
Posted on March 19, 2009You've probably heard about Canadian Science minister Gary Goodyear's original refusal to respond to a question about whether he "believes" in evolution, saying:I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate...
Hope For the Future
Posted on March 18, 2009Remember Matt LaClair, the Kearny, New Jersey high school student who dared to stand up to a popular American history teacher who was injecting his religious views into his classes? Well, he's not alone. All the way across the country, deliciously in the back yard of the Undiscovery Institute, another young man has shown remarkable maturity and courage:Colin Moyer, a senior at Curtis High School in University Place, has been awarded a 2009 ACLU Youth Activist Scholarship for challenging the teaching of a form of creationism in his science class and for promoting freedom of speech at his school...
Freudian Spit
Posted on March 17, 2009Ah, David Klinghoffer is over at the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation practicing the fine art of projection. Ironically, it begins with an admission dressed up as an accusation:The power of a slogan is that if you say it over and over again enough times, the effect is like brainwashing on yourself and many of the people who listen to you...
The Road to Perdition
Posted on March 16, 2009The Texas Freedom Network is reporting that the Texas State Republican Executive Committee has passed a resolution calling upon the Republican members of the State Board of Education to support the retention of the "strengths and weaknesses" standard in the Texas science standards, officially making the results of science and educational content a partisan political issue...
Break Out the Floppy Shoes
Posted on March 15, 2009Apparently the creationists in Texas aren't confident that their representatives on the State Board of Education can carry the day. As reported by the NCSE, the appropriately named Wayne Christian (guess which party!) of the Texas House of Representatives has introduced H...
Steady ... Steady ...
Posted on March 15, 2009New Scientist really wants to trash whatever reputation it may have once had.First it was the "Darwin Was Wrong" cover that did not match the contents of the (over-hyped) story of long known issues about the "tree of life." The author, responding to numerous criticisms, defended the sensationalism all over the blogoshere on the basis of selling magazines...
Workers of the World
Posted on March 14, 2009I'm a little more progressive than Mike Dunford but a little less than John Lynch. But anyway you slice it, all three of us are commie, God-hating, anti-Merkin', wine-sipping, nattering nabobs of negativism and part of the effete corps of impudent snobs "extremely progressive" according to the Center For American Progress...
Dueling Theologies
Posted on March 14, 2009Both Larry Moran and Mike Haubrich have favorably mentioned this article: "The Untenability of Theistic Evolution (2009)" by Bart Klink. I'm afraid I find it wanting in many ways, but there is no real need to go beyond this:To avoid conflict with the methodological naturalism of science, TE would have to exclude consideration of any supernatural intervention during creation...
One Man's Meat
Posted on March 14, 2009Dr. Richard Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, is at The Christian Post "Lamenting the Reversal of Pro-Life Stem Cell Policy."Monday was a sad day for the sanctity of all human life in America...
No Trouble
Posted on March 13, 2009Do you suppose Casey Luskin will be whistling anything from The Music Man anytime soon?Oh, there's nothing halfwayAbout the Iowa way to treat you,When we treat youWhich we may not do at all.Well, the Iowa legislature is the latest to have the good sense to turn the Discovery Institute's "academic freedom" scam into fertilizer ...
Punishing the Righteous
Posted on March 13, 2009Here's something you may have never thought about before: who preaches to the Pope? Apparently, it is Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household. That's right, even being the head of some 1 billion faithful doesn't mean you get to skip the boring sermon...
Heavens Above
Posted on March 12, 2009Ooh! This looks like fun:UFOs and aliens may not neatly match the Hollywood depiction of advanced races from far off planets reaching us through worm holes or inter-dimensional portals. Daily sightings of anomalous airborn crafts worldwide and accounts of alien abduction might find an explanation in something as handy as your Bible...
Texas Two-Step
Posted on March 11, 2009Texas politicians continue their war against quality education. The National Center for Science Education is reporting that a member of the Texas State House of Representatives (guess which party) has introduced a bill to amend the Education Code, that presently reads:A person may not grant or award a degree or offer to grant or award a degree on behalf of a private postsecondary educational institution unless the institution has been issued a certificate of authority to grant the degree by the board [that is, the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board] in accordance with the provisions of this subchapter...
Rat Dreams
Posted on March 11, 2009You may remember David DeWitt, the neuroscientist from Liberty University who thinks that the chance death of an organism somehow "begins to unravel the idea of natural selection." Well, it seems he takes his students in his ironically named Advanced Creation Studies class (what exactly is there after "then God poofed it into existence"?) on a field trip...
Turkeys
Posted on March 10, 2009The English translation is a little fractured but this is, if even vaguely correct, a revoltin' development. It seems there is a Turkish government agency by the name of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜB?TAK) that publishes a popular science magazine, Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technical, according to one on-line translation), that has killed a cover story on Charles Darwin due to political pressure:Allegedly, a executive member of the council intervened at last minute to remove Darwin from the magazine's ?Bilim ve Teknik- cover, as well as a dossier on the theory of evolution...
Science Diseducation
Posted on March 09, 2009The National Center for Science Education has identified the amendments to the Texas science standards inserted at the last meeting of the State Board of Education by the creationist members. The list is below and if you go the NCSE site you can get a full explanation of why they suck, though many of the reasons will be obvious...
The Carnival Turns Ten
Posted on March 08, 2009The Carnival of the Elitist Bastards X has set sail out of port En Tequila Es Verdad, a tad late but heavily laden with a cargo of disdain for the anti-intellectualism abroad in the land. Here is a small sample from PalMD:The origins of human sexuality are interesting, but completely irrelevant when discussing civil rights...
Educational Test
Posted on March 08, 2009The Discovery Institute drones keep telling us that they don't want the teaching of Intelligent Design to be mandated in public school. No one on the side of good science education believes them, of course. Now it seems that the DI's allies don't believe them either...
Carrying Chutzpah to Rome
Posted on March 07, 2009Sometimes you just have to stand in awe of the nerve of the Discoveryless Institute's propaganda machine.In an article entitled "Darwin Conference Does Not Speak for Vatican, Says Intelligent Design Proponent" in the Australian version of Christian Today Bruce Chapman, head propagandist of the DI, trys to spin the conference being held at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome:Chapman, a Roman Catholic himself, emphasized that the conference's sponsor, The Pontifical Council on Culture, is an office of the Vatican but represented neither the Vatican nor the Pope himself...
Of Birds and Brains
Posted on March 07, 2009Oh, look! Ray Comfort is educable. In an article in WingNutDaily he responds to PZ Myers' criticism of Comfort's "argument" that:Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn't keep going...
Visions of Discovery
Posted on March 06, 2009You've probably heard about the state legislator from Oklahoma who is bucking to get on Ed Brayton's list of stupidest in the nation by filing a resolution stating that:... the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma...
First Light
Posted on February 26, 2009Hugh Ross, an astronomer and old-Earth creationist, seems to be moving further away from the Intelligent Design Movement. In the past he has described himself as "a Discovery Institute ally," though he has chided IDers to stop "attempt[ing] to walk a middle ground between evolution and creationism," which results, he says, in that "you make theology weak and you make science weak...
Aping Science
Posted on February 26, 2009Oh, by the way, speaking of the religious nature of Intelligent Design Creationism, Troy Britain, at Playing Chess with Pigeons* has noticed the link I missed between Uncommon Descent, William Dembski's sycophant-fest ... er ... blog and the young-Earth creationist blog, Science and Values, that James McGrath (himself a Christian and a biblical scholar) accuses of "tactics used by deceitful individuals determined not only to attack science without warrant, but to give Christianity a bad name in the process...
Turning Over Political Rocks
Posted on February 25, 2009Poor Casey Luskin. Here he expends all the time and effort to try to paint the opposition to Iowa's version of the Discovery Institute's "academic freedom" legislation as unfairly characterizing the bill as attempting to inject religion into public classrooms and along comes one of his "allies" and blows his cover:Norman Pawlewski, representing the Christian Alliance and one of two state lobbyists registered in favor of HF 183, said, "Why shouldn't teachers and students be able to decide among all the science-related information? God created science, after all...
Mental At Least
Posted on February 24, 2009What do you do with a feel-good article about tears?Therese J. Borchard writes a column called "Beyond Blue" for BeliefNet that, if "The Healing Properties of Tears: 7 Good Reasons to Cry Your Eyes Out" is a fair sampling, should give treacle a run for its money...
Pressing Concerns
Posted on February 23, 2009If you would like to see how not to conduct an interview and maintain a shred of journalistic objectivity, go look at Suzan Mazur's attempt to chivvy David H. Koch (wealthy industrialist and major backer of PBS' Nova) into strong-arming the program to run something on her fantasized imminent collapse of the "Darwinian paradigm...
Secular Thought
Posted on February 22, 2009A thought:[T]here was a good deal of misunderstanding ... respecting the import of the word secular. There is no uncertainty about it. There is not a better defined word in the English language. Secular is whatever has reference to this life. Secular instruction is instruction respecting the concerns of this life...
In the Ranks
Posted on February 22, 2009A thought:I'm all for exposing students to some of the philosophical, religious and political issues surrounding the challenges to evolution -- as part of studying the history of science, for example. But at a time when American high school students rank 27th among students from developed nations in scientific literacy, and in the face of environmental crisis and economic uncertainty, the United States can't afford for biology classrooms to be church-state war zones...
Creative Naming
Posted on February 21, 2009Akron Fossils & Science Center.Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Not so much:It's a small, one-story building at the corner of Cleveland-Massillon and Minor roads, a couple of miles south of Copley Circle. If you go inside and look around, you will discover a paean to creationism...
Ready ... Aim ...
Posted on February 21, 2009James McGrath has an interesting take on the New Scientist "Darwin Was Wrong" cover, which he thinks, ultimately, does more good than harm. His contention is that:1. It shows that there is no "atheistic conspiracy" to shield Darwin from criticism;2. The "tree of life" and the diagram in Darwin's notebook (labeled "I think") are not about something that is central to evolution and which he could not have known about anyway; and3...
More Quote Mines From Texas
Posted on February 21, 2009Jeremy Mohn, who has already done yeoman's work, in his "Collapse of a Texas Quote Mine," uncovering the quote-mining of the creationists on the Texas State Board of Education, has found more examples, this time by the truly execrable Terri Leo. Her method in this instance is the tried-and-untrue method of cutting off the quote before the thought is complete: If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down...
Rave Reviews
Posted on February 21, 2009The Jacksonville Florida Times-Union has a column called "Rants & Raves," which prints short anonymous letters to the editor. This one caught my eye:Because the recent ranter against intelligent design doesn't mention whether he holds a Nobel Prize, I'm going to have to go with people who have achieved that distinction and do believe in intelligent design: Charles Townes, George Smoot and Leon Lederman, to name a few...
Bad Arguments for ID # 2362
Posted on February 20, 2009From a Letter to the Editor in the Agusta (Georgia) Chronicle:Science means the testability of a hypothesis -- well, until a scientist can bring me a dragonfly he created out of organic soup, I'll stick with Intelligent Design and an intelligent designer...
Bad Arguments for ID # 1656
Posted on February 20, 2009From a Letter to the Editor in the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, Republican Herald:Adherents to religion agree that something or someone created the universe. Is it not possible that "God's" creation involved careful design of the hierarchical natural laws that comprise it?Here's the scenario as I see it: God creates physics, physics dictates chemistry and chemistry dictates the rest ?including evolution...
Err Presumptive
Posted on February 20, 2009Richard B. Hoppe has a wonderful takedown of creationists at The Panda's Thumb (and not just because he links to a post of mine). It involves the "presuppositional" argument claiming that "creation scientists" and (real) scientists use the same evidence, but that they interpret it from different starting points, Biblical creationism and "man's reason...
McLeroy in a Nutshell
Posted on February 20, 2009There is an interesting article on Don McLeroy, the creationist chairman of the Texas State Board of Education in The Texas Observer that, among other things, reveals that he was lured by the promise of sex into fundamentalist Christianity and creationism ...
Disappearing Praise
Posted on February 19, 2009It wasn't my favorite way to celebrate Darwin's Year, but there is something, somewhere, that says we should not steal. Apparently that does not include the "Praise Darwin: Evolve Beyond Belief" billboard. The billboard sign was made of vinyl and Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said that a representative from Clear Channel Outdoor told her, "It took a long ladder and a lot of determination" to remove the billboard material...
The Theory of Law
Posted on February 19, 2009Clive Thompson, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a former Knight Science-Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a theory. Noting that creationists take advantage of the language used by scientists to inculcate doubt in the general public's mind about evolution, he seconds the call of Australian-born physicist Helen Quinn for the scientific community to revise scientific terminology...
Random Thoughts
Posted on February 18, 2009The National Center for Science Education has a report on the latest entry in the "academic freedom" legislative ploy sweepstakes, House Bill 656, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives. Besides the excruciatingly vague language usual in these bills, intended to allow individual teachers and local school boards to pour as much creationism into the interpretation of the words as possible, House Bill 656 has an interesting change from the 2008 version, which read:This section only protects the teaching of scientific information and this section shall not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or nonbeliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion...
Of Chickens and Roosts
Posted on February 17, 2009Stephen Moss in the Guardian has a nice comprehensive piece about the young-Earth creationism movement in the United Kingdom that is well worth reading.While the movement is still the poor country cousin to the YEC brigade in the US, there has been some growth in their ranks in the past few years...
What Does the NAS Know About Science?
Posted on February 17, 2009Well, that does it!All these years the vast and overwhelming majority of scientists have thought that evolution was a scientific theory ... you know, one of those things the National Academy of Sciences calls "a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time...
Return of the Whore
Posted on February 16, 2009First, there was Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary ... now, the truly indescribable Ray Comfort:In challenging a report by Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, saying Darwin's theory is compatible with Christianity, Ray Comfort, author of the hottest Christian book on Amazon, "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence But You Can't Make Him Think," points out Jesus himself backed up the Genesis account of Creation when he said, "In the beginning God created them male and female...
