They’re all the same, I’m afraid: Stepford Creationists

Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I’m already functioning on a pool of fatigued neurons). Zedler really is an idiot; the entire interview is a series of non sequiturs as Zedler blindly recites from the creationist script. Here’s an example:

Mother Jones: Are you a creationist?


Bill Zedler: Evolutionists will go “Oh, it just happened by chance.” Today we know that’s false. Today we know that even a single-celled organism is hugely complex. When was the last time we’ve seen someone go into a windstorm or a tornado or any other kind of natural disaster, and say “Guess what? That windstorm just created a watch.”

First sentence: No credible scientist claims evolution is a theory solely of chance. It wouldn’t be a very interesting theory if it were, now would it?

Second sentence: I know it’s false that Bill Zedler has sex with chicken corpses.

Third sentence: Yes, cells are complex. So? Complexity can be produced by chance, so announcing an irrelevant fact does not challenge his strawman version of evolution, anyway.

Fourth sentence: Job 38:1. “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind”. So the last time anyone claimed a windstorm created a watch, it was their god. Scientists aren’t the ones claiming that purely chance forces assemble functional complexes.

I have to say that ol’ Bill Paley was a smart guy for his time, a persuasive writer, and extremely influential…but every time some clueless creationist drags out a watch analogy, I want to build a time machine, go back to 1743, and strangle him in his crib.

Of course, then someone else would invent some catchy but irrelevant parallel, and creationists would be endlessly recycling the same tired metaphor, whatever it was. It’s been over 200 years; can they please come up with something original now?

Jesse Bering responds

I was not kind in my assessment of Jesse Bering’s story about the evolutionary psychology of homophobia. He was quite irate with me and several other people who pointed out the tattered fabric of his evidence. Now he has gone scurrying back to the author of the study he described, Gordon Gallup, and gotten his take in a rather tendentious interview. Between the two of them, unfortunately, they still can’t manage to address anyou of our criticisms. It’s a very weird conversation: here’s how he handles me.

One common complaint lodged against evolutionary psychology is that its methods, which typically do not track the claimed fitness benefit, are inadequate for testing its hypotheses. PZ Myers, in surveying your homophobia studies, writes:

They know nothing about heritability, they’ve shown nothing about differential survival or fecundity … Is this to be the fate of evolutionary psychology, that it shrivels away into irrelevancy as its proponents overhype (sic) feeble, pathetic data sets?

Myers is, of course, notorious for such over-the-top statements—like the Jim Bakker of New Atheists, a caricature of sweat, histrionics and stage glitter, he sees religious conspiracies as often as evangelicals see the Devil.

Oh, man, glitter! I just knew I’d been forgetting something for my stage show.

Despite that useful bit of information, however, it’s dodging the issue with irrelevancies. I did not accuse Gallup or Bering of committing some religious conspiracy, nor did I even mention religion in my complaint. I said there was no evidence to back up their claims that homophobia conferred a fitness benefit, or even that it was a heritable trait. I know, expecting evidence of an evolutionary psychologist may be a sign of hysteria, and certainly is over-the-top, but I would expect that a reply to shoot me down would be the presentation of evidence to show I was wrong.

They don’t do that.

Instead, Gallup mentions a series of papers he’s published that have nothing to do with homophobia. For instance, he claims that they’ve “shown that a person’s voice is also related to fitness.” But they haven’t! I looked at the paper: it’s another self-reporting exercise in which they determined that people perceive women’s voices as more or less attractive in different stages of their menstrual cycle. Again, there is no attempt to examine inheritance, or whether this perception actually affects survival or fecundity…so we’re right back at my original complaint.

I’m not even going to touch Bering’s unwarranted moral indignation at the idea that Gallup might be a homophobe, which is not only irrelevant but wasn’t even suggested by any of his critics, or his silly conclusion that he’ll do anything to understand why gay men and women are bullied and murdered around the world…as if all of his critics are somehow just fine with the oppression of homosexuals.

Again, Jeremy Yoder has another solid response to the nonsense.

Is there such a thing as congenital vileness?

