Here’s an interesting leak, if true. Someone (“Yellow Rose”, or YR) is a mole within a religious group trying to subvert the Wikipedia:

YR gathered intell on a baker’s dozen fundamentalist techno-geeks, resembling a cult within a cult, who have become Wikipedians. Lacking a Y chromosome and being thus subordinated to menial church chores, she could not herself get closer than the loneliest of the 13 guys, but the Pentecostal sexual prohibitions at least afforded her the ability to avoid sacrifices espionage agents often have to make. YR emphasizes that their names mean nothing, and their ages mean less, and that the country they come from is called Texas. They were brought up there and taught there the church to abide, and that the worldview they live, by has God on its side. Empowered by God, and led by a charismatic, MIT, computer science sophomore (who also plays lead guitar in a Christian rock band), this squad-size cohort of Christian soldiers is chipping away at Wikiscience, in subject areas entirely predictable. Clever they are too, in taking advantage of Wikiethics, specifically NPOV (i.e., Neutral Point of View), where all views must be represented, even if demonstrably incorrect; any fundamentalist worth his salt can drive a truck threw such a loop hole, and they have begun doing so. Intelligent design and biblical floods are being commingled with Darwin and DNA. The process is so far more apparent on the discussion pages than on actual pages, where God’s soldiers employ a Pentecostal version of good cop, bad cop. The bad cop is an apparent Christian trying to interject religion where science contradicts his worldview, and the good cop(s) is disguised as an atheist lending support by invoking the NPOV rule.

This wouldn’t be at all surprising. Creationists really aren’t necessarily stupid—just wrong, deluded, and dedicated to advocating a stupid point of view.

Reading through Good Math, Bad Math, I saw a classic example of creationist foolishness: a fellow who insists that math will vindicate the Bible by proving that π = 3. It reminded me of this old post where a creationist had the thread jumping in her need to prove that the story of Jacob and Laban actually demonstrated a valid form of biblical genetics. So here it is; the original comments are also amusing.

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It’s not just the US that is infested with creationists; take a look at Canadian Christianity. Like their southern brethren, they seem to be greatly concerned about homosexuals and evolution; I’m always astounded at how much conservative Christian identity is tied to the denial of civil rights and opposition to science. There are several juicy tidbits of benighted ignorance there, but I’m going to focus on one incredible claim made in an interview with a Kirk Durston, who is apparently a director of some Campus Chrusade for Christ ministry…which, apparently, means he is now a fully qualified creationist biologist. In the interview, he’s asked this leading question:

As you know, evolutionists tend to use ‘evolution’ as a blanket term, without making the crucial distinction between ‘micro-evolution’ (physical changes within a single species) and ‘macro-evolution’ (transformation from one species into another). Because micro-evolution is scientifically provable, they can say that evolutionary theory is legitimate science—and by using the general term ‘evolution,’ they imply that macro-evolution is also legitimate science. Do you think there is sufficient awareness of the fact that there is no concrete evidence for macro-evolution? Are evolutionists simply afraid to admit this to the public—and perhaps to themselves?

[Read more…]

Joe Carter is making a curiously convoluted argument. He’s trying to get at why the majority of the American public does not accept the theory of evolution, and he’s made a ten part list of reasons, which boils down to placing the blame on the critics of intelligent design creationism. We’re all bad, bad people who are doing a bad, bad job of informing the public and doing a good job of antagonizing them. There is a germ of truth there—I do think we all have to do a better job of educating American citizens—but what makes it a curious and ultimately dishonest argument is that Joe Carter is a creationist. It’s one thing for an evolutionist to complain that the facts are on our side and we’re doing a piss-poor job of communicating them, but it is a weird thing for a creationist to complain that we do a poor job of communicating the facts, while neglecting to mention that the facts are all against his personal view of life’s origins. The impression it leaves is that Joe Carter doesn’t like evolution because those dang ‘Darwinists’ are all poopy-heads.

Let’s go through each of Carter’s 10 complaints (which you can find in parts I, II, and III), and you’ll see that he even bungles the task of putting together a logical argument: it’s loaded with false premises and inconsistencies.

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Hey, Wilkins! I know you were a lucky dog who got to visit Darwin’s home a while back, but did you know who else had been there?

Ken Ham.

He seems to have had a different reaction than you did.

It was a book that attacked the foundations of the Christian faith,
with an impact that was felt around the world. I prayed, “Lord, bring down this
‘house’—this ‘house’ of evolution that has permeated cultures around the world.”

Ol’ Ken does have a sense of mission, though. I guess mumbling to a nonexistent being isn’t effective in accomplishing his ends, even if that nonexistent being is supposed to be superpowerful.