Oklahoma OK!
Posted on February 16, 2009As originally reported by Abbie at ERV, the Oklahoma version of the "academic freedom" ploy was killed in committee today (and just why were they working on President's Day, anyway? -- Commies!):The vote was 7-6 on Monday in the Senate Education Committee against Sen...
A Start On All the Truth That's Fit To Print
Posted on February 16, 2009Heh! I commented the other day on an alleged news story in the Lynchburg (Virginia) News Advance entitled "Liberty University refuting evolution."It seems the editorial staff has seen the light and the web story has now been renamed as "Liberty University disputing evolution...
What Does It Prophet a Man?
Posted on February 16, 2009It's not just his own department at Lehigh University that stands against Michael Behe.Darwin's theory of natural selection plays a key role in most Lehigh Valley public school science curricula.None of the public schools interviewed for this article includes the controversial idea of intelligent design, a theory that living organisms are so complex a higher power must have created them...
Mohler's Choice
Posted on February 15, 2009Let's see ..."If you understand Christianity or even Theism ? the belief of a sovereign creator God ? and evolutionary theory in its dominant form , I find it impossible to reconcile the two," Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on his radio program Thursday, the 200th birthday anniversary of Charles Darwin...
Fire Sale
Posted on February 15, 2009You know it's going to be painful when an alleged news story is titled "Liberty University refuting evolution." The "refuter" is "Neuroscientist" David DeWitt, who claims:"I show them side-by-side ? Here's the human. Here's the chimpanzee," he said. "If I would not present evolution and their best evidence and arguments, then I would not be a scholar and I would not be providing the best service for the students...
Dangerous Places
Posted on February 14, 2009It seems that churches in Arkansas may be too dangerous to enter unarmed.The Arkansas House of Representatives last Wednesday passed a bill on a 57-42 vote allowing concealed handguns in churches by removing houses of worship from the list of places where concealed handguns are banned...
Red In Tooth ...
Posted on February 14, 2009Ian Bell in The Sunday Herald on creationists:They are otherwise persuaded, despite a ton of evidence. People, as ever, believe what they want to believe. ...Speaking as a monkey's uncle's less popular nephew, I don't mind. If I have read Darwin half-way right, employing both opposable thumbs to prop up the book, natural selection depends on a majority always missing the point...
Dogma and Pony Show
Posted on February 14, 2009It seems that we have all been politically incorrect. According to James Dobson's Focus on the Family, it is name-calling to refer to "the Religious Right."Terms like 'Religious Right' have been traditionally used in a pejorative way to suggest extremism...
Mythbusters
Posted on February 13, 2009In the category of excruciating irony, we have this title for a story by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network: "On Darwin Day, Myths Parade as Fact." It may be ironic but it is certainly true because Pat's propagandists proceed to march out a whole phalanx of them delivered by, who else, that coterie of Discoveryless Institute talking ...
Birthday Loot
Posted on February 12, 2009Some birthday goodies for Mr. Darwin (and us!):Scientific American's "Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin."Evolution: Education and Outreach's "birthday issue."Nicholas Wade with "Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential" in the New York Times Science section (ignore that other article)...
Dr. Egnor Outs ID
Posted on February 12, 2009In the category of spilled beans:Science and religion don't address entirely separate aspects of human experience. There is one truth about the world. The truth about the natural world is obviously a part of metaphysical truth. Science addresses the truth about the natural world, and religion addresses the deeper metaphysical truth...
Of Pandering to People
Posted on February 12, 2009You know how the Undiscovery Institute is always on the lookout for usages by scientists of the words "intelligent design," in that order, prior to 1987, in an attempt to disprove the evidence by Barbara Forrest at the Kitzmiller trial showing how the "cdesign proponentsists" writing Of Pandas and People were just using ID as a ploy to avoid the consequences of Edwards v...
Passed History
Posted on February 11, 2009This is "scratch your head" news.Despite the best efforts of the Discovery Institute and the Religious Right in general to paint the theory of evolution as "Darwinism" and despite the plethora of recent stories about Darwin in the popular press in the run-up to the "year of Darwin," only 55% of respondents in a Gallup poll could identify him with evolution...
Charles Darwin Superstar
Posted on February 10, 2009Drat those high-salaried college professors, living in the lap of luxury with their trophy wives, dripping with leisure time to idly peruse the internet and write extended critiques of whatever catches their fancy. I had started to write a scathing commentary on a piece that appeared in this morning's New York Times Science section, entitled "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live," by Carl Safina...
Loons Walk Too
Posted on February 10, 2009Ed Brayton points to yet another example, found by the NCSE, of the disingenuousness of the "teach the controversy" and "strengths and weaknesses" campaigns waged by the Religious Right. The real motive, of course, has nothing to do with science, as shown by the sponsor of the bill (that mercifully died in committee) in the Mississippi legislature to append a sticker to biology textbooks that was to include such supposed "weaknesses" as:There are many topics with unanswered questions about the origin of life which are not mentioned in your textbook, including: the sudden appearance of the major groups of animals in the fossil record (known as the Cambrian Explosion); the lack of new major groups of other living things appearing in the fossil record; the lack of transitional forms of major groups of plants and animals in the fossil record; and the complete and complex set of instructions for building a living body possessed by all living things...
Moth Man
Posted on February 09, 2009The University of Cambridge has a "Tribute to Mike Majerus," the late evolutionary geneticist who laid to rest the "icons" of misinformation creationists have fabricated about the Peppered Moth.You can also read the script and see the Powerpoint file from Majerus' 2007 lecture, "The Peppered Moth: The Proof of Darwinian Evolution," where he explains why he undertook to set the record straight and how he went about it, including why he went so far as to test the "proposition" that bats might be preying preferentially on moths based on their color...
Heavenly Metaphors
Posted on February 09, 2009In the category of "we're better off if you don't help":I am a firm believer in the inspired words of the Bible, however the fact is that God created us to evolve. It has been scientifically discovered that COMETS contain organic molecules of life. I accept the story of Adam and Eve as a METAPHOR...
Protecting the Faith
Posted on February 08, 2009RenewAmerica, the website for the portion of the Religious Right that can't handle all the three syllable words they might encounter in WorldNetDaily, shows once again that most people, particularly ID's advocates, can see right through the obfuscation of the Discovery Institute about the identity of the "Designer":The debate between Intelligent Design and Darwinism is not allowed in our public school classes ? but it should be...
Counterfeit Bills
Posted on February 08, 2009Uh, oh! The Discovery Institute is going to be pissed!State Sen. Stephen Wise, a Jacksonville [Florida] Republican, said he plans to introduce a bill to require teachers who teach evolution to also discuss the idea of intelligent design. We all know DI is against mandating the teaching of ID, don't we?This bit is good: Rep...
Prepare to Inspect
Posted on February 07, 2009Abbie at ERV has detected the infestation of the University of Oklahoma's student newspaper, The Oklahoma Daily, with Sal cordovaitis. Abbie snaps on her surgical gloves, probes the infection in its nether regions, and determines that it has the usual symptom of making large numbers of people laugh...
Riding North
Posted on February 06, 2009Larry Moran has accused me of reveling in the creationism that pops up outside of the United States. ... Okay, misery does love company. But you shouldn't think that I find particular pleasure when Canada is the victim ... not that it isn't true, you just shouldn't think it...
Getting Out
Posted on February 05, 2009A thought:But what would this ghost, who would find the separation of church and state unthinkably radical, have to say about the legal battles over evolution being waged across America? An indifferent student, Darwin preferred the outdoors to the schoolhouse and once confessed, "Observing, thinking & some reading beat, in my opinion, all systematic education...
Out and About the Intertubes
Posted on February 05, 2009Some interesting stuff from the last few days:Greg Laden points out the good ... and the bad at U.S. News and World Report. The very good Glenn Branch, of the National Center for Science Education, explaining why "Intelligent Design is Not Science, and Should Not Join Evolution in the Classroom" and the indescribably -- one might say congenitally -- bad Henry Morris III, explaining -- well, nothing -- except how to construct a god small enough to fit in science's gaps...
Stupidburn
Posted on February 04, 2009Ow! Ow! Ow!Does anyone know how to treat third-degree irony burns?The Discovery Institute has issued a press release (the closest it ever gets to science) that should only be viewed after applying a thick layer of SPF 100 sunscreen or above. Be warned before reading further!SEATTLE, Feb...
Jamming the Radar
Posted on February 03, 2009As predicted, the ID noise machine is gearing up to claim that Ben Stein's withdrawal from being commencement speaker at the University of Vermont is evidence of academia's bias against ID and lack of academic freedom. I already noted Wild Bill Dembski's entry into the claque and now that epitome of sound and fury signifying nothing, Casey Luskin, is stamping his foot over at the Discovery Institute's blog...
To Tell the Truth
Posted on February 02, 2009Ooh, lookie!By now you should of heard of Ben Stein's proposed gig as commencement speaker at the University of Vermont and his subsequent "withdrawal" from the ceremony. A local Vermont television station, WCAX, is reporting:Stein has made headlines recently for his views regarding Darwin's theory of evolution, intelligent design and the role of science in the Holocaust...
Carnival Of the Elitist Bastards IX
Posted on February 01, 2009The Carnival Of the Elitist Bastards IX has launched all boats at Ecstathy.Choosing from one of the entries, this point on probabilities and predictions should be a lesson for every kindergarten student:As the old saying goes; "The battle does not always go the strong, nor the race to the swift, but that's the way to bet...
Advertising War
Posted on February 01, 2009There are reactions, and then there are reactions.The love affair of atheists for buses is moving to Canada:The Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign is a collaboration between Chris Hammond, a first-year political science student at York University and the Free thought Association of Canada (FAC)...
Propaganda Lite
Posted on January 31, 2009Well, January 30th has come and gone and the deadline for video entries in the Discoveryless Institute's Academic Freedom on Evolution Student Video and Essay Contest has not (yet) been extended again. As of the moment, only three videos are up at the contest's YouTube site, though it seems there is a delay between their posting and appearance, so I'll wait a day or two before trying to finish reviewing them all...
Popularity Poll
Posted on January 31, 2009Now here's an interesting poll conducted in Britain:More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a "designer" must have lent a hand, the findings suggest.And one in three believe that God created the world within the past 10,000 years...
Sacred Cows
Posted on January 30, 2009Okay, this is just silly but, on a day when I'm a bit under the weather, presenting it for your delectation is one way to fill up the blog:And I would like to suggest that vegetarians who refuse to eat meat for moral reasons - apparently the most common reason - speak to us in an interesting way about the controversy between evolution and intelligent design...
Philosophizing Science
Posted on January 29, 2009Edge has a series of responses to the The New Republic article by Jerry Coyne that asks: "whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science." Here are samplings of a few of the responses:Daniel Everett:Religion is philosophically incompatible with science...
Sowing the Seeds of Faith
Posted on January 29, 2009Dr. Michael Egnor, apparently still being stung regularly by Dr. Steven Novella's refutations of his babblings is back turning over all the same old ground with his usual plow: bald assertions, the misrepresentation of the process of science, projection of his own faults onto Dr...
Filming Propaganda
Posted on January 28, 2009Oh, hey! It looks like the Discovery Institute will have to pay out its fabulous prize of a $500 grand-prize and at least one $250 runner-up prize in its Academic Freedom Day Video and Essay Contest. With just 3 days to go they now have two whole video entries...
Praise Hymn
Posted on January 28, 2009Okay, I'm ambivalent about this one.That's the new billboard the Freedom From Religion Foundation is planning to erect in Madison, Wisconsin, Dayton, Tennessee, and Dover, Pennsylvania. Of course, they have every right to put up billboards and Darwin's image is certainly in the public domain...
Awe Moments, Ewww Moments
Posted on January 27, 2009PZ Mxyzptlk is taking comfort, or comradeship, or sly schadenfreude, or something, in the fact that the great documentarian, Sir David Attenborough, also gets hate mail from believers:"They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance," Sir David said during an interview with the Radio Times about his latest documentary on Charles Darwin and natural selection...
Courting Danger
Posted on January 26, 2009Another scientist has entered the fraught waters of the relationship between science and religion: Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester. His new book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate has a companion blog and he will be joining Discover magazine's Reality Base blog to post an ongoing discussion of science and religion...
IDing Illiteracy
Posted on January 26, 2009From a New York Times editorial on the Texas State Board of Education's actions last week:We were heartened when the board beat back, by a very narrow margin, efforts to reintroduce the language on "weaknesses." But the conservative bloc immediately recouped by pushing through amendments that require students to assess the arguments "for and against" common ancestry, a core element of evolution theory, and its "sufficiency or insufficiency" to explain the fossil record...
Still Wrong
Posted on January 26, 2009Oh, look! New Scientist is reporting on the last minute insertion of creationist nonsense into the Texas science standards:The previous text invited students to: "evaluate a variety of fossil types, transitional fossils, fossil lineages, and significant fossil deposits with regard to their appearance, completeness and rate and diversity of evolution"...
Philosophical Fail
Posted on January 25, 2009Having just discussed "scientism," it is only right and just to discuss what doesn't fall under that category. Here is yet another example of the kind of disingenuous pabulum that will be foisted on unsuspecting schoolchildren if the Discovery Institute's "strengths and weaknesses" ploy get widely disseminated in public education...
Philosophizing About Science
Posted on January 25, 2009I had planned to review and critique Jerry Coyne's book review qua philosophical treatise qua theological discourse after a careful reading and full consideration. Unfortunately, I have been a victim of life's circumstances to a greater degree than usual of late and I won't be able to give it the attention it deserves presently...
Schooling Labor
Posted on January 24, 2009A thought:The status of schoolteaching as an occupation is lower in this country than elsewhere, and it is far lower than that of the professions in the United States. Characteristically, as Myron Lieberman remarks, teachers are recruited "from the top of the lower half of the population...
