Ken Ham’s new book

Just when you think these guys can’t get any more dishonest, here comes Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots. The tag line on the book is a quote from Ham: “Although racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any person to popularize it.”

Wow. More than Martin Luther, who helped make anti-semitism a favorite German pastime? More than Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped the Ku Klux Klan grow to half a million members? More than Hitler? More than our Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision? More than Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations? More than Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond? More than King Leopold II of Belgium?

This Charles Darwin?

Remind me, once Ken Ham dies, that I have to start a campaign to remember him as the person most responsible for popularizing piglet-raping. Truth doesn’t matter with Ham, so we can freely invent any crime we want and blame him for increasing its popularity. Anything goes, too — he’s certainly willing to stoop to any vileness to defame those he dislikes, so he can’t complain when he gets santorumed.

We have an image problem

RPM has put up an amusing bestiary of typical science seminar attendees — it’s all true, I’ve seen all of those people.

But you know what the problem is? It’s a collection of pedants and old people! Where are the celebrities misbehaving in our talks? Maybe we’d get more attention for science if we had a Paris Hilton vamping around, or a Britney Spears breaking down and flashing her anatomy, or a Mel Gibson getting drunk and haranguing the speaker about his Jewish background, followed by a Chris Crocker histrionic shrieking at everyon to leave the speaker alone.

Scientists are a pretty dry and sedate lot, I’m afraid. I’ve never seen anyone like that at a seminar.

We’ve got a live one!

Some of you may be reluctant to delve into the fiery melee that are the Pharyngula comments, but you’re missing a very entertaining battle. We had a creationist named Steven pop by last night to offer his, um, opinions. Here’s a brief summary of some of his sillier claims.

  • Darwin was a racist.

  • Christianity never supported slavery.

  • The 15th and 16th century slave trade was driven by the Dutch and Portugese, who were not Christian.

  • Scientists were responsible for the slave trade, not Christians.

  • Robert E. Lee converted to Christianity late in life — he was an atheist! He became an abolitionist after he became a Christian.

  • Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson ran for the presidency of the Confederate States of America on the platform of abolition.

  • Georgia was an abolitionist state.

  • American slaves were better off here than they were in Africa. Slavery was good for them.

  • Hitler was an atheist. The Holocaust was the product of Darwinist teaching.

  • Oh, yeah…evolution is false. The infall of cosmic dust to earth means that, if the earth were millions of years old, it ought to be touching the sun. Sedimentary layers at Mt St Helens. Snail shells give incorrect carbon dates. Nebraska man. Cro-Magnon man looks human. Harris and Klebold, those famous biologists, were bad people. Bombardier beetles. It’s like the Index to Creationist Claims was written for this guy.

Oh, and he’s very confident of his claims, and is bragging about how he’s defeating all of us mental midgets.

The stupid is radiating off that thread in eyeball-melting waves, but we so rarely get the classic creationists with IQs that limbo that low in here anymore that I thought some of you might want to join in the feeding frenzy.

A creationist own goal?

Florida approved science standards that actually use the word ‘evolution’, but as I noted at the time, the creationist compromise was that it had to be referred to as “the scientific theory of evolution”. It was weird: it is the scientific theory of evolution, as opposed to the non-scientific guesswork of creationism, so what was the advantage to the creationists? All I could imagine is that they somehow thought this enthroned their misunderstanding of the word “theory” as official policy.

Well, the word is out that the creationists screwed up big time, and their own ignorance has turned around and bit them on the ass. They really did think inserting the word “theory” would help discredit evolution (it may still do so, as they try to frantically spin it in their church newsletters, but it’s only going to work among their true believers), but it’s going to have the opposite effect in the public schools.

Not only will Florida’s students learn about evolution; they’ll also learn that the scientific definition of a theory is different from the everyday definition,
referring not to wild-eyed speculation but to a vast body of observation
and testing that confirms a hypothesis so strongly that it might as
well be considered fact.

You might argue that that is only Wired‘s interpretation, and that maybe the creationists actually have some secret nefarious plan to turn that bit of language into a propaganda victory. We’ve got confirmation, though: the Discovery Institute is furious, and Casey Luskin is squeaking madly about how they were tricked into a compromise that added a harmless phrase to the standards, while allowing the “dogmatism of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)” to stand.

This may have an added benefit. Creationists have benefitted from the public’s colloquial understanding of the meaning of the word “theory,” which differs from the scientific meaning. Now they’re getting chastised by their own for screwing up and mistaking their own quirky ignorance for a useful strategem. We’ve been yelling at them for years that a scientific idea that has reached the status of a theory is a good thing — it means the idea is powerful tool for integrating many lines of inquiry — but maybe now the message will sink in.

