The Darwin Conspiracy

Sometimes you just have to sit and stare dumbfounded at the appalling stupidity creationists will state with absolute conviction. Here’s an example that will leave you awestruck, too: a site that declares there is a Darwin conspiracy, and cites three fatal flaws that they claim conclusively prove that evolution is wrong. You might expect that such a grand claim would be accompanied by arguments that are at least impressively sophisticated … but no, we get two claims that kids should learn the answers to in high school, and a third that is just flaky and weird.

Wow, but these are amazingly stupid claims.

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Schlafly wants to play rough now

Andy Schlafly is one persistent fool. After harrassing Richard Lenski not once, but twice, prompting one of the best smackdowns on the intertubes, Schlafly now wants to take some vague sort of legal action against Lenski to get his own copy of every bit of data Lenski has generated in 20 years … data that he wouldn’t understand, and which would include bacterial samples that he couldn’t maintain, and requiring so much effort to collect (can you imagine having to go through 20 years worth of stored bacterial samples to create a copy?) that it would disrupt research in the lab to an unacceptable degree. That’s what he wants, of course: he’s a petulant incompetent who doesn’t like the conclusions of research into evolution, and who has to be smarting over the international peals of laughter that have been made at his expense.

Here’s the text of Schlafly’s pretentious “challenge” (Sorry, I’m not linking to the Conservapædia fecal pond).

A Conservapedia challenge is an unsolved problem or task that offers the promise of bettering society when lawfully accomplished.

The first Conservapedia challenge is to find a legal means for obtaining public disclosure of Lenski’s federally funded data.

I don’t see how figuring out a legal strategy that will enable creationists to shut down biology labs with harassment will better society.

Chris Comer strikes back

Chris Comer, who was fired for whispering “Barbara Forrest“, is fighting back. This could get interesting.

Christina Comer, who lost her job at the TEA last fall, said in a suit filed in federal court in Austin that she was terminated for contravening an “unconstitutional” policy at the agency. The policy required employees to be neutral on the subject of creationism – the biblical interpretation of the origin of humans, she said.

The policy was in force, according to the suit, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that teaching creationism as science in public schools is illegal.

“The agency’s ‘neutrality’ policy has the purpose or effect of endorsing religion, and thus violates the Establishment Clause” of the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit said.

Although…every time the evolution issue goes to court, I feel like we’re sailing off into a dangerous fantasy land where decisions will be made on the basis of something other than their correspondence to reality.

The poll…I cannot resist

Oh, man…you know you’ve got colossal wackaloonery when you find a website titled “Remember Thy Creator” — but then you discover that they are sponsoring a YEC conference at the end of July, that they list luminaries like John Morris and Ken Ham, and that they’ve got a front page article demanding that people reject the idea that the earth is old because the Bible says so, and best of all, they’ve got an open online poll. “Do you think Creation should be taught, along with Evolution, in public schools?”

Go on, skew that sucker.

I think this can be my last post on the debacle called Expelled

The propaganda movie opened in Canada, and the weekend box office numbers are in.

$24,374. Nationwide.

So Canada is a smaller country in population than ours, and their money is worth a little more than ours, but still…I don’t think we can call that anything but a flop.

Where’s Creationist Keith now? He was ranting about the hundreds of millions of dollars the movie was going to make, how it was going to trigger a world-wide change in attitudes towards evolution, and how it was going to get me fired. Boy, was that prediction ever wrong.

The bill from Bogalusa

A certain Brown University biology graduate has taken an unfortunate step, one that we asked him to avoid. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has signed a pro-creationism bill into law, all to pander to evangelical protestant hicks. We know this is a guy with national aspirations, so he’s taking a big gamble that we aren’t going to swing back towards a more sensible secularism, since the only people who could vote for him now are fundagelical god-wallopers who don’t understand science. That may be a fairly big voting base, but I’m hoping that it’s shrinking. Either Bobby Jindal is toast… or we all are.

One bizarre item in that story is that the reporter contacted the Discovery Institute, who quickly disavowed any association with the bill, saying that they did not “directly” support it and that they certainly wouldn’t support any attempt to insert religion into the schools. Like everything that comes out of the DI, they are lying reflexively. Barbara Forrest has an excellent overview of the context and history of the bill — the bill has the DI’s frantic, fervid paws all over it.

I do think we need to call this the Bogalusa Bill, after the district that the sponsor, Ben Nevers (a creationist and a democrat, for shame!), comes from. It’s a name that just trips off the tongue, like a happy fusion of “bogus” and “loser”, said with a lovely New Orleans drawl.

