Bachmann on ID

Eva sent me a link to a wingnut’s account of a debate between some 6th Congressional District candidates: Patty Wetterling (Democrat), John Binkowski (Independent), and Michele Bachmann (Rethuglican). It’s not a very good transcription—for one thing, the wingnut’s commentary is all tangled up with the words of the candidates, making it hard to tell who said what—but there’s one part of interest. They were asked the ID question.

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Science educator/evangelist needed for hazardous duty!

Salon has an article on a new up-and-coming star of the evangelical movement: Stephen Baldwin. Stephen Frickin-Dumb-As-A-Lizard Baldwin!

For Dobson, Baldwin and young Americans the nation over who yearn for the certainty this brand of Christianity pitches, the personal is political. Absolutism reigns in the new evangelical youth movement, shining through the chaos of modernity, global terror, media bombardment and glorious moral relativism. Baldwin pitches the ultimate dumbed-down fundamentalism, offering reductive, brainless theology. “I sleep good at night because I am totally content in the knowledge that God is in control,” he writes, a conviction glittered up with the fact that it sprung from the mind of an honest-to-God celebrity.

Intentionally or accidentally, Baldwin has braided together what young Americans seem to crave most today: fame, cool and answers. Answers to the questions of who will look out for them, who will love them, who will tell them how to live. Answers from a man who called himself the son of God, and another one who calls himself Stevie B.

…and calls everyone “dude”, and uses the word “gnarly” non-ironically.

Jebus, but we are in trouble. When someone with as little charisma and intelligence as Stephen Baldwin can be popular and draw in thousands of kids for right-wing fundamentalism, that tells us that the bar is set very, very low. And when we then note that no one on the evolution side can rise to that level…well. This is bad news.

We need a scientist who is willing to snort cocaine for a couple of years, sleep willy-nilly with models and any half-naked starlet with no taste, and bash himself repeatedly over the head with blunt objects until his IQ descends to perilously low Stephen Baldwin levels, all so that we can enrapture the precious skateboarding teenager bloc. Any volunteers?

(Paulie Z? Oooh. <shudder>. I just don’t think I’m brave enough to sink that low. I fear we also need someone younger, with the stamina to cope with the kind of abuse and degradation needed for this job.)

Consider the source

The usual suspects of Intelligent Design creationism came out with a book a while ago honoring the patriarch of the movement, that sneaky rascal Phillip Johnson. They had to shop around for someone to puke up some happy blurbs about the book; Duke Cunningham demanded too much money, Charles Manson had some standards, and Roy Cohn was both gay and dead, so they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel of sleazy criminals and came up with Chuck Colson. I have no idea how much he was paid, but they didn’t get their money’s worth.

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Help FCS out

Florida Citizens for Science is asking for your contributions to a rebuttal they’re working on. The organization got an op-ed published decrying the recent ID BS at the Sundome, and the local newspapers have published a series of replies that are stupefying in their ignorance. This should be easy.

One writer simply lies:

The scientific evidence for intelligent design would fill several editions of this newspaper. The scientific evidence for macroevolution, the formation of a new species by random mutation and natural selection (Darwinism), would not fill the period at the end of this sentence. The missing links are still missing.

Wow. Simultaneously claiming that there is no evidence for evolution while Intelligent Design creationism has lots is absurd: ID is not science, and the body of ID literature is negligible. There isn’t any published research on ID; these people tend to publish extended tracts, lacking any evidence.

That was the high mark of this series of letters. Here’s one that drools out one of the oldest canards in the book:

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is exactly what the name implies – a theory that has yet to be proven and will never be proven.

The writer doesn’t know what the word theory means, and has no glimmering of the volume of
evidence for evolution.

Finally, the newspaper published a whole column on the subject from someone named Guy Fisher, who doesn’t have a clue and merely parrots a list of scientists endorsing the existence of a controversy about evolution. It’s rank quote mining. For instance, he quotes fragments from SJ Gould, Colin Patterson, and Eugenie Scott to give the impression that they have or had serious disagreements with evolution, tosses in some crackpottery from Fred Hoyle, and then scrapes the bottom of the barrel with some guy named Louis Boundoure, the wingnut economist Paul Craig Roberts, and the Discovery Institute. It’s all common dishonesty.

Leave a comment at Florida Citizens for Science if you want to give them more ideas. It looks to me, though, that Florida creationists are a particularly stupid breed.

Will this work?

The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there’s no reason to be complacent. There’s a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the next generation, aren’t going to be propelling us as well. Take this report by science educators, for instance:

“We are the best in the world at what we do at the top end, and we are mediocre — or worse — at the bottom end,” said Jon Miller, of Michigan State University, who studies the role of science in American society.

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Dodos of your own

You may recall that I reviewed Flock of Dodos last week—it’s good, you should all see it if you can. The movie now has a distributor, so maybe you can. Unfortunately, this isn’t a release for private use yet, so what you need to do is get an institution to fork over $345. Yeah, that’s steep, but it includes public performance rights. Maybe you could convince your local university to get it for a Darwin Day showing…? Recoup the cost by selling tickets?