Sadventists, badventists

This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn’t believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said “goodbye!”, and scurried away. It’s so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty.

Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists.

The Seventh-day Adventist cult’s “prophet” and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White, was astonishingly fanatical and legalistic, and let’s face it, folks, crazier than a bag of wet cats. At the age of nine, Ellen was hit in the head with a rock, which resulted in her being comatose for three weeks. Many think this trauma damaged her brain in ways that could have caused her extreme zealotry — I prefer to call it religious lunacy — which involved what she claimed were visions shown her by god, visitations by angels, and even a trip to Jupiter. Others think she was a calculating, greedy, power-hungry fraud. Some think she was a combination of both. Then there are the Sadventists, who believe even today in 2011 — despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, all of which is poorly explained away by the cult, although the explanations are good enough for the believers — that she was a true prophet of god whose writings were divinely inspired and remain an infallible supplement to the word of god. The cult holds Ellen in the same regard as the biblical prophets (something else they deny vehemently to outsiders but acknowledge within the invisible walls that surround the cult). Over the years, there have been endless revisions and changes made in Ellen’s writings by the Sadventist Powers That Be to cover up some of her more embarrassing statements or obvious errors, which seems odd if her infallible writings are divinely inspired. Nevertheless, nearly a century after her death, Ellen’s writings are still the arbiter of doctrine and scriptural interpretation in the cult.

The really fascinating thing about Ellen White is that most other Christians consider her and her cult heretical — the whole thing about a wild-eyed prophetess declaring a privileged status with God and Jesus and witnessing miracles doesn’t sit well with all the other wild-eyed fundamentalists and evangelicals who declare that they have a special relationship with divinity. And yet the modern young earth creationists, the kooks who trace their interpretation of the Bible and our origins to Whitcombe and Morris’s The Genesis Flood, are actually promoting Ellen White’s version of the creation story. Ron Numbers has traced it all back in his book, The Creationists, and basically what Ken Ham and the Hovind’s are pushing is Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine, sanitized of any mention of the crazy Millerite lady from Maine.

Paul Nelson takes a stab at Ontogenetic Depth again…which makes me go stab-stab-stabbity-stab

Paul Nelson has deigned to write a two-part essay on “Ontogenetic Depth“, his sciencey made-up term for a metric that he claims makes evolution essentially impossible. We’ve been wrangling over this for a long time — he and Marcus Ross introduced this in a poster at the Developmental Biology meetings in 2004, titled “Understanding the Cambrian Explosion by Estimating Ontogenetic Depth”, and in our conversation at that time I certainly got the impression that he and Ross were busy collecting this peculiar thing alien to creationists called “data”. I have asked him multiple times over the last 7 years how to estimate this hypothetical number; at the meetings, I recall asking him specifically how I would go back into my lab and measure it in my zebrafish. He was evasive. We’ve been trying to get him to explain this datum, which was his pretext for getting into a professional meeting, and gotten nothing.

Well, now we’re done. His first point in his first essay is that “ontogenetic depth” is “A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure”.

Oh.

So what the heck were Paul Nelson and Marcus Ross doing? Nelson was certainly doing his best to pretend that they were actually doing real work on this metric, but I should have known better: a failed young-earth creationist philosopher could not possibly have been soiling his hands with empiricism. Now he’s frantically arguing that it doesn’t matter, that once upon a time no one knew the distance from the earth and the sun, but they could at least name the concept, so he can take credit for at least recognizing a real problem, and he can also patronizingly thank me for pointing out that they don’t actually have the tools right now to actually measure it.

Wait, how can they thank me for that? I’m picturing Nelson and Ross sitting at a microscope and looking at eggs of a nematode or a zebrafish or a frog, rubbing their hands in anticipation of a productive morning, and then staring at each other and wondering what to do next…and end up inventing a term for