The Politics of Stupid
Posted on January 23, 2009Here's a funny quote about the Texas science standards fight:It's outrageous that our highest elected education officials voted to silence teachers and students in science class," said Jonathan Saenz, a lobbyist for the Free Market Foundation [the Texas affiliate of James Dobson's Focus on the Family]...
Fallout
Posted on January 23, 2009Here are some more interesting reactions to events in the Texas State Board of Education:From the Fox News outlet in Lubbock, Texas: "The Texas Board of Education took one step back and two steps forward today," said Dr. John West of the Discovery Institute...
One Step Forward ... One Back
Posted on January 22, 2009In the preliminary vote of the Texas State Board of Education held today, creationists on the board failed to reinsert the "strengths and weaknesses" language into the science standards.However, some very damaging changes were made to the Biology and Earth and Space Science standards...
You're Doing Fine
Posted on January 21, 2009Here is a strange little fact about Oklahoma University:Kerry Magruder, the curator of the History of Science Collections, said the university is one of the few in the world with a complete collection of Darwin's works in first edition.Some, including a first edition of Darwin's report on the HMS Beagle's expedition, during which he saw the wonders of flora and fauna on the Galapagos Islands, are priceless...
Dueling Bozos
Posted on January 21, 2009PZ Megahertz has the funny lowdown on Ray ("the banana is an atheist's worse nightmare") Comfort's latest evidence that you really do have to be an ignoramus to buy into the more egregious forms of creationism. (Whether Ray himself is himself a drooling idiot, or merely tailoring his message to the ignoramuses he is trying to exploit, is an open question)...
Today's the Day
Posted on January 20, 2009... our long national nightmare is over.But maybe not. Because we still have people like this in our country:I want Obama to fail because his agenda is 100 percent at odds with God's. Pretending it is not simply makes a mockery of God's straightforward Commandments...
An Ancient Tradition
Posted on January 19, 2009The Beulah (North Dakota) School Board voted 4-3 to ban the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil from the local high school library.The vote came as a result of a complaint by Keith Bohn, a Beulah vocational agriculture teacher (okay, there are a lot of jokes there but I'm piously passing them up), and Kathy Bohn, a school janitor, because: ...
Don't Know Much Biology
Posted on January 19, 2009It ain't just biology that the creationist members of the Texas State Board of Education are out to gut. It's Earth and Space Sciences too. Steven Schafersman, a member of the standards-writing panel, has a long report on the efforts of the young-Earth creationists, Roger Sigler and Tom Henderson, put on the panel to water down the standards as to such YEC-killing science as radiometric dating of rocks from the Earth, the Moon and meteorites; red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation evidence for the Big Bang and, generally, to make the standards less "dogmatic," wherever they refuse to pander to such scientific nonsense as a young Earth, by removing all science standards altogether...
Starting To Come True
Posted on January 19, 2009Today can come on no more fitting day than the day before tomorrow.And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...
Racing For the Bottom
Posted on January 18, 2009It's definitely pile on Louisiana time.There was the article "The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom" in Scientific American by Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott a while back that highlighted the creationist intent of Louisiana's misnamed Science Education Act...
Object Lesson
Posted on January 18, 2009The State of Louisiana doesn't have the best record on maintaining the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. The ACLU sued the state over:... the constitutionality of a general appropriations measure, House Bill 1, which was signed into law in July 2007 by former Governor Kathleen Blanco...
Darwin News
Posted on January 18, 2009Science News has a special web edition that includes expanded versions of articles from the magazine's print edition plus two additional features, all commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Here are the links:Darwin's Evolution, by Tom SiegfriedEvolution's Evolution, by Rachel EhrenbergMolecular Evolution, by Tina Hesman SaeyStep-by-step Evolution, by Sid PerkinsComputing Evolution, by Patrick BarryA Most Private Evolution, by Susan MiliusThere is also an "interview" with Darwin...
Academic Freedom Day Watch
Posted on January 17, 2009Down to the wire!Less than a week to go until the entry period for the Discovery Institute's Academic Freedom Day Video and Essay Contest closes and there are still no videos posted at the contest's YouTube site.But wait a minute! The contest, originally scheduled to close on January 23, 2009 (no doubt to allow the judges time to sort through the massive number of entries) has now been extended to January 30, 2009!Now all you budding design theorists get cracking!The early bird gets the fabulous prize:One grand-prize winner will be announced and have his or her entry officially unveiled at academicfreedomday...
Money Changing Hands
Posted on January 17, 2009Where can you find books about "Christian sex" (doing it on your knees?), "Samson muscle suits," or the ever-popular "camouflage Bibles"?That would be the Mardel Christian and Education store, owned by a division of the Southern Baptist Convention, in Lubbock, Texas...
Scribbling Well
Posted on January 16, 2009A nice editorial in the Financial Times:... Many scientists and liberal politicians regard the rising creationist tide as a side-show that they can safely ignore. They are wrong, for several reasons. Wide areas of research, from biology to cosmology, would suffer directly if it became politically difficult for governments to fund fields that depend on such a basic a part of science as evolution...
Ragtime Cowboy Poe
Posted on January 16, 2009Okay, I call Poe's Law on this one: I don't believe in atheists. There is no credible scientific evidence that any atheist actually exist. I know there are people out there who claim that they do not believe in God, but the evidence says differently. They are really anti-God...
Before Breakfast
Posted on January 15, 2009Anika Smith is bucking for the job of White Queen at the Discovery Institute (against very stiff competition, as you might imagine) with her latest posting about the guidelines adopted by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education concerning what "supplementary materials" can be used in teaching "controversial" scientific theories such as evolution...
American Ideals
Posted on January 14, 2009A thought:[T]he primary intellectual value [nineteenth-century American schoolbooks] embodied was utility. As an early reader said: 'We are all scholars of useful knowledge." Jedidiah Morse's famous geography boasted: "While many other nations are wasting the brilliant efforts of genius in monuments of ingenious folly, to perpetuate their pride, the Americans, according to the true spirit of republicanism, are employed almost entirely in works of public and private utility...
Court Capers
Posted on January 13, 2009Law-Suit Larry Caldwell, as Timothy Sandefur deliciously calls him in Sandefur's article at The Panda's Thumb, is attempting, with the Pacific Justice Institute, to take the case of Larry's wife against the U.C. Berkeley Understanding Evolution website to the Supreme Court...
Taking One for the Team
Posted on January 12, 2009Well, as I noted last week, the professional educators in Louisiana had been so far refusing to play along with the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean that the backers of that state's version of the "academic freedom" boondoggle for constitutional lawyers had been expecting of all concerned...
Evolutionary Art
Posted on January 11, 2009Jonah Lehrer, in the Washington Post, reviews a book on art and evolution, The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher. Dutton wants to add art to the list of cultural universals that have been identified, including language, religion and certain traits of social structure, such as the reliance on leaders...
Newcomer
Posted on January 11, 2009Science magazine has a new blog called Origins:2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150 years after he published On the Origin of Species. As part of its celebration of these two anniversaries, Science will be blogging, with Darwin as our inspiration...
Across the USA
Posted on January 11, 2009A number of bloggers have been posting this map which, in my case, indicates I've visited 31 states (62%). Can you figure out the cause of the pattern? I'd estimate the odds of doing so as approximately 10 out of 80-95.Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project.
Accidental Honesty
Posted on January 10, 2009The Richmond, Indiana Palladium-Item has an Op-Ed piece by Kenneth Riden, described elsewhere as a "local coordinator for a national effort seeking legislation to require teachers" to "teach the controversy." It is instructive as to how the "academic freedom" advocates, lead by the Discovery Institute, really see the movement:[T]eachers today should have not only the freedom to teach evolution, but also to teach all relative (sic and a neat description of ID) scientific theories that contradict evolution...
The Attack of the 50 Foot ...
Posted on January 09, 2009.There's a big film festival going on in Texas right now. What? You've never heard of it? How could you have missed the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival?Fortunately, the reports of James Alanis in the Dallas Morning News will keep you apprised of events...
Excitement Machine
Posted on January 09, 2009Hey folks!There's only two weeks to go until the end of the entry period for the Discovery Institute's Academic Freedom Day Video and Essay Contest with the fabulous grand-prize of $500, prizes of $250 each for the essay runner-up and video runner-up and up to 10 awards of a choice of a free book or DVD for finalists...
Flunking At Being American
Posted on January 08, 2009For the Americans out there ... the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has a Civics Literacy Test to see how well you know America's founding principles, political history, international relations, and market economy. As with most such tests, the results are depressing:~ Less than half can name all three branches of the government...
Matthew 7:15
Posted on January 08, 2009Now here's a surprise! It seems that the Louisiana Family Forum, a state affiliate of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and a major force behind the passage of Louisiana's version of the "academic freedom" bill, is unhappy with how professional educators are interpreting the law, the language of which you can find here...
The Hurry With the Fringe on Tap
Posted on January 07, 2009As reported by the National Center for Science Education, Oklahomans are the first out of the starters gate in the sweepstakes to see which state legislature can make fools out of themselves by passing anti-evolution bills in this anniversary year for Darwin...
Revelations
Posted on January 06, 2009PZ Myearshertz may get interesting email, but William Nedblake at Skiing Mount Improbable got some interesting snail mail. Specifically, it is a fundraising letter dated 11 December 2008 from the Discovery Institute attempting to capitalize on the tragic death, probably by suicide, of Jesse Kilgore...
Roosts
Posted on January 05, 2009Here is something of a rarity: a transcript of an interview that does not include the questions. The subject is Edward O. Wilson and here are some of his answers (guess the questions yourself):If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science...
Failings
Posted on January 04, 2009A thought:When the United States began its national existence, the relationship between intellect and power was not a problem. The leaders were the intellectuals. Advanced though the nation was in the development of democracy, the control of its affairs still rested largely in a patrician elite; and within this elite men of intellect moved freely and spoke with enviable authority...
Another Effect of Religion
Posted on January 03, 2009As is often the case, here is another thing that becomes obvious ... once you think of it:In recent years doctors and researchers have confronted an alarming consensus that billions of people, starting in infancy, are lacking Vitamin D and thus at risk for a host of health problems, including a shorter lifespan plagued with aches and pains...
New Year, Old Crap
Posted on January 02, 2009One Bruce Walker, a vanity press "author" (if this is any guide, deservedly so), is ushering in the infant year with another attempt to connect, by the feeblest of threads, eugenics and the Holocaust to ... you guessed it! ... "Darwinism." Apparently, someone forgot to diaper the baby...
Casey Rides Into Battle
Posted on January 02, 2009Unfortunately for Luskin, it's against Ken Miller sitting astride a war horse of logic, facts and the words of Michael Behe, whose demolition at the Kitzmiller trial Luskin is trying desperately, and unsuccessfully, to paper over.Writing at Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, Miller parries with ease Luskin's feeble feints and leaves Behe's claim that the blood clotting cascade, or any part thereof, is irreducibly complex ...
Canny Canidae
Posted on January 01, 2009Here's some prognostication:But as we focus on 2009 we will see our government adopt policies that worked before, this year will not seem particularly innovative but it will have a dominating urgency about it; issues must be undertaken and problems solved...
Auguration
Posted on December 30, 2008A thought:Intellectualism should not mean that one must possesses a graduate degree in order to embrace it. It means we cannot allow oversimplification to trump responses to complex issues that require more than a sound bite.It also means that our civic duty did not end on November 4, 2008...
How ID Can Enhance Your Reputation
Posted on December 29, 2008From Felix Salmon at Condé Nast's Portfolio.com, about a claim by Ben Stein that he turned down an offer by "a little delegation from a major investment bank" to invest his money with Bernie Madoff:For one thing, "major investment banks" are conspicuous by their absence when it comes to the roster of Madoff's victims...
The Coming Darwin Year
Posted on December 29, 2008In all the hoopla to be expected in the next year over Darwin, it may become a cottage industry to spot and correct the errors in popular accounts of his life and work (not to mention the deliberate distortions of creationists). Just to warm up a bit, here is an account in The Independent by Archie Bland entitled "The Big Question: How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?":It's a mark of how extraordinary a step Darwin took on humanity's behalf that a principle that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial today ? that random mutations would make some species better suited to their environments than others, and that those species would be more likely to breed ? could have caused such extraordinary upheaval as recently as 1859...
Hush, Hush, Sweet Scientist
Posted on December 28, 2008The traveling exhibit that started at the American Museum of Natural History and moved to the Museum of Science, Boston, the Field Museum, Chicago and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, has now reached its natural home at the Natural History Museum, London...
Going Where No Elitist Bastard Has Gone Before
Posted on December 28, 2008. The Carnival of Elitist Bastards, Version 8.0, is up and soaring at Submitted to a Candid World. Here's one of my (many) favorites bits:Just when I thought the la guerre de Noel n'aura pas lieu, in walked Bill. Sometimes I can't decide what the best thing about O'Reilly is---his pugnacity or his stupidity...
Memories
Posted on December 28, 2008Greg Laden, in his end of the year reveries, is reviving Crackergate. Okay, I thought PZ was wrong in obtaining and disposing of the Communion host the way he did but what really interests me is this from Greg, who reveals that he is an erstwhile altar boy:PZ intones "It's a cracker!" But you know, it's not a cracker...
History in the News
Posted on December 27, 2008Michael Barton of The Dispersal of Darwin got a nice write-up in The Billings Gazette for the work he did at Yellowstone National Park's Heritage and Research Center a while back when he was working as an intern there. Barton found that use of religious language in descriptions of the park was common during the Romantic movement, a reaction to the 18th century's Enlightenment that stressed science and objectivity...
A Tory Take On Christmas
Posted on December 27, 2008British MP John Redwood:It is typical of evil governments down the years that they think nothing of the convenience of their citizens. I am sure the last thing Joseph wanted with a pregnant Mary, and all the extra bills fatherhood would bring, was to down his carpenter's tools and travel to Bethlehem just to register and pay a tax...
Revisionist Christmas
Posted on December 26, 2008Just to follow up on the excerpt from The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford I posted, here is a commentary by one A.W.R. Hawkins, a columnist for Human Events (an outlet that seems to think Ann Coulter is a serious political voice):It's Christmas time but Christmas cheer isn't abounding as it did when we were kids...
More War on Christmas
Posted on December 25, 2008Here is an excerpt of an excerpt from The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford, available at the NPR website:... There were no Christmas cards in 1843 England [when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol], no Christmas trees at royal residences or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa or his million clones, no outpouring of "Yuletide greetings," no weeklong cessation of business affairs through the New Year, no orgy of gift-giving, no ubiquitous public display of nativity scenes (or court fights regarding them), no holiday lighting extravaganzas, and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a savior...
Ridin' the Range
Posted on December 25, 2008The National Center for Science Education is reporting that the third draft of Texas's proposed new science standards has removed the latest version of the "strengths and weaknesses" language that is an obvious ploy for injecting creationism into public schools...
Holiday Prayer
Posted on December 24, 2008A loved one is going through a difficult illness and, on top of the big issues, some smaller, but not insignificant, annoyances, exacerbated by bureaucrats, have cropped up to make matters worse ... okay, making the bureaucrat squirm was a minor consolation...
Bah!
Posted on December 23, 2008Because of life's circumstances I may not be posting for a while.Merry Christmas!Happy Chanukah!Cheery Kwanzaa!Super Solstice!Happy Monkey!Special Saturnalia!Happy Holidays!.
Bleedin' Choir Invisibile
Posted on December 22, 2008div align="justify"br /a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BQtYCYJpONQ/SVBbvL_N-DI/AAAAAAAADFU/BlDj7GKL8Yw/s1600-h/Dead+Parrot.jpg"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5282823229135517746" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 234px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4...
Year's Gifts
Posted on December 21, 2008.National Geographic has a list of the "Top Ten Dinosaur & Fossil Finds" of 2008:10. "Amazing" Dinosaur Trove Discovered in Utah9. Odd Fish Find Contradicts Intelligent-Design Argument8. PHOTO IN THE NEWS: DNA-Based Neanderthal Face Unveiled7. "Bizarre" New Dinosaur: Giant Raptor Found in Argentina6...
Passages
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Hard on Pants
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It Must Be Somethin' In the Water ...
Posted on December 18, 2008div align="justify"br /a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BQtYCYJpONQ/SUsSgtoVh7I/AAAAAAAADFE/eJE50wPiv7o/s1600-h/Contrails.jpg"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5281335341235931058" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 210px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1...
Don't Let the Door ?
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As Others See You
Posted on December 16, 2008A thought:[The following are] the ideal assumptions of anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate; snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools...
IQuestions
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Not Perfect Yet
Posted on December 15, 2008Here we go again with more evidence of what is in store for Texas children if the creationist wing(nuts) of the State Board of Education get their way. Ken Mercer is a member of the SBOE and here is what he thinks the "weaknesses" of evolutionary theory are:The controversial "macro" evolution was commonly understood as those major changes that could occur if one species jumped to another...
This Explains a Lot
Posted on December 15, 2008David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He has an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times that, among other things, makes this extraordinary statement:The latest scientific theory holds that particular brain functions evolved for purposes suited to the survival of the species, but then got "hijacked" by religious and other supernatural beliefs...
Dangerous Fool
Posted on December 15, 2008Mark Chu-Carroll has an excellent must-read post on why Dr. Michel Egnor's blather about evolution being useless in medical practice because natural selection is supposedly a tautology ("what survives, survives") is not only wrong, it would be, even if true, only trivially so and why Egnor's misrepresentations, on the other hand, are not themselves trivial and must be constantly and forcefully opposed...
Catchup
Posted on December 14, 2008Because of the recent need to replace my computer, and the general havoc it has caused, I have been slow in my blog perusing. I have managed to be late to reading several good posts on Dr. Steven Novella's Neurologica Blog:Dr. Steve follows up on his "Skeptical Battlegrounds: Part I ? Background" with "Skeptical Battlegrounds: Part II ? Creationism...
Firing Squad
Posted on December 14, 2008Heh! Ed Brayton notes that the Washington State Department of General Administration has declared a moratorium for exhibits and displays in the Legislative Building:[A]ll pending applications - including one for a Festivus pole - an homage to the made-up holiday featured in the comedy series "Seinfeld" - have been put on hold until the department completes a review of the current policy for exhibits and displays in the Legislative Building...
Siege Mentality
Posted on December 14, 2008According to Misty Upton, "Christians are under siege again."Why? Because people dare to say there is no God ... gasp ... in public![T]he American Humanist Association is launching an ad campaign appearing on Washington, D.C. buses. The ads read, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake...
Educational Malpractice
Posted on December 13, 2008What's wrong with this Op-Ed piece about the upcoming curriculum fight in Texas?:In response to the Express-News editorial of 12/1 ("Don't Water Down Science Curriculum") we at San Antonio Bible Based Sciences Association would like to ask how you can water down a curriculum which is almost exclusively evolution already by changing the wording which has existed in the curriculum for many years? Also, no creationist organization in this state is trying to insert new language, change the evolutionary science curriculum of this state or insert creationism in any way during this adoption cycle...
The Party of Lincoln Hoover
Posted on December 12, 2008Um ... why did the short-term rescue of US automakers fail?[Sen. Bob] Corker [Rep. KY.] said he proposed that wages and benefits of U.A.W. members be competitive with lower rates at American plants run by foreign rivals ? Toyota, Honda, Nissan and B.M...
Hoisting the Holidays
Posted on December 12, 2008Concerning the continuing contretemps in the Capitol of Washington State, Ed Brayton has pointed out that the Governor has no choice but to allow access to the atheist group due to a settlement the state made last year in a suit brought by the conservative Christian Alliance Defense Fund...
Let the Games Begin!
Posted on December 11, 2008This should be interesting:A Kansas-based church that has blamed deaths in Iraq on U.S. tolerance of homosexuality has asked Gov. Chris Gregoire's office to approve a "Santa Claus will take you to Hell" message to display among other religious statements in the Capitol's third-floor hallway...
Thinking Design
Posted on December 11, 2008Here?s an interesting article by Hania Köver for the Berkeley Science Review entitled ?The psychology of teleology.? It is a brief report on a study by Berkeley psychologist Tania Lombrozo on why some people find teleological explanations, such as Intelligent Design Creationism, so compelling...
Poll Cats
Posted on December 10, 2008The Harris Poll released a new nationwide survey of 2,126 U.S. adults surveyed online between November 10 and 17, 2008. Some of the results:-- 80% of adult Americans believe in God - unchanged since the last time we asked the question in 2005. Large majorities of the public believe in miracles (75%), heaven (73%), angels (71%), that Jesus is God or the Son of God (71%), the resurrection of Jesus (70%), the survival of the soul after death (68%), hell (62%), the Virgin birth (Jesus born of Mary) (61%) and the devil (59%)...
Of Birds, Feathers and Flocks
Posted on December 09, 2008Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority has a bit of a (justifiable) rant about the lack of honesty of Dr. Michael Egnor, The Discoveryless Institute?s brainless surgeon. Perhaps, in the end, what is most notable about Mike?s post is the fact that, once circumstances were pointed out to him that suggest that the example from Egnor's article he was particularly focusing on might have been the result of sloppiness on Egnor?s part (a peculiar trait for a neurosurgeon) rather than the result of malice, Mike acknowledged it immediately, though Mike still thinks Egnor is ethically challenged...
Navel Observatory
Posted on December 09, 2008.In an exercise with more than a little midrift gazing, Australian astronomer Dave Reneke, who is also news editor of Sky and Space magazine, has announced yet another candidate for the ?Star of Bethlehem.? Using a computer program to map the night sky as it would have appeared over the Holy Land more than 2,000 years ago and using Matthew's Gospel as a reference, he pinpointed the slightly inconvenient date of June 17 in the year 2 BCC as when:"Venus and Jupiter became very close ...
Surprise, Surprise
Posted on December 08, 2008The Supreme Court has refused to hear an emergency appeal from Leo Donofrio of New Jersey, who claims President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible for the office because he had dual nationality at birth, since his mother was American and his father was a British subject from Kenya and, therefore, he cannot be a "natural born citizen...
Please Stand By
Posted on December 07, 2008. Because of technical difficulties, I've had to replace my computer and I expect it will take some time before I can become proficient on the new one. Therefore, I expect posts may be somewhat sparce for a few days at least. We apologize for any inconvenience...
Sermonizing
Posted on December 06, 2008The ... um ... select few readers of this blog will probably be thoroughly sick or Richard Hofstadter's renowned book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life by the time I get done reading it but this section has a clear lesson for us now:Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to intellectuals in the East, and it is not uncommon to take a condescending view of both sides...
99% Ape
Posted on December 05, 2008.This looks good:99% Ape: How evolution adds up, is a new book from the Natural History Museum published last week.The book introduces the topic of evolution, and leading experts at The Open University explain this fundamental yet often complex subject, guiding the reader through the latest evidence...
Future Shock
Posted on December 05, 2008A thought:By the end of the [19th] century it was painfully clear to fundamentalists that they were losing much of their influence and respectability. One can now discern among them the emergence of a religious style shaped by a desire to strike back against everything modern -- the higher criticism, evolutionism, the social gospel, rational criticism of any kind...
Gob Smacking
Posted on December 04, 2008Some things in life just have to be filed under "Huh?"James Madison University has a campus club of Freethinkers that meets Wednesday night. Nothing very surprising there. Okay, the fact that a staff member of the JMU Campus Crusade for Christ chapter regularly attends is perhaps a little unusual but if freethinkers can't tolerate opposing views, who can?"I think it's really good that they come," said [Shannon] McKernin, the Freethinkers secretary...
Patoot
Posted on December 04, 2008Dr. Steven Novella has been deconstructing Dr. Michael Egnor's "logic" again, an exercise with some similarities to going after piscines in a barrel with a quater pound of C-4. Here are the posts by Dr. Steve [one, two].Now Egnor is at it again, this time riffing off a blog post by David Chalmers, a philosopher of mind who argues that consciousness is a non-material but wholly naturalistic phenomenon...
Changing Faces
Posted on December 03, 2008Marcus du Sautoy is about to take over from Richard Dawkins as Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. The New Scientist has an interview with him, that includes some questions about his predecessor:Will you be as confrontational as [Richard Dawkins] is?I certainly intend to defend science but I see this position as more about helping to create connections with society and scientists, to help encourage dialogue, to involve people in doing science and to get people so excited that they want to become scientists...
Practical Science
Posted on December 02, 2008I'm reading Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in America and it is striking how little has changed in the last 45 years. One thing that seems fresh on Hofstadter's page is the way anti-intellectuals go about the business of marginalizing the life of the mind: The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms...
Screamin' Memie
Posted on December 02, 2008It seems I was too lenient with the last malefactor perpetrating misdememeors in the neighborhood, only arranging for a bit of time at the military's little vacation spa in Cuba. This latest transgressor may need the Qaddafi ā la Gipper treatment.In any event, the Five Fifty-Six Meme is supposed to go like this: take the first 10 books you see, open it to page fifty-six, transcribe the fifth sentence, and challenged your readers to guess the books...
Marching Minds
Posted on December 01, 2008A thought:To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous...
Carnival of Elitist Bastards, VII
Posted on December 01, 2008The November (almost) Carnival of Elitist Bastards is soaking up some caffeine at Café Philos. Here is a sample that particularly tickled my elitist sensibilities:I'm pretty sure I threw something at the TV when I found out that some skid mark was sueing CERN because he was certain that none of the hundreds of trained physicists could possibly have thought about black holes being made in the LHC...
Meaner Than Meme
Posted on November 30, 2008Despite threats to turn perpetrators of the internet terror known as "memes" in to Fatherla ... um ... Homeland Security and have their sorry asses transported to Gitmo for a little arbeit macht frei, occasionally someone makes the grave error of meming me...
The True Spirit of American Christmas
Posted on November 29, 2008Not far from where I live:The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. At 3:30 a.m., the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control, and an officer with a bullhorn pleaded for order...
A Bibliophile's Celebration of the Winter Solstice
Posted on November 28, 2008Rob Boston has a post at the blog of Americans United for Separation of Church and State entitled "Good Gifts: Holiday Ideas For The Church-State Separationist On Your List." You can go over there for short descriptions of the books or just look through the links below:Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom by Barry W...
Designing Turkeys
Posted on November 27, 2008It is particularly appropriate to deal with the newest argument for Intelligent Design today.[T]urkey [is] loaded with the narcotic tryptophan?that stuff that proves to all the stubborn secularists out there that intelligent design is everywhere, if only they had eyes to see...
Giving Thanks
Posted on November 27, 2008.Happy Thanksgiving to all with hopes that all our friendsaround the world have equal reason to be thankful!.
Liberal Education
Posted on November 26, 2008Ed Brayton has a couple of posts about conservative Christians blaming education and (shudder) atheistic professors for suicides among their youngsters. One father (via the ever-reliably lunatic WingNutDaily) blames Richard Dawkins for his son's suicide and Dr...
Trading In Texas
Posted on November 25, 2008Lisa Falkenberg has a good opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle on the whole mess that is the state's Board of Education. First of all, there is this on the motivation of the creationist wing of the Board:"Strengths and weaknesses" is a new buzz phrase that's replaced "creation science" and "intelligent design," and other science curriculum labels that incorporate teachings of faith, which courts have consistently struck down...
Mockup
Posted on November 24, 2008How come no one told Indy?Though no one knows if Valencia's grail is the true Last Supper chalice, a group of experts says it has tremendous cultural value due to its impact on history and literature.This was affirmed by members of the international congress "Valencia, City of the Holy Grail," focusing on the chalice traditionally associated with the institution of the Eucharist...
