Money: lots and little

Jim Lippard continues to present his reports on creationist finances, and this time he shows the Discovery Institute’s balance sheet. They brought in $3.5 million in 2004, almost all of it in the form of donations.

That sounds like a lot of money, but to put it in perspective, you could take a look at a representative university’s operating budget. The small liberal arts university I’m at, with about 2000 students, brings in about $11 million per year in tuition, and I believe that charitable donations were on the order of $1 million per year. In that absolute sense, the Discovery Institute is small potatoes. The difference is, though, that a university actually provides services by highly trained staff, and most of its income is plowed right back into doing real work. The DI uses its income almost entirely for PR.

Keep that in mind when you hear them talking about gearing up to do actual research: they don’t have the infrastructure or the people in place to do that much science, and they certainly don’t have the income to make much real progress. Maybe if they fired a bunch of flacks and philosophers, they’d have enough to fund one solid lab, if they could piggy-back on existing facilities somewhere.

Of course, they do have more than enough money to make a bigger public relations splash than a small university.

The Counter-Creationism Handbook comes to the masses!

Here’s some happy news for all you warriors against creationism: Mark Isaak’s Counter-Creationism Handbook(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), that wonderfully indispensable and entirely portable version of the Index to Creationist Claims, can now be purchased in paperback for less than $15. It was previously only available in a rather pricey but but extremely well bound edition. Next time you attend a talk by Ken Ham or Duane Gish or any of the common-as-dirt wandering creationists (or Kent Hovind, once they let him out of jail*), you’ll want a copy of this with you—teach them to fear the power of well-referenced and clear answers to their crazy objections.

*Say, do you think we ought to take up a collection and buy a copy for the prison library?

Ron Numbers, another tool of the religious establishment

The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts sinking, sinking, sinking. He’s another hamster on the exercise wheel, spinning around the same old ineffective arguments that get us nowhere, and he can’t even follow through on his own chain of logic.

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Impending Major Developments in Pseudoscience!

Bill Dembski has posted a list of three pathetic predictions for Intelligent Design: that there will be two books published by the usual suspects (Behe, and Wells and Dembski) and that there will be a ‘research center’ at some unspecified university. Whoop-de-doo. For a major, groundbreaking, revolutionary new scientific paradigm, as they like to think of it, that’s nothing—when they crow about their triumphs, all they can do is mention a few PR efforts, and they’re so paltry that you could count them on the fingers of one partially maimed hand? John Lynch mocks their feeble vision, and offers a few suggestions for trivial additions which we know they will not produce.

After you’re done laughing at that silliness, here’s some more: Howard Smith is looking for the ethical imperative in cosmology and the kabbalah…it’s another respectable scientist suspending his credulity to build a pseudo-scientific link between reality and the fantasies of medieval mystics. It’s going to be very interesting when the Christian IDists like Dembski finally rout the entire mainstream scientific community with a couple of books and a church-sponsored room at a bible college, and then they have to turn and deal with the non-Christian heretics.

Science and the National Park Service: a festering problem

The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase’s reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don’t know what I mean, here’s a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service of dumbing down the interpretive material and turning it into a purely aesthetic experience.

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How normal is Kearny?

Maybe it’s a bad, bad idea for a community to have an open-access electronic bulletin board, because it sure is a great tool for exposing the ugly underbelly of the group. Kearny, NJ has had its moment of fame, with the story of the history teacher babbling nonsense to his class, and
Jim Lippard has found some troubling stuff on the Kearny bulletin board. Paul LaClair, the father of the young man who recorded his teacher’s rambling BS, posted a
review and complaint about the community’s failure to support good teaching, and what’s bothersome are the replies. A few are supportive, but some are still defending the history teacher’s poor instruction, and worse, there are some comments that verge on being death threats.

It’s depressing to read if you have any optimism about people at all: the stupidity on display is shocking. Maybe we just have to hope that Kearny, NJ is some kind of magic dumb-magnet that sucks in mobs of the mindless, leaving the rest of the country much smarter. I fear, though, that it might actually be representative.

It’s not enough to be just an anti-creationist

I am not going to praise John Derbyshire; some people seem to be impressed because he has penned a dismissal of the ID creationists, but jebus, that ought to be the absolute rock bottom minimum we should expect from rationalists. That he can clear a hurdle set one inch above the ground does not impress me in the slightest.

Furthermore, he couldn’t spit it out without saying something stupid.

As it turned out, Judge Jones is a conservative in the right way, the best way: he respects the law, and the plain rules of evidence.

Think about that. Respect for law and evidence is not a property exclusive or intrinsic to conservatives. Does he think liberals believe in violating the law and ignoring the evidence (don’t bother to answer; he probably does.) I’m not dazzled by a wingnut who manages to see the obvious but is still burdened with the usual far right nonsense.

(via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

Irony Alert! Kirk Cameron explains his new board game

It’s hard to believe, but there is more information on the absurd board game designed by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.

Cameron said, “We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation evolution argument, and in doing so, shows that the contemporary theory of evolution is perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times.”

Uh, sure they’re going to show “both sides”: you can get an idea of what they think is the evolution side by the illustrations. There is a frog with bull horns (a bullfrog! Get it? Ha ha.), and a couple of other chimeras whipped up in Photoshop, and unless they’re using them to illustrate what evolution does not predict and what would constitute evidence against evolution—which I doubt—these are examples of utterly bogus creationist arguments, and do not bode well for the intellectual content of the game. Which promised to be pretty much nonexistent, given the identities of the authors.

I wonder if there’s a banana in the game?

The Grand Canyon is how old?

At this point, it’s safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due consideration in product placement.

Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.

The book is clearly in violation of the standards the Park Service sets for itself; this excellent letter from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility cites the explicit directive from the director of the agency that lays out the criteria.

Historical and Scientific Research. Superintendents, historians, scientists,
and interpretive staff are responsible for ensuring that park interpretive and
educational programs and media are accurate and reflect current
scholarship…Questions often arise round the presentation of geological,
biological, and evolutionary processes. The interpretive and educational treatment
used to explain the natural processes and history of the Earth must be based on
the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have
stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism.

This is a no-brainer. The book should not have been approved in the first place. It should be removed from their catalog immediately. The Park Service should approve and implement training for their staff (which should hardly be necessary; they shouldn’t hire idiots in the first place) to make sure that they are presenting accurate geological information to the public.

“No comment” is not good enough. This disgraceful controversy has been stewing long enough that the continued inaction of the Park Service administration constitutes an implied endorsement of anti-scientific nonsense.