The Canadian reviews trickle in

You may have heard that Expelled opened in Canada this week…but it’s not off to a soaring start. The first reviews are coming in, and I am encouraged by the opening line of this one: “I found this film so distasteful I hestitate to dignify it with even a thumbnail review.”

Also noteworthy: the reviewer interviewed the awful Ben Stein about it.

I interviewed Ben Stein for a Newsmaker item in this week’s Maclean’s, and he did acknowledge the debt his film owes to Michael Moore. “We were greatly influenced by him,” he said. “He showed you can make a documentary on a political subject and make money.” But Stein couldn’t really elaborate on how Moore’s influence was applied. After all, he reminded me, unlike Moore he was just the host, not the filmmaker. Besides, he’s never seen more than two minutes of a MIchael Moore film. “It makes me sick just to look at him,” he said. “He’s physically revolting. He so angry. I like to look at people who have sweet, nice faces.” Stein–whose face is familiar from his roles as a teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years–immodestly included himself in that sweet, nice camp.

He did, however, concede with a sigh that Expelled is a whole lot less successful than Moore’s films, “so whatever secret he has, we haven’t learned it.”

No kidding.

Wait—Ben Stein, a guy with the face of a mackerel and the emotional range of a dead one, finds Moore physically revolting? He isn’t one of the beautiful people (and neither am I), so judging his work by how he looks…well, Stein should not go there.

Nice admission at the end, though.

(via Canadian Cynic)

There’s more at Straight.com and The Coast. It’s getting panned all over. Again.

Three dopes sitting around a table

Eric Hovind is continuing his father’s tradition of utterly inane arguments against evolution. In this case, it’s a video of Hovind and two of his bland buddies sitting around talking about…cephalopods. Oh, it is painful to witness.

They show excerpts of some perfectly lovely videos of cuttlefish swimming about, exercising their camouflage, and they talk about its specialized defenses and sophisticated behavior. In classic creationist form, they watch all this beauty and throw up their hands in surrender, and exclaim that they don’t see how this could have evolved, and ask, “How does evolution explain that?”

I would turn that question around: “How does creationism explain that?” And I’m sorry, “God did it” is not an explanation. It says nothing about the processes used to create the cuttlefish’s capabilities, and it does nothing to explain limitations — why can’t the cuttlefish fly? Why doesn’t it have three eyes? Why does it use similar genes to our own? You can’t just posit an omnipotent creator who can create anything without also having an explanation for the constraints on his creations.

At one point, they are talking about the mechanisms the animals use to camouflage themselves, and they express dumbfounded ignorance about how they do that (and babble incorrectly about some of the details — they do not see everything in shades of green). Did Eric Hovind’s two researchers ever think to look up the science? Roger Hanlon has been doing some marvelous work on cephalopod behavior and camouflage; I have no idea what Hanlon’s religious beliefs are, and it doesn’t matter, but he clearly sees these as natural phenomena generated by natural processes.

We do have explanations of cephalopod evolution. I don’t expect Hovind and cronies are at all aware of them. In fact, in this interview Hovind reveals a common and significant misconception about how evolution works. He speculates that an evolutionary explanation would be that “…one of them decided while he was sittin’ there getting munched on, hey, I need to evolve a defense mechanism to overcome this…”.

I hear this all the time. The only way they can imagine evolution working is by an act of will, that every adaptation must be a product of an individual organism doing something special and directed towards acquiring that ability. They miss the key insight Darwin had.

No, one of them getting munched on did not decide anything, and the action was done: it was being eaten. It would not reproduce. The properties of that specific individual would have a diminished influence on the next generation. It was the other cephalopods that were not being eaten who would propagate, and it would be their genes that would continue on.

The idea is right there in their very own scenario, and they lack the intelligence to grasp it. They keep talking about features of the animals that help them survive better, and they are blind to the fact that survival is the key. It’s depressing to see such hopeless ignorance in these three, each reinforcing the other, when the answers to the questions they ask are in books anyone can get.

Lenski gives Conservapædia a lesson

Once again, Richard Lenski has replied to the goons and fools at Conservapædia, and boy, does he ever outclass them. For a quick outline of the saga, read this summary at A Candid World; basically, Andy Schlafly has been demanding every bit of data from Richard Lenski’s work on the evolution of E. coli, despite the fact that Schlafly doesn’t have the background to understand it and doesn’t have any plan for what he would do with it if he got it. Lenski has been polite and helpful in his replies; his first response is a model for how to explain difficult science to a bullying ideologue. Now his second response is available, and while he has clearly lost some patience and is unequivocal in denouncing their bad faith efforts to discredit good science, he still gives an awfully good and instructional discussion.

I’ve put the whole thing below the fold, in case you’d rather not click through to that wretched hive of pretentious villainy at Conservapædia.

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