Wising Up the Fools
Posted on November 23, 2008Brian Burgess is upset.[A]s a graduate of Hardin-Simmons University, I was grieved when I read that professors at each of Abilene's "Christian" universities have joined a fundamentalist group bent on destroying academic freedom and banning from public schools scientific data that clearly refutes their dogmas...
Iced Dice
Posted on November 22, 2008David White has an interesting take on Intelligent Design Creationism from a theist's viewpoint:[C]reationism's familiar yet totally unscriptural chimera of "accidental evolution" now lives on as the centerpiece and all-around bogeyman of intelligent design...
Booking the Perpetrators
Posted on November 21, 2008Just in case there was any doubt about why the creationists on the Texas State Board of Education are so intent on keeping the "strengths and weaknesses" language (or "strengths and limitations" in it latest cosmetic morph) in the state's science standards, there is this report in the friendly confines of the Baptist Press: [Board Chairman Don] McLeroy has said such statements only add to his desire to put both the pros and cons of evolution into the textbooks for students, allowing high school students to think critically about generally held theories of science and question whether those theories are valid...
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Posted on November 20, 2008In the first round of hearings in Texas over the new science standards for the public schools there, the overwhelming majority of speakers supported good science education, a fact that did not get by the Texas State Board of Education Chairman: Board Chairman Don McLeroy said the lopsided turnout was part of an orchestrated campaign and flatly dismissed the notion that the board is intent on sabotaging the teaching of evolution in public schools, which would defy the U...
Anti-elitism At Its Finest
Posted on November 20, 2008Jonathan Saenz of the Free Market Foundation, a group that works to limit government and promote free enterprise and Judeo-Christian values, testifying at the Texas State Board of Education hearings concerning the proposed revisions to the state?s science curriculum:Darwin was from England and Einstein was from Germany...
Public School Faith
Posted on November 20, 2008This statement by Rabbi Ana Bonnheim, Assistant Director for Education at the Union for Reform Judaism?s Greene Family Camp, delivered at the Texas State Board of Education hearings concerning the proposed revisions to the state?s science curriculum, is worth repeating:?On the surface, teaching about the ?strengths and limitations of scientific explanations?? may not seem like teaching religious beliefs...
Testing ... Testing ...
Posted on November 19, 2008Bud Kennedy has a good Op-Ed piece in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, tying the push to foist creationism on Texas public schools to state politics:[Gov. Rick] Perry has said bluntly that he wants so-called intelligent design ? creation theology ? taught in science classes...
Warnings
Posted on November 19, 2008As reported by Ed Brayton, Bud Kennedy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has the story about the disappearance of Cynthia Dunbar's commentary accusing Barack Obama of not being eligible to be president and all but plotting with terrorists to attack America so he can declare martial law and wield dictatorial powers...
Whine and Jeez
Posted on November 18, 2008Well, I said that we should expect another round of whining about how elitist academic Darwinists are stifling the academic freedom of Joe Sixpack and his little packlets. That didn't take long. Robert Crowther is at the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation boo-hooing about the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund's poll...
Life
Posted on November 18, 2008One of my near and dear is seriously ill so posting may be somewhat spotty for a while. Do carry on without me if I'm not around as much....
Poll Tex
Posted on November 17, 2008The Texas Freedom Network Education Fund has arranged to survey science faculty in the state concerning the upcoming battle over the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, curriculum standards that will not only decide what children in the state are taught in public schools but could also decide what biology and other science textbooks are approved by the second largest purchaser of school books in the country, thus potentially effecting science education across the country...
Dreamin' of a White Xmas
Posted on November 17, 2008From the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association.Maybe some kind soul should donate one for the White House lawn._____________________________Via Larry Moran and Ed Brayton..
Theism and Evolution
Posted on November 16, 2008Elliot Sober hasn't just written the book, Evidence and Evolution, that I have been humping over the past few months, on the subject of Intelligent Design Creationism. He also has a number of scholarly articles on the subject available on the web here...
Metaphysics of Biology
Posted on November 15, 2008.A thought:The usual line of argument endorsed by most critics of ID and other forms of creationism is that science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, makes no commitment to metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is typically construed as [Michael] Ruse describes it: as an ontological thesis, stated with a priori certainty, about the absolute non-existence of entities other than those posited by our current scientific theories...
Fit To a Tee
Posted on November 15, 2008Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon ? it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.Troy Britain of Playing Chess With Pigeons is selling t-shirts with, of course, a message...
To Save a Mockingbird
Posted on November 14, 2008The finches of the Galapagos are much more famous, even being given the general appellation "Darwin's finches," but the mockingbirds were more important. It was the mockingbirds that first started Darwin thinking that species might not be stable:When he arrived on San Cristobal Island (then known as Chatham), he immediately saw that the mockingbirds were similar to ones he had collected in South America...
Help Bailout Texas
Posted on November 14, 2008The NCSE has an article up about the upcoming border skirmish in Texas between the inhabitants of Reality and the natives of Fantasyland. Once again, a few Texas Rangers are needed to fight off those who would ignore the law and try to steal the most precious possession of children, a good education:NCSE encourages anyone who is ready, willing, and able to testify in defense of the proper treatment of evolution and the nature of science to register to testify...
Heavenly Visions
Posted on November 13, 2008Greg Laden, at his fiendishly cleverly named blog, Greg Laden's Blog, is speculating on an increase in pareidolia events now that the European Union is changing its rules about selling "ugly" produce.You know what pareidolia is ... when the image of Mother Teresa shows up in a cinnamon bun ...
A Tale to Pinto a Donkey
Posted on November 12, 2008I suppose I should preface this with the statement that I really admired Stephen Jay Gould's take on science and his writing. Also, The Panda's Thumb is one of my favorite blogs. But the fact is that Gould's use of the panda's thumb as an argument in favor of science and against creationism was deeply flawed...
Digging the Truth
Posted on November 11, 2008The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology has issued a statement about the grossly misnomered "Louisiana Science Education Act," urging the citizens and legislators of Louisiana to repeal it:The Act was drafted under the guise of ?academic freedom? and appeals to cherished values of fairness and free speech...
Controlling Helplessness
Posted on November 10, 2008A new study by Northwestern University researchers has found that superstitions may arise as a reaction to the feeling of a lack of control which, in turn, causes persons hunt for patterns and meaning from the random events in our everyday lives.The Chicago group found that making experimental subjects remember a time when they lacked control actually changed the way they viewed the world, and created a temporary need to see patterns where none existed...
Fallout
Posted on November 09, 2008Here is a hopeful sign, found in The Baltimore Sun:Diane Butler, who finished fourth in the contest for three seats [on the county school board], said campaign literature distributed by third-place finisher Allen Dyer was taken out of context and distributed without her permission...
Ignorance is Strength
Posted on November 08, 2008Oh, look! Casey Luskin, the Gofer General of the Discovery Institute's anti-science division, has a new title! Now he is "an education policy analyst"! Funny, I knew that Luskin has a law degree and a Masters in "Earth Science," but I can't find where he has any training in education...
Another Vote for a Quality Candidate
Posted on November 08, 2008Brian Switek of Laelaps, as well as Smithsonian magazine's new blog, Dinosaur Traking, is one of the 20 finalists in the 2008 Blogging Scholarships and has a shot at winning $10,000.Brian's work at Laelaps is some of the best writing on the history of science you'll find in the blogosphere, such as his recent post on the rise of anti-evolutionism resulting from the post-World War I revelation by biologist Vernon L...
Coming to a Consensus on Crichton
Posted on November 08, 2008By now you've probably heard of the death of Michael Crichton. You've probably also heard some grandiose talk about his "significance" as an author and purveyor of science to the masses. Normally, I would not try to rain on that parade. Most everyone, upon death, deserves a paean or two from admirers and judicious silence, for a while at least, from critics...
Creative Teachers
Posted on November 07, 2008Britain's Teacher TV, a website and TV station for teachers, emailed a survey to 10,600 education professionals, of which 1,210 responded. Out of that figure, 248 science teachers responded. Disturbingly, out of the science teachers, 18%:... said they thought creationism or intelligent design should be given the same status as evolution in the classroom, although this question did not specify whether it was referring to science lessons or the curriculum in general...
A New Voldemort?
Posted on November 06, 2008Having polished off God, has Richard Dawkins decided to go after a much tougher opponent?I would like to know whether there's any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things ? it is unscientific, I think it's antiscientific...
Lower Education
Posted on November 05, 2008Oh, wait! Republicans do want to fund education!As the US election campaign wound up, Republicans apparently made a last-minute bid to get an Oxford academic to help scupper Barack Obama's chances. Peter Millican, a philosophy don, was contacted about using software he had devised to "prove" that Obama's autobiography had been ghostwritten by a former terrorist...
Now Is the Time
Posted on November 03, 2008Because if you don't, you can be sure people like this will:Remember freedom of speech? Remember when it was okay to speak about your beliefs to other believers and share those beliefs in discussion (public or private) because your freedom to speak about whatever was guaranteed...
Cultural Counterrevolutionary
Posted on November 02, 2008An enemy of the people has been identified and forced to confess his counterrevolutionary activities!A former Republican Secretary of State and one of John McCain's most prominent supporters offered a stunningly frank and remarkably bleak assessment of Sarah Palin's capacity to handle the presidency should such a scenario arise [in a National Public Radio interview]...
First Annual Ferric Patella Award1
Posted on November 01, 2008John Freshwater is (but, hopefully, not for long) a middle-school science teacher in Mount Vernon, Ohio, who I've written about before. He is in the process of being fired by the school board for, among other things2, teaching creationism/Intelligent Design in his classes...
Another Elitist Identified!
Posted on November 01, 2008Here is Cynthia Tucker of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, discussing if Sarah Palin is the "future" of the Republican Party or Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal might be:Jindal's credentials make him sound like the obvious savior for a party desperately in need of a image transplant...
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Posted on October 31, 2008It seems that Douglas Adams was wrong. The answer appear to be "10."
Figuring Figurers
Posted on October 31, 2008Razib Khan of Gene Expression has a short piece up at the Guardian about the errors of those who use statistics while wearing glasses of their favorite tint. While he notes that predictions that Europe will soon be dominated by Muslims are wrong, he focuses on those who predict it will soon be atheistic: Conservative commentator Mark Steyn declares that Europe will soon be dominated by Muslims...
Science, History and Politics
Posted on October 30, 2008Peter McKnight of the Vancouver Sun has a multi-part series, that can be accessed here, about religion and science that looks pretty good so far:Part I: Coupling of science and religion;Part II: Religion in disguise;Part III: Hitting a brick wall; andPart IV: The tension between science and religion...
Natural Method
Posted on October 29, 2008I've already linked to Dr. Steven Novella's two part response to what appears to be a shift in emphasis, at least, in the Intelligent Design Movement's war against science. As Larry Moran says:As a general anti-science strategy, it's easy to see why the mind-body problem is resurfacing...
Slapstick Education
Posted on October 28, 2008David Bradley is a clown.However, Bradley, the current vice-chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, is a bigoted and dangerous clown:"Do you know what the Democrat for State Board of Education supports?" reads the handout, which was disseminated at a recent gathering of the Golden Triangle Republican Women and trumpeted earlier this year at a Republican senatorial convention...
Lonesome Hawk
Posted on October 27, 2008Would someone fire up Bobby Vinton's "Mr. Lonely" on the victrola?The Harvard Crimson has a piece about the perceived, by some, under-representation of conservatives on the faculty. One of them is government Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, who: ... explained the presidential race in terms of his book "Manliness," which mourns the lack of manliness in a "gender neutral" society...
Nearer, My God, to Thee
Posted on October 26, 2008Heh!Maybe John McCain is learning what most of the rest of us already suspect about Sarah Palin.According to CNN, Sarah's not about to play "good soldier" in a campaign that's looking more and more like the political version of the Titanic.Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue...
Carnival of Elitist Bastards, VI
Posted on October 25, 2008.Don't sing me, poet, of the topless towers of Ilium.I, Odysseus, stood by while unwashed Agamemnonand his drunken brigand Greeks toppled the lastof the rude mud bricks that made up Troy.Tall tales are fit for songs like yours,and to send the children off to bed,but I was there and the reality'senough to make the singing cloy...
Whither the Religious?
Posted on October 24, 2008John Wilkins, clinging, as always, to the Fatal Shore, has a good post up about religion and the hope-triumphing-over-experience expectations of some that religion will wither away:A]lthough, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out...
It's the Economy, Stupid!
Posted on October 23, 2008Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, has an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle worth reading if you are a Texan or anyone else concerned with good science education and its effect on America's economic future:Texas has earned a reputation as an innovation powerhouse in fields ranging from agriculture and life sciences to high technology and space exploration...
Weakening Teaching
Posted on October 23, 2008Unsurprisingly, Robert Crowther is over at the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Information, mangling the message of Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, that I linked to earlier today...
Brain Drain
Posted on October 22, 2008. Uh oh, here we go again:"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about...
Babu Babble
Posted on October 21, 2008Oh, my! Babu G. Ranganathan is back demonstrating his absolute lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in particular and science in general. Not wanting to risk killing too many neurons by exposing them to the neutron-star-like density of Babu's ignorance, I stopped after I ran across this:A true transitional form would be something like a fish having part fins?part feet, or a bird having part scales?part feathers, partially one function, partially another with neither being complete or functional...
Flying High?
Posted on October 21, 2008Jeffrey Hart, a former Nixon speechwriter and senior editor for National Review is interviewed in The Dartmouth Review, during which he explains why he is supporting Barack Obama and passes on a few words about Sarah Palin:I think she is a good woman...
Opps!
Posted on October 20, 2008What was that about voter fraud?The head of a voter registration group hired by the California Republican Party was arrested over the weekend for allegedly lying about his address in the state in order to vote illegally, the office of California's secretary of state announced Sunday...
Do Your Ears Hear What Your Mouth Says?
Posted on October 20, 2008John McCain and Sarah Palin have (for now) dropped the charge that Barack Obama is a socialist. Besides the difficulty selling that line in the face of Obama's endorsements by Warren Buffett and Colin Powell, it may have a wee bit to do with McCain's own recent past...
Taxing the Truth
Posted on October 19, 2008Colin Powell makes an excellent point towards the end of this press session he had after the announcement of his endorsement of Barack Obama:To paraphrase: it is ridiculous to call Obama a "socialist" because he wants to look at and adjust the distribution of the tax burden in the US...
Beyond Reason
Posted on October 19, 2008Don McLeroy has a guest column in the Waco Tribune.Texas is adopting new science standards. Scientists representing evolutionists and calling themselves the 21st Century Science Coalition say that creationists on the State Board of Education will inject religion into the science classroom...
Endorsement
Posted on October 19, 2008Colin Powell endores Barack Obama on NBC's "Meet the Press."Powell mentions Sarah Palin unreadiness to be president, the negativity of McCain's campaign, particularly the Ayers attacks, the constant suggestions by many in the party that Obama is a muslim (and that, even if he was, it would somehow matter) and the promise by McCain to make the Supreme Court more conservative as some of the reasons for his decision...
Race Relations
Posted on October 18, 2008FiveThirtyEight.com has a telling story about America in the 21st century:So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for...
Plunging
Posted on October 17, 2008Joe the plumber is not likely to slow John McCain's passage through the porcelain exit. It seems Joe's savings under McCain's tax plan wouldn't even pay off the back taxes Joe already owes to Ohio ... even assuming Joe really earned enough to go over $250,000 in taxable earnings...
Exercising Both Sides of the Mouth
Posted on October 16, 2008Just to further demonstrate what a disservice the Texas State Board of Education has done to the children of that state, here is some more from Ralph Seelke, one of the authors of the Discovery Institute's untextbook, Explore Evolution:"Simply allowing the student to look at scientific evidence for and against something, that is not by any means, by any stretch of the imagination teaching intelligent design--which I do not want," Seelke said...
Boffo!
Posted on October 15, 2008Comedy is better than lies.Bill Maher and Larry Charles' "Religulous," a satiric diatribe on modern religion that opened Oct. 1, will soon pass "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," an argument for the teaching of intelligent-design theory in academia and a favorite of the faith crowd, as this year's highest-grossing documentary movie...
Sabotaging Science
Posted on October 15, 2008As PZ and Wes have already noted, Texas screws its own children:Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller today sharply criticized the inclusion of three strident evolution opponents, including two authors of an anti-evolution textbook, on a panel that will review proposed new science curriculum standards for Texas public schools...
Eating Their Own Young
Posted on October 15, 2008Christopher Buckley, son of William F., an author in his own right of satirical political novels, and a contributor and editor to his father's magazine, National Review, has been fired by the magazine for apostasy. It seems that Christopher had the temerity to ...
Who Said This?
Posted on October 14, 2008From a political speech in the United States on Monday, October 13, 2008:We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change.Hint: it did not come from a politician whose name rhymes with "Osama...
Reading the Bible Doesn't Make You Stupid!
Posted on October 14, 2008.The Review of Biblical Literature, affiliated with the Society of Biblical Literature has a review (pdf file) of Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue by Christopher Heard of Pepperdine University that demonstrates that Heard can see through the ID sleight of hand...
Where the Weakness Lies
Posted on October 13, 2008The Houston Chronicle has a nice editorial endorsing Laura Ewing, the opponent of David Bradley, the vice chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Mr. Bradley thinks that education involves teaching children to "jump to conclusions." This part of the editorial was nice (despite a slight gender error):The question facing the board, in the first overhaul of the science curriculum in more than a decade, is whether the curriculum will continue to include teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories, including evolution...
Woo Hoo!
Posted on October 12, 2008Another great announcement!Brian Switek of Laelaps has been tapped by the Smithsonian magazine to contribute to its new blog, Dinosaur Traking. You can see Brian's first post about termite-eating dinosaurs here.We often think of dinosaurs as massive beasts that shook their earth with their footsteps and their roars, but under the feet of those giants were smaller, stranger dinosaurs that no one ever expected to find...
Sail On
Posted on October 12, 2008The Sixth Carnival of Elitist Bastards is due to sail on October 25th from Port Haystack.I know that there are a lot of bastards out there who'd like to show up the stupidity, ignorance and dishonesty currently masquerading as "small town values," "common sense" and "teaching the controversy...
Lowletist of the Low
Posted on October 12, 2008Get Fuzzy"Country First" ... or "Stupid Is the New Smart" ... We report, you decide..
Fantasylandier
Posted on October 12, 2008Truth will out, even when the subject is Answers in Genesis' "Creation Museum" and the speaker is Ken Ham:We made a decision quite a few years ago, that we wanted to do it first-class ... as good as you would see at museums or Disney World or Universal Studios...
Doubling Standards
Posted on October 11, 2008A thought:What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of "traitor," "liar," "terrorist" and (worst of all) "kill him!" that could be heard at recent rallies. ...Is inaction tantamount to consent? The McCain campaign certainly thinks so when it comes to Obama and incendiary remarks from the Rev...
Trading Eyes
Posted on October 11, 2008There is an interesting article, "Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled?" by Paul Vallely in Britain's The Independent about the forces that rose up and bit Michael Reiss. To us in America, it might seem like undue worry on British scientists' part, given the relative sizes of our problems...
Loving More
Posted on October 10, 2008Congratulations to the people of Connecticut on joining the enlightened citizens of the world. Today its Supreme Court overturned the bar to marriage by gays and lesbians. Even though a form of "civil union" was recently enacted, the state's legislature had issued this disclaimer, expressly stating that the gay rights law shall not be: ...
Proceeding Economically
Posted on October 09, 2008.A thought:When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld...
Happenings
Posted on October 09, 2008James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix, an Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University, is a thoughtful theist and Christian who values and defends science and secular government.James has now become part of the Christian Century blog network...
Santayana's Curse
Posted on October 08, 2008Daniel Nexon at The Duck of Minerva beat me to it.Curious as to the mouth-breather reaction to that debate thingie we American inflicted on ourselves (full disclosure: I didn't watch it), I went to RedState to see that partisan side's take on the whole thing...
Technological Godlings
Posted on October 07, 2008The ever-reliable and trustworthy Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine has more on the review article in Science, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" by University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, that I mentioned the other day...
To Read Pile Piles Up
Posted on October 06, 2008From Publisher's Weekly:Why Evolution Is True Jerry A. Coyne. Viking, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-02053-9With great care, attention to the scientific evidence and a wonderfully accessible style, Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, presents an overwhelming case for evolution...
Behold a Palin Horse
Posted on October 05, 2008Newsweek's cover story by Jon Meacham is entitled "The Palin Problem" and it exemplifies what Elitist Bastardry is all about. Some highlights:Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans. It is not shocking to learn that politics played a big role in the making of a presidential team ...
de Tocqueville's Folly
Posted on October 04, 2008.Hey, sailor, wanna come up and vote for me sometime?Sigh!.
Aping Religion
Posted on October 04, 2008There is a semi-interview in the Toronto Star with Ara Norenzayan, a University of British Columbia psychologist and lead author of a review paper in Science on the role of religion in expanding social traits such as altruism and cooperation beyond kin groups...
Out of Lux
Posted on October 03, 2008Joseph Brean at the National Post has an interesting article on a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, about the possible revival of the "oscillating universe" model, by which the universe endlessly expands and collapses, from big bang to big crunch and over again...
Under the Counterknowledge
Posted on October 02, 2008Louis Bayard has a review in Salon of a new book by Damian Thompson, who is described as a "British polemicist," a lead writer the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of a major Catholic newspaper, the Catholic Herald. Entitled Counterknowledge, Thompson's book describes the seemingly endless incoming tide of woo...
Ouch!
Posted on October 01, 2008The Christian Post has a more creationist-friendly version of recent events in Texas than the story I linked to yesterday.Well, sort of.The problem with being creationist-friendly is that it sort of requires that you let them talk ... which is never doing them a favor...
Small in the Saddle
Posted on September 30, 2008More than 800 scientists from Texas universities have formed the 21st Century Science Coalition to fight either the teaching of creationism in public schools or the watering down of evolutionary instruction."Texas public schools should be preparing our kids to succeed in the 21st century, not promoting political and ideological agendas that are hostile to a sound science education," said David Hillis, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin...
English Gets a New Word
Posted on September 29, 2008funderburk (fun·dur'·burc) v. -burked, -burking, -burks. To endorse insane or wildly dishonest material while holding a position of public trust, particularly political office, and then lying transparently about it. FORT MILL, S.C. -- Fort Mill Mayor Danny Funderburk says he was "just curious" when he forwarded a chain e-mail suggesting Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is the biblical antichrist...
Which Trials?
Posted on September 29, 2008This story has been kicking around awhile. The Brunswick County, North Carolina, school board wants to teach creationism in its public schools. The state's Department of Public Instruction has been pretty clear that they can't. Edd Dunlap, science section chief for the department stated that neither creationism nor Intelligent Design may be taught as a required course of study...
Purpose and Science
Posted on September 28, 2008This is just one of my musings about philosophy that is, doubtless, more interesting to me than to others ... but it's my blog! Feel free to spare your glazed-overed eyes.There is a common argument for atheism that runs like this:If purpose was part of the universe then there's no reason at all why science couldn't have detected it...
Gee, Dawkins, What About Santa?
Posted on September 28, 2008In the course of a review of Stuart A. Kauffman's new book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, Henry Gee, a senior editor of the journal Nature, presents an amusing answer to scientific reductionists: In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins boasted that he once told a child that Santa Claus didn't exist...
God and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Posted on September 27, 2008Martin Nowak, a mathematician and biologist at Harvard, accepts evolutionary explanations of the appearance of altruism in humans and other species.Yet as a Catholic, he rejects [Richard] Dawkins's notion that believing in evolution precludes belief in a God who included altruism in evolution's bequest to us...
If Not Now, When?
Posted on September 27, 2008The Fifth Carnival of Elitist Bastards has set sail at The Coffee-Stained Writer. And at this time there is one paramount reason for elitism:By trying to set our towns against our cities, Palin makes the vital mistake of imagining that, despite our differences, we don't need each other, and the equally dangerous mistake of pigeonholing our towns & cities into pre-determined antagonistic roles...
Garbage In ...
Posted on September 26, 2008The Discovery Institute's Gofer General, Tour Guide and Custodian of Science Ignorance, Casey Luskin, has delivered himself of another dose of stupidity and/or dishonesty.He claims that a Yale University news release from earlier this month threatens one of the "icons" of evolution: the notion that "junk DNA" demonstrates, as Michael Shermer put it, that: Rather than being intelligently designed, the human genome looks more and more like a mosaic of mutations, fragment copies, borrowed sequences, and discarded strings of DNA that were jerry-built over millions of years of evolution...
Blowin' Up
Posted on September 25, 2008Since the dust is about to fly in Texas, you might as well know why.You can find the draft science standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (or "TEKS") at the Texas Education Agency's site.I haven't studied them in any detail but some things stand out...
And So It Begins
Posted on September 24, 2008A six-member committee of teachers, college professors and curriculum experts nominated by the Texas State Board of Education has released its recommendation for new standards for the biology curriculum. The recommendation would eliminate the teaching of ideas "based upon purported forces outside of nature...
Bits and Pieces
Posted on September 23, 2008A few things from around the intertubes:Roger Ebert was, in fact, having us on:Some days ago I posted an article headlined, "Creationism: Your questions answered." It was Q&A that accurately reflected Creationist beliefs. It inspired a firestorm on the web, with hundreds, even thousands of comments on blogs devoted to evolution and science...
Bring Out the Stakes ... and Beer!
Posted on September 22, 2008Well, it's come to this at last!Christians are being asked to donate to a college campus group that will, as one advertising sign put it, "Make atheists read the Bible."What next? Gangs of Jehovah's Witnesses roaming the streets looking for nuns they can force to recite articles from The Watchtower?This outrage must be stopped before ...
Page Turner
Posted on September 21, 2008In hopes of inducing a state just short of terminal envy in Larry Moran, I had the opportunity yesterday to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art's special exhibition of J.M.W. Turner's paintings and watercolors.Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775?1851) was an English artist best known for his landscapes and seascapes...
Hobbes and Choice
Posted on September 21, 2008There's a review of three books purportedly answering the "New Atheists" at something called The American Thinker (would someone please get poor old Uncle Sam some Kaopectate?). Among their other sins, the folks in charge of The American Thinker maintain that Sarah Palin is an archtype of our "best selves burned into history," the frontierswoman, in the same vein as Maureen O'Hara was...
On Attention Spans
Posted on September 20, 2008John Polkinghorne weighs in on the Michael Reiss affair:I believe that he has been the victim of our sound-bite culture, in which a phrase is plucked from a considered speech and, out of context, is made to seem as if something quite contrary to the speaker's actual intention was being said...
Torah Torah Torah
Posted on September 19, 2008The Clergy Letter Project, begun by Michael Zimmerman, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University, to demonstrate support for science, particularly evolutionary theory, among members of the clergy of all Christian denominations has garnered 11,672 signatures to date to a statement that reads, in part:We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests...
Stuffed Turkey
Posted on September 18, 2008A court has denied access by internet users in Turkey to the official Richard Dawkins website based on, of all things, a complaint by Adnan Oktar, the creationist who publishes under the name Harun Yahya. One of Oktar's more notable activities recently was to mail tens of thousands of copies of something called The Atlas of Creation, unsolicited, to schools, researchers and research institutes throughout Europe and the United States...