Something nasty seems to get passed on with the name “Hovind”, anyway. Eric Hovind’s latest stunt: He’s ‘taking back’ Earth Day with a silly, misguided campaign to replace tree-planting with Christian evangelism, and with selling t-shirts to benefit his lunatic ministry. There’s nothing in his plans about conservation or protecting endangered habitats or species — he’s only hijacking the holiday as a pretext for more god-babbling.

His father, Kent Hovind, gets out of prison in 2015. Then there will be two of these scumbags fleecing the public and lying in the name of their god.

Ken Ham was expelled! Ha haa!

Amazingly, a gang of ignorant young-earth creationist crazies who are running fundamentalist home-schooling conferences decided that Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis were just too crazy even for them, and they have formally banned AiG from appearing at any of their conferences. This wasn’t a dictate from irate scientists or atheists, either: this decree has come down from his own people, fellow creationists who also believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that God shuffled every kind of animal on the planet into a big boat before drowning everyone else. Here’s the official letter they sent to AiG:

After much prayer and deliberation over the weekend, Great Homeschool Convention’s Advisory Board has unanimously decided to disinvite Ken and AIG from all future conventions, including the Cincinnati convention next week. The Board believes this to be the Lord’s will for our convention and searched the Scriptures for the mind of the Lord and the leadership of the Holy Spirit before arriving at this decision. The Board believes that Ken’s public criticism of the convention itself and other speakers at our convention require him to surrender the spiritual privilege of addressing our homeschool audience.Please know that our Board is 100% young earth and we largely share AIG’s perspective from a scientific standpoint. That is why Ken was originally invited and treated so graciously and extremely generously in Memphis and Greenville (far beyond what we do for other speakers or their ministries). Our expression of sacrifice and extraordinary kindness towards Ken and AIG has been returned to us and our attendees with Ken publicly attacking our conventions and other speakers. Our Board believes Ken’s comments to be unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited statements that are divisive at best and defamatory at worst.

One of the core values of our convention is that we believe that good people can disagree and still be good people. We believe that Christians do not need to personally question the integrity, the intelligence, or the salvation of other Christians when debating Biblical issues. Ken has obviously felt led to publicly attack our conventions and a number of our speakers. We believe that what Ken has said and done is unChristian and sinful. A number of attendees are demanding explanations from our board and we must respond to them.

We believe that Dr. Ham is very intelligent and deliberate and that he decided that publicly slandering our conventions and defaming a number of our speakers is what he wanted to do. Whereas Ken chooses to conduct himself in a way that we believe to be unscriptural, we cannot countenance that spirit as we believe it would not honor the Savior whom we serve.

A public statement will be prepared for distribution at the convention explaining our Board’s decision. Anyone who inquires regarding Dr. Ham or AIG will be referred to that statement. We have no intention to defame or publicly slander Dr. Ham, the Creation Museum, or the work of AIG. Our Board would respectfully request that Dr. Ham and AIG prayerfully consider doing the same. Our Board takes seriously the admonition of Jesus in John 13:35, “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Sincerely,

Brennan Dean
Great Homeschool Conventions, Inc.

Ooooh, burn. These people are deranged, but there they are, chastising Ken Ham for being beyond the pale. It’s got to sting when all the other inmates in the asylum shun you.

What is really important

the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia.

The rest of the article is an interesting analysis of what makes Angry Birds addictive. I found it persuasive, anyway: I’ve never played it, and now I never will, just like I’ll never try that first taste of cocaine.

Poll on the fate of a creationist biology teacher

Beau Schaefer is a biology teacher in an Illinois public school. Beau Schaefer has admitted to promoting creationism instead of science in his classes.

The law is clear on this one: teachers in public schools do not get to peddle their personal superstitions to a captive audience. They especially don’t get to do it if it compromises or replaces teaching the mandated curriculum.

This is such a serious national problem that I think the school district ought to come down on the incompetent jerk hard…but I also think it ought to be the responsibility of the school system to police this sort of behavior, and it’s not up to random mobs on the internet. So what does the NY Daily News do? Makes it the subject of a stupid internet poll.

Should be is allowed to teach creationism in public schools?

Yes, it is a legitimate belief. 39%
No, it is a religious concept not a scientific one. 59%
I don’t know 2%

Of course it is a stupid poll. They couldn’t even put the question into proper English.