The ministry of AiG is one the Lord has raised up to combat Darwin’s
legacy. In reality, AiG vs. the evolutionary establishment is a battle between
two opposing legacies. Darwin’s legacy has permeated nations around
the world, and wherever there’s a formal education system, Darwinian evolution
is taught as fact. 

Millions around the world are being led astray by this horrible legacy.
We can see the effects of it nearly everywhere: millions of
students are being taught that Genesis is “nonsense.”

Actually, we don’t teach that Genesis is nonsense—we don’t even mention the Bible, for the most part. Students who are taught to think and evaluate the evidence manage to figure out for themselves that Genesis is nonsense. If he wants to defeat us, he’ll need to campaign against logic, evidence, skepticism, the scientific method, and thinking…oh, wait. Darn. That is his strategy. Curse you, Ken Ham, you’re always one step ahead of us!

The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America’s standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum’s fossil collection. This includes some of the most impressive examples of humankind’s ancient history, such as multiple australopithecine specimens and Turkana Boy; it’s arguably one of the world’s foremost collections of hominid fossils. This is where many of Richard Leakey’s finds are stored.

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A columnist in the Cincinnati Post, Kevin Eigelbach, has a few words for Answers in Genesis. He got a letter from them asking for money to protect the Bible from the wicked secularists who want people to think critically about its contents.

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Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of the political divide. However, he takes exception to the idea that a good part of the blame belongs to the religious and to the far right. Instead, he blames the failure on schools run by Democrats.

It goes without saying that those school systems — mostly located in large cities and the rural south — don’t need a belief in God to keep them from understanding evolution. All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals.

[Read more…]

We are so screwed.

That’s the result of a new survey of people’s attitudes toward evolution. Notice where the United States lies: nearly dead last. We beat Turkey.

There was more to this study than just asking whether a person agreed with the statement that “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” They also collected other data on age, gender, education, genetic literacy, religious belief, attitude toward life, attitude toward science and technology, belief in science and technology, reservations about science and technology, and political ideology, and carried out a statistical analysis to determine the relative contribution of these variables to ignorance about evolution.

I’m sure you can all guess what the number one biggest obstacle to accepting evolution was.

The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries (path coefficients of -0.42 and -0.24, respectively), which indicates that individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true than adults with less conservative religious views.

The number two problem?

Second, the evolution issue has been politicized and incorporated into the current partisan division in the United States in a manner never seen in Europe or Japan. In the second half of the 20th century, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as a part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in southern and Midwestern states—the “red” states. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of “creation science”. There is no major political party in Europe or Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform.

On the positive side, one factor that improves the acceptance of evolution is genetic literacy, and the authors advocate improved science education in our public schools. We need it, desperately.

It appears that many of these adults have adopted a human exceptionalism perspective. Elements of this perspective can be seen in the way that many adults try to integrate modern genetics into their understanding of life. For example, only a third of American adults agree that more than half of human genes are identical to those of mice and only 38% of adults recognize that humans have more than half of their genes in common with chimpanzees. In
other studies, fewer than half of American adults can provide a minimal definition of DNA. Thus, it is not surprising that nearly half of the respondents in 2005 were not sure about the proportion of human genes that overlap with mice or chimpanzees.

Nick Matzke has more to say on this part of the work)

Despite the good suggestion about improving education, the paper ends on a grim and pessimistic note. Like I said, we are so screwed.

The politicization of science in the name of religion and political partisanship is not new to the United States, but transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions marks the beginning of a new era for science policy. The broad public acceptance of the benefits of science and technology in the second half of the 20th century allowed science to develop a nonpartisan identification that largely protected it from overt partisanship. That era appears to have closed.

Hmmm. I wonder what the Discovery Institute thinks of all this. Let’s ask Bruce Chapman!

“A better explanation for the high percentage of doubters of Darwinism in America may be that this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field,” Chapman said. “In particular, the growing doubts about Darwinism undoubtedly reflect growing doubts among scientists about Darwinian theory. Over 640 have now signed a public dissent and the number keeps growing.”

I think the study shows precisely the opposite effect. Americans are being rolled in large numbers by an ideological ‘elite’ nested in our churches and in the Republican party—the reason we are falling so far behind in our understanding of the biological sciences is that political and religious authority figures are lying to the people and fostering ignorance, and Americans are dumbly falling for it…and the more ignorant they are, the more they depend on those false authorities.

Americans aren’t second to last because they are “famously independent.” They’re failing biology because they’re god-soaked sheep, and the Republican party has exploited that failing.

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By the way, I am quoted on Fox News on this one. That feels…strange.

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Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.