Stumbling on the Truth
Posted on September 17, 2008When last we left beautiful downtown Butteville, California, trustees of the Union Elementary School District had agreed to seek legal counsel regarding the "information/action agenda item" entitled "Evolution versus Intelligent Design Taught in the Classroom...
Another One Bites the Dust
Posted on September 16, 2008Michael Reiss, the center of much recent controversy, has resigned his position as the Royal Society's Director of Education. The Royal Society has issued a press release:Some of Professor Michael Reiss's recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society's Director of Education, were open to misinterpretation...
High Tech Justice
Posted on September 15, 2008George Bush's wet dream may be in the offing. And if that's not enough of a reason to be suspicious, here's the rest of the story:The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete...
Trouble in Paradise
Posted on September 15, 2008Well, maybe not paradise ... but it is the home of Charles Darwin and the place where the theory of evolution, now accepted as the bedrock of biology, originated in earnest.According to the BBC, Britain now has its own creationism museum, though there's no word whether it matches America's monument to the waste of money...
Paradise by a Dashboard Light
Posted on June 13, 2008If you are reading this, stop at once as you are dead.The House of Yahweh outside of Abilene Texas (no relation to the House of Blues or the International House of Pancakes) has announced that doomsday is to arrive on June 12, 2008.Yahweh leader Yisrayl Hawkins says a nuclear holocaust will come June 12th and only members of his group will be saved...
The Rule of Law Returns
Posted on June 12, 2008The Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, has delivered a resounding rebuke to the Administration's detainment program at Guantanamo.One basis for the Administration's claim that the Constitution does not apply to these detainees was that there were noncitizens being held in "foreign" territory...
Voting For a Change
Posted on June 12, 2008James McGrath has a post at his blog, Exploring the Matrix that details the feeling among some apocalyptic-oriented Evangelicals that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. James, of course, insists on being rational about the whole thing, almost overlooking the potential humor involved...
Unwanted Suitors
Posted on June 11, 2008Americans United for Separation of Church and State is promising a reprise of its successful suit against the injection of Intelligent Design Creationism into the Dover, Pennsylvania public schools, should Louisiana follow the same path.Louisiana's House of Representatives today approved the so-called "Science Education Act," which is generally expected to be signed by Gov...
A Challenge, Part Deux
Posted on June 10, 2008Uh, oh! Another challenge to atheists!And boy! Are you guys in trouble now! 'Cause this time it comes from a business planner!Anyway, Yomin Postelnik says he has simple proofs that no atheist has ever been able to counter effectively. Indeed, he says that "even after much debate on the issue I have yet to meet an atheist who can make even a feeble argument to counter any of these points...
Anxiety and Obloquy Enough
Posted on June 09, 2008The ACLU has already raised $258 Million from various private sources and is now looking to increase that to $335 million in gifts from the public. The initiative, entitled "Leading Freedom Forward: The ACLU Campaign for the Future" is an effort to build the organization's infrastructure and secure the ACLU's financial funding for years to come...
Tales of Creation
Posted on June 08, 2008Jim Chen, dean and professor of law at the University of Louisville, has an article entitled The greatest story ever told at Jurisdynamics, at one of the several excellent sites his has founded, including The Scientific Lawyer and Biolaw.Humanity, so it seems, demands a story of origins...
The Dark at Noon
Posted on June 08, 2008The Houston Chronicle has a nice editorial about the clouds gathering like a 1930s dust storm over Texas education. After explaining that the battle will be fought over implementing already existing "strengths and weaknesses" language in the state standards, the editorial goes on:It sounds reasonable...
A Perfect Fit
Posted on June 07, 2008.Sometimes people get it so right that you have to take your hat off ... even when what they're so right about is why they're wrong.Al Clemens of Springfield, Missouri, has had such a perfect insight:[T]he biggest problem for the evolutionist is the "supposedly spontaneous generation of life from nonlife...
B+
Posted on June 07, 2008The New York Times has an editorial that almost nails it perfectly. Except for an unfortunate implication that only young-Earth creationists can be included in the term "creationists," a misnomer that the Discovery Institute endlessly attempts to exploit, the editorial expertly dissects the situation looming in Texas: When it comes to science, creationists tend to struggle with reality...
Improving Education
Posted on June 06, 2008Here is some stuff on the latest entry in the Our State Is the Stupidest Sweepstakes: Michigan.First, the background:State Sen. Bill Hardiman (R., Grand Rapids) and State Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Midland) have introduced so-called "academic freedom" legislation that would require teachers and students to explore the "strengths and weakness" of evolutionary theory...
Flaming Assets
Posted on June 05, 2008Sometimes it's nice to know there are some verities in life -- things that can be counted on to be rock steady when everything around you is spinning past at an accelerating rate.And sometimes not.An example of the latter is the way that the Discovery Institute has never seen a disingenuous spin they didn't like...
Not OK!
Posted on June 04, 2008The execrable Sally Kerns' latest atrocity is now on the desk of the governor of Oklahoma.Dustin Hughes, Managing Editor of the Sand Springs Leader gets it right:Bell bottoms, big giant sunglasses, reality shows, the New Kids on the Block. Things you think you're finished with, for the better, and *BAM* they smack you in the face...
Box Office Hits
Posted on June 03, 2008PZ Myearshertz got a nice write-up in Alan Boyle's MSNBC blog, Cosmic Log. As might be gathered from the title, "The Expelled Evolutionist," one focus of the article is a certain infamous incident. Boyle starts off:P.Z. Myers is the evolutionist creationists love to hate: They hate him so much that he was expelled from an advance screening of "Expelled," even though the anti-evolution movie includes an interview with him...
Thunk ... Ow ... Thunk ... Ow ...
Posted on June 03, 2008Ed Brayton has uncovered a truly crazed ... "rant" would give it too much dignity ... fetid swamp emanation ... attributed to the Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment for Hamas.I won't try (much) to steal Ed's thunder so you'll have to go there to learn about the Israeli guided missile especially designed to take out politicians...
Imagine That
Posted on June 02, 2008The temporary injunction granted to Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Julian Lennon and EMI Blackwood Music to prevent further distribution of Expelled has been lifted by Federal Judge Sidney Stein on the grounds that the movie's producers have established that they are likely to prevail on their fair use defense if the case goes to trial...
Stuck in the Door
Posted on June 01, 2008Wes Elsberry at The Austringer points to an article by Francis Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University and one of the smartest and most rational of the Intelligent Design supporters or, perhaps more accurately in Beckwith's case, "fellow travelers...
Carnivāle!
Posted on May 31, 2008The very first Carnival of the Elitist Bastards is now up and running at En Tequila Es Verdad.Go give it a look...
Religious Studies
Posted on May 31, 2008A thought: Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions. The noblest among them are sure that humanity migrates toward knowledge by logotaxis, an automatic orientation toward information, so that organized religion must continue its retreat as darkness before enlightenment's brightening dawn...
Under the Radar
Posted on May 30, 2008CNSNews, the media outlet of the Media Research Center, both of which were founded by L. Brent Bozell III, a nephew of William F. Buckley and a member of the board of Bill Donohue's Catholic League, has an interesting article on the recent spate of so-called "academic freedom" bills being bandied about by various state legislatures...
Be All the Bastard You Can Be
Posted on May 29, 2008But all you have to do is knock on any door and say, "If you let me in, I'll live the way you want me to live, and I'll think the way you want me to think," and all the blinds'll go up and all the windows will open, and you'll never be lonely, ever again...
Finding Faith
Posted on May 29, 2008A thought:I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves...
There's Philosophers and Then There's ...
Posted on May 28, 2008Due to overwhelming public demand,* here is my take on Pastor Paul Dean's attempt to demonstrate the superiority of Christian "philosophy" over that of non-believers, particularly atheists and agnostics. For reasons which should become obvious, your mileage may vary...
A Challenge
Posted on May 27, 2008Paul Dean, pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Greer, South Carolina, has an article at Crosswalk that throws down a gauntlet:One of the basic dynamics that attends any worldview that is contrary to the Christian worldview is a lack of philosophical justification for it...
The Game's Afoot!
Posted on May 26, 2008Sigh!Michael Moriarty, a moderately talented actor perhaps best known as the original prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order," is holding forth in the confines of something called Enter Stage Right, which declares itself as a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism but also declares that "religion and conservatism generally do not mix...
Phoenix Reborn
Posted on May 25, 2008It appears that NASA's Phoenix Mars spacecraft has made a safe landing on Mars.Because the signal was relayed via the Mars Odyssey orbiter, the controllers would have to wait another couple of hours, until Odyssey's next pass over the landing site, for additional word of the Phoenix's condition, including whether it had successfully unfolded its solar panels and possibly the first photographs...
Remembrance of Things Not Past
Posted on May 25, 2008On May 25, 1925, John Scopes was indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.As this 1961 article by G.G. Simpson makes clear, not much has changed over the years since the trial:We are all familiar with the Scopes trial, if only from being reminded by the stage and movie success, Inherit the Wind...
Mooning About
Posted on May 24, 2008Ya know, maybe the Intelligent Design advocates have a point.Maybe critically thinking human beings should at least be prepared to consider if there is any critical body of evidence for scenarios that establishment scientists, who are linked with a consortium of elites, call farfetched...
Missed It by That Much ...
Posted on May 23, 2008The United Methodist Church -- Dubya's own church and the second largest protestant denomination in the US -- almost had a clean sweep.During the church?s recent General Conference, held in Fort Worth from April 22 to May 2, not just one but three resolutions passed expressing the church's support for evolutionary science...
Birds of a Feather ...
Posted on May 23, 2008Christ Community Church has it about right. According to the Alamogordo Daily News, it:... offers a Christian education hour each Sunday beginning at 9:15 a.m. Children and youth classes are offered, as well as different classes for the adults to attend such as "Creation Science and Intelligent Design Theory"; "Discipline: Despise Not Chastening," a study in Galatians by Pastor Jack Brock; "Who I am in Christ" and "Learn the Bible in 24 Hours...
A Fine Judgment
Posted on May 22, 2008Lessee ...... God punished the residents of New Orleans by sending Hurricane Katrina.How many people from New Orleans would vote for me anyway?... the Catholic Church is "the Great Whore."Um, well ... how many Catholics are there in the Red States?.....
Stupid Legislator Tricks
Posted on May 21, 2008The Louisiana House of Representatives advanced that state's version of the Discoveryless Institute's Trojan Horse "academic freedom" bill. You can find the bill and the House's amendment here.Without minimizing the potential mischief this bill could do if it becomes law, it is, of the legislation considered by various states so far, the one that affords the best chance for advocates of good science education to counter any bad effects...
What Am I?
Posted on May 21, 2008In the never-ending game of 20 Questions that Intelligent Design advocates play, it seems that we have a new entry.Is ID, as William Dembski says, "the path for people to come to Christ"? Or is it philosophy of science, promising us a non-materialistic version of science?Now it seems that it may be politics...
Please Have a Seat ...
Posted on May 20, 2008Missouri has joined Florida and Alabama in being unable to pass the Undiscovery Institute's misnomered "academic freedom" legislation. With Mike Fair of South Carolina predicting the same fate for that state's try, the DI might be feeling a little antsy right now ...
Educating Educators
Posted on May 20, 2008There is a new survey of high school biology teachers published in PLoS:The good news, as shown in the above chart, is that biology teachers are more likely to accept evolutionary theory than the general public. The worst news is how little time is devoted to the subject at all: [W]e found that those who take most seriously the advice of NSES to make evolution a unifying theme spent the most time on evolution...
Good News ... Maybe
Posted on May 19, 2008Acccording to the sponsor of the South Carolina untruth-in-advertising "academic freedom" bill, Sen. Mike Fair (another misnomer), it has no chance of passage this year.On the other hand, I'm pretty sure his lips were moving when he said that.They certainly were when he said this:The Republican told The Greenville News the bill would not advocate teaching any point of view...
Abusing Reason
Posted on May 18, 2008In the run-up to the Carnival of Elitist Bastards, I naturally got to thinking of the nature of terms of abuse -- why we use them and how they work.Terms of abuse, like "elitist," are, by their very nature, broad brushes. As we've seen recently, it can be used to describe those who have the temerity to think that science is a good thing and, more importantly, that it should be taught to children as it is actually practiced, while philosophy and theology should be taught as what they really are -- conceptually separate, though potentially valuable in their own right, intellectual exercises...
Fools Advice
Posted on May 18, 2008First a quote from the Dallas News:Our image of God strongly depends on our image of the world, and our image of the world continuously changes under the influence of science and scientific discoveries.- Michael Heller, cosmologist, theologian, Catholic priest, and winner of the $1...
Bringing Home the Bacon
Posted on May 17, 2008A thought:Darwin was prepared for the abuse which the content of his theory, especially its implications for man, was to receive from certain quarters, but he was not prepared for the criticism which his methodology was to receive from the most respected philosophers and scientists of his day...
Waiving It About
Posted on May 16, 2008I'm sure Cathi and Kris Unruh are nice people. They no doubt fit comfortably within John Wilkins' 95/95 Rule: 95% of all people are decent 95% of the time. Despite their evangelical Christian faith, that led them to home school their children, they purportedly taught their children a wider philosophy and accept that they may think differently than their parents do...
Standing in the Aisles
Posted on May 15, 2008Some very good thoughts:[W]e conclude that, under this state's Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process...
Modern Scholarship
Posted on May 14, 2008Good ol' WingNutDaily! They always bring the crazy nice and frosty cold!They have a little blurb about the upcoming oral arguments before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Larry Caldwell's quixotic lawsuit against the University of California-Berkeley because of the University's involvement in creating the non-commercial, educational website, Understanding Evolution...
Inferiority Complex
Posted on May 13, 2008Brian C. Melton, Assistant Professor of History at Liberty University, is over at Intellectual Conservative trying to twist the cap off of another bottle of Expelled whine.As usual, there is talk about the "naturalistic biases" of scientists, without any explanation of how unnaturalistic "explanations" could be tested ...