Now we just have to do this a few more times.

Creationist: There are no transitional whale fossils!

Scientist: Oh, dear, really? That’s terrible! We should teach the students about that, don’t you think?

Creationist: Yes, we should. That information must go into the science standards for our state.

Scientist: I quite agree. When we mandate that our teachers must offer instruction in the details of whale transitional fossils, the gaps will be so obvious.

Creationist: Good. Let’s insert, “Teachers will discuss the nature of evolutionary transitions, emphasizing the kinds of evidence needed to support claims that land animals evolved into whales, and that cats give birth to dogs.”

Scientist: Well, as a compromise, let’s leave out the bit about cats and dogs, and we’ll have to clean up and standardize the language in committee, but let’s do it. The committee might even make this broader, pushing for discussion of all kinds of transitional fossils, which, of course, are absent. Boy, you sure got me over a barrel, forcing me to include discussion of an evolutionary flaw in our public schools. I hope you aren’t going to continue to outwit me with your Mastery of Science.

Creationist: <preening smugly> Ha ha, our cunning plan is working!

The moon is going away!

What a perfect situation: it’s bitterly cold outside, but the moon happens to be in the sky right outside my front window, so I can see it from the comfort of my living room. It’s half gone right now!

Now the moon has gone dark and red! Surely these are evil portents. What god should I worship to bring it back? Who should I sacrifice?

I’d take a picture, but the moon is high in the sky at an angle that would make it difficult to photograph through my window … and I really don’t want to go outside. Fortunately, Lindsey Bradsher sent me a picture she just took.

i-63563d1cfffbcbd519e52ba6135cfa75-lunar_eclipse.jpg

Two tales of whale evolution

A reader sent me two links to video clips. The contrast is fascinating.

Here’s the first. It’s a nice illustration of the evidence behind our understanding of the evolution of whales, all in 7 minutes.

Now watch a creationist explain whale evolution.

Ouch. He complains that those wicked scientists are trying to turn the bible into a great big joke…but I think this clown does an even better job of that. Try counting the misconceptions — he goes on and on with this story about an animal crawling out of the primordial ooze onto the land and not liking it, and then wishing it could go back into the ocean, where it sucks in its hindlimbs and turns into a whale…and then he calls that story stupid and ridiculous. Guess what: it is! Of course, this ignorant nitwit is the person who made up the story, and it has nothing at all to do with what the evidence actually says.

This is what we have to deal with: morons who think their caricatures are evidence, and this bozo is probably voting for school board members based on how closely they approximate his level of idiocy.

15 misconceptions about evolution

Take a look at this excellent list of evolution misconceptions. The entries are very brief, but mostly correct and very common: in particular, #12, “Natural selection involves organisms ‘trying’ to adapt” is one of the most common mistakes in creationist thinking — they completely miss one of the most important insights that Darwin had.

But I have to nitpick a little bit. #6, “The theory is flawed,” gives the wrong answer — it basically tries to argue that the theory of evolution is not flawed. Of course it is! If it were perfect and complete we’d be done with it, and it wouldn’t be a particularly active field of research. The “flaws” that creationists typically bring up aren’t flaws in the theory at all, but flaws in the creationists’ understanding of the science, but let’s be careful to avoid giving the impression of perfection.

#15 is also a pet peeve: “Evolution is a theory about the origin of life” is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that “abiogenesis is not evolution,” but it’s a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity. It includes molecular biases towards certain solutions and chance events that set up potential change as well as selection that refines existing variation. Abiogenesis research proposes similar principles that led to early chemical evolution. Tossing that work into a special-case ghetto that exempts you from explaining it is cheating, and ignores the fact that life is chemistry. That creationists don’t understand that either is not a reason for us to avoid it.

#13, “Evolution means that life changed ‘by chance’,” also ducks the issue more than it should. As it says, natural selection is not random — but there’s more to evolution than natural selection. It’s a bit like ducking the question by redefining the terms. Much of our makeup is entirely by accident, and evolution is a story of filtered accidents. Creationists don’t like that — one of their central assumptions is that everything is purposeful — but don’t pander to their beliefs. Go for the gusto and ask them what their god was thinking when he loaded up your genome with the molecular equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts, or when he ‘accidentally’ scrambled the sequence of our enzyme for synthesizing vitamin C.