How to Build a Quote Mine
Posted on May 12, 2008Michael Craven (okay, that one's too easy), described as the "Founding Director of the Center for Christ & Culture," has a blog at Crosswalk.com where his latest post is more fertilizer spread around the smelly weed that is Expelled. Craven dredges up the supposedly unaddressed "holes" in the theory of evolution that only remain so if you resolutely refuse to look for the answers in those secret, hidden away places called "libraries...
Monkey See
Posted on May 11, 2008The Gofer General of the Discoveryless Institute, Casey Luskin, is holding forth on what he calls "a biased and error-filled post at the Chronicle of Higher Education by Richard Monastersky." As a sleight-of-hand artist, Luskin lacks all panache, so I'll refrain from chasing the weasel all the way 'round this mulberry bush...
Thinking Out Loud
Posted on May 11, 2008Will you risk being sneered at by both Hillary Clinton and Rush Limbaugh? Would you like to stick your thumb in the eye of people who believe knowledge is a bad thing? Do you think that science and education and culture are all things worth openly and proudly pursuing?If so, you may be ready to participate in the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards...
Out and About the Intertubes
Posted on May 11, 2008Freshwater, Stale Brain:There is more on John Freshwater, the crazed teacher who thinks he was hired with public tax money to be preacher.Among other things, Freshwater used a device to brand a cross into the flesh of some of his students, which turned out to be a BD-10A High Frequency Generator, about the same size and shape as a power screwdriver, the tip of which puts out up to 50,000 volts of electricity...
Propping Up the 'Ganda
Posted on May 10, 2008There is a nice example in The Modesto Bee of how the Discoveryless Institute goes about making its alleged connection between "Darwinism" and Hitler and the Holocaust, and the best that can be said of it is that the smoke and mirrors are artfully arranged...
Out of This World Marketing
Posted on May 09, 2008Okay, as regular readers (all two of you) will know, I tend to be tolerant of and strive to be reasonably respectful to the more rational religious sects and their adherents.But sometimes ...According to the Associated Press, the Vatican has ordered Roman Catholic dioceses worldwide to withhold member registries ? essentially, the records of baptisms and deaths -- from Mormons...
An Object Lesson In the Constitution
Posted on May 08, 2008I've mentioned John Freshwater before. He is a middle school science teacher in Mount Vernon, Ohio, who has refused to remove his personal Bible from view on his classroom desk. That is, in and of itself, arguably not a violation of the First Amendment's separation of church and state...
Explosive Exegesis
Posted on May 07, 2008No, it's not the Fourth of July come early. The sound you hear is irony meters all over the world meeting catastrophic demises over an article from WingNutDaily:A minister who promotes the Old Testament roots of Christianity suggests a rare string of lunar and solar eclipses said to fall on God's annual holy days seven years from now could herald what's come to be known as the "Second Coming" of Jesus...
Loving You
Posted on May 06, 2008You may have heard of the death of Mildred Loving. She was half of the interracial couple that the State of Virginia jailed and tried to force to leave the state for the simple fact that they were married:In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws...
Music to My Ears
Posted on May 05, 2008And the recriminations keep coming:"People pushing this legislation are pushing it on the merits, not to demonstrate we still have muscle," said James A. Smith, the executive editor of the Florida Baptist Witness, who watched the debates in the Legislature last week...
Over the River
Posted on May 05, 2008Stony Brook University is the home of Dr. Michael Egnor, the brain surgeon who disproves the trope that "it ain't brain surgery" properly refers to an activity requiring the opposite of great intelligence. That and the fact that the University is nearly in my back yard makes it particularly sweet when the student newspaper, the Stony Brook Independent, nails Intelligent Design Creationists for their disingenuousness:Stein is portrayed as a courageous and daring figure standing up against the tyrannical actions of the scientific community...
Decisions, Decisions ...
Posted on May 04, 2008There has been some concern expressed that the recent decision (pdf file) in Sklar v. Clough will support the Nondiscovery Institute's claim that merely stating that some religions have accepted evolution is an unconstitutional preference of one religious denomination over others...
In Which I Hit the Big Time
Posted on May 03, 2008Sniff ... success at last!David Klinghoffer is over at the Discoveryless Institute's Ministry of Misinformation, in a post entitled "Lying for Darwin," complaining about "the juvenile name-calling" directed at him for supporting Expelled. Of course, he immediately goes on to claim that no one can reasonably disagree that "Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere used transparently Darwinian arguments [whatever the heck that's supposed to mean] to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution" "if your powers of reading comprehension rise above sixth-grade level...
And the Recriminations ...
Posted on May 03, 2008John West in the Undiscovery Institute's Whine and Jeez blog:Supposedly, the Florida House refused to pass the Senate bill because it favored a stronger measure to require the critical analysis of evolution. As a former political science professor, I can tell you that this explanation doesn't hold water...
Learning More Than Science
Posted on May 03, 2008Wes Elsberry has a good history of the fight for proper science education in Florida that, unfortunately, people in many states, including Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, and Louisiana, may need to study for their own battles:Back in 2005, Florida hired Cheri Pierson Yecke as its K-12 Chancellor, the second highest post in the Department of Education...
Dope
Posted on May 03, 2008Here is a humorous but telling comment about Expelled from a Letter to the Editor by Fred Herman in The Modesto Bee:Someday, "Expelled" will be a "Reefer Madness" relic of Bush-era excesses. Today it's an ideological bludgeon, a tedious attempt to make audiences believe it white when it is, in fact, black...
Florida's Children Win!
Posted on May 02, 2008Evolution bills die in Legislature as session endsPublished Friday, May 2, 2008 at 6:19 p.m.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. ? Hotly debated evolution bills that critics said would inject religious doctrine into public schools in the guise of science died a quiet death Friday on the final day of the legislative session...
Countdown
Posted on May 01, 2008In the category of "Nothin' gets past dem IDeologists" (from The Florida Times-Union, via Florida Citizens for Science:"I'd say someone in the House, in the name of trying to push this bill, is actually trying to kill it," said John West, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that developed a model evolution-debate law that was the basis for Florida's legislation...
I've Been Acquitted!
Posted on May 01, 2008Hello,Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused...
Tears of a Clown
Posted on May 01, 2008Most everyone interested in Expelled will be aware of the lawsuit by the family of a moderately famous singer/songwriter:[John] Lennon?s widow Yoko Ono Lennon and sons Sean and Julian, along with EMI Blackwood Music, filed suit on April 22, 2008 claiming that Premise Media?s unauthorized use of ?Imagine? violates copyright and trademark law...
Casting Call
Posted on April 30, 2008Hey, PZ! Here's another chance to break into Hollywood!Michael Barton at The Dispersal of Darwin has discovered there is another movie is in the works that's looking to interview historians and scientists for a documentary about the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species...
Morality Play
Posted on April 30, 2008Here's a bit more on the dismissal of Nathaniel Abraham's lawsuit against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, already discussed by Timothy Sandefur at The Panda's Thumb and PZ Myers at Pharyngula.Abraham failed to bring his suit within 90 days following the dismissal of his administrative complaint of discrimination...
Mechanical Engineering
Posted on April 30, 2008I went to post this morning and discovered that, on the "create post" page, there was one of those annoying (and frequently difficult to get to work) "word verification" boxes. Therein lies a tale that might explain why Abbie of ERV (old and new) was locked out of her blog and the content disappeared for a time...
Out and About the Intertubes
Posted on April 30, 2008We're all ignorant. The most erudite person in the world knows only the tiniest fraction of the collective knowledge of the human species. That's why we build libraries. And human knowledge itself represents only a tiny fraction of what there is, in this vast universe and what may lie beyond it, out there to be known...
Defaming Science
Posted on April 29, 2008A press release:Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the HolocaustNew York, NY, April 29, 2008 ? The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. 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...
Conserving the Environment
Posted on April 29, 2008A thought:[H]ere is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world ? that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he?s not chattering into his cell phone...
True Lies
Posted on April 29, 2008Canadian Christianity on Expelled:... Stein's climactic interview with Dawkins includes an exchange that is treated like a major 'gotcha!' moment, yet if anything it suggests there is something fundamentally dishonest, or at least disingenuous, about the ID movement...
Signs of Intelligence
Posted on April 28, 2008It seems that IDeologists may not all be lacking in the essential ingredient for their "theory":The [Florida] House's insistence on language [in the so-called "academic freedom" legislation] the Senate already has rejected left John West, the [Discovery Institute's] associate director, perplexed...
Dangerous Working Conditions
Posted on April 28, 2008John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser, is interviewed at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here is some of what he had to say about Intelligent Design Creationism, starting off with the President's statement seemingly supporting the teaching of ID:If you go back and look at the circumstances of the way he made a statement, it was hardly a statement...
Reviewing Our Options
Posted on April 28, 2008Publishers Weekly's review of Ken Miller's new book:Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's SoulKenneth R. Miller. Viking, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-670-01883-3Thoroughly enjoyable and informative, this new book by Miller (Finding Darwin's God), a Brown University biologist and leading proponent of evolution, dismantles the scientific basis of intelligent design piece by piece...
Up and Away
Posted on April 27, 2008The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an uncommonly astute editorial today. The editorial notes the report of a:... remarkable new genetic study published last week has demonstrated that the closest living relative of the giant T. rex are birds ? specifically, chickens and ostriches ? rather than reptiles like alligators and lizards...
Modern Maturity
Posted on April 27, 2008You may remember Matt LaClair, the young man who dared to stand up to a popular teacher who was proselytizing his personal faith to his students. He's back with an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times about more institutionalized "evangelism":... I thought I was done with controversy for a while...
A Whiff of Evolution
Posted on April 27, 2008There is an article by Faye Flam entitled "Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors" that is based on Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, a book I recently finished and found to be a very readable and clear explanation of the power of evolutionary theory to explain the living world around us...
Off the Court
Posted on April 26, 2008Ed Brayton has the story of the dismissal of what he calls "one of the strangest lawsuits I've ever heard of." Having seen the kind of looney-tunes cases Ed has uncovered in the past, I could not help but have my curiosity piqued, so I hunted down the decision...
Trump Card
Posted on April 26, 2008Is it just me or has there been an uptick in the "elitism" meme since the release of Expelled? Anti-science advocates have always played that card, going back at least as far as William Jennings Bryan, "The Great Commoner," and his crusade against "Darwinism...
Dispelled
Posted on April 25, 2008Okay, so I'm not so much posting this for your benefit but my own, as a handy place to park these links where I can find them again. But you few hardy souls reading this might want to peruse the articles anyway and maybe tuck them away where you can retrieve them for later use...
Buggy
Posted on April 25, 2008Today is World Malaria Day. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the disease kills 1.3 million people each year, mostly children under the age of five. The United Nations has announced a new global initiative to eliminate malaria but it won't be easy: The US National Institutes of Health said in a separate statement that malaria has proven to be "remarkably resilient, resurging because of the emergence of drug-resistant parasites and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes"...
Editorial Discretion
Posted on April 24, 2008From a good editorial in the Tampa Bay Times:With newly passed science standards that require the teaching of evolution, Florida is finally on track to give its young people a solid educational grounding for careers in biology and medical science.Not so fast, says state Sen...
You Gets What You Pay For
Posted on April 24, 2008The maneuvering continues in Florida:A proposed law allowing teachers and students to question the scientific theory of evolution is in jeopardy.The Senate narrowly passed its version Wednesday, but rejected an amendment that would have brought it in line with the House version -- and compromise may not be possible before the annual lawmaking session ends next week...
... But It's All About the Science!
Posted on April 23, 2008William Dembski, Florida Baptist Witness, April 24, 2008:Controversy surrounds [Expelled]. Reviews tend to be extremely positive or extremely negative. Who likes it? People who think God may have had something to do with our being here and therefore find it reasonable that God may have left tangible evidence of His involvement in creation...
The Efficacy of Prayer
Posted on April 23, 2008The Institute for Creation Research has been seeking approval in Texas to offer an online master's degree in Science Education. It has also been asking for prayers and support in the run-up to its final hearing before state education officials tomorrow, April 24th...
Hard Days Night
Posted on April 23, 2008Uh, oh! Now they've gone and done it:John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, and his sons are suing the filmmakers of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" for using the song "Imagine" in the documentary without permission.The family, along with privately held publisher EMI Blackwood Music Inc...
Mein Expelled
Posted on April 23, 2008John Wilkins has an excellent point:One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had causes quite unrelated to the Jews, mostly caused by the overweening ambitions of the German militarists and industrialists who pushed the German speaking nations into the Great War...
Macro-Lies
Posted on April 22, 2008One thing creationists, including the Intelligent Design sort, inevitably get around to is claiming that there is some insurmountable difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution." The usual trope is that microevolution, as evidenced by such observations as the changes over human time spans in "Darwin's Finches" or the Peppered Moth, is nothing more than minor adaptations to the environment, different in some unspecified way from those necessary to result in a different "kind" of animal...
Gifts from Above
Posted on April 22, 2008Troy Britain at Playing Chess with Pigeons has an excellent two part post demonstrating how Intelligent Design Creationism is really just warmed-over "Creation Science," with all the same old tired "arguments" against evolution. Troy compares the "Leadership Guide" (a fairly large pdf file) offered at the official Expelled site, to statements by such stalwarts of "Creation Science" as Henry Morris, Duane Gish and Gary Parker...
Political Science
Posted on April 21, 2008A thought:Whether from genuine religious feeling or political calculation, elements of the political right wage war against miscalled "Darwinism" ? therefore against honest science teaching.Why "miscalled"? Because to revile evolutionary science, 140 years after the Darwin-Wallace insight, as "Darwinism" is ignorance or rabblerousing...
Academic Discourse
Posted on April 20, 2008Sahotra Sarkar is a Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, Austin. His book, Doubting Darwin?: Creationist Designs on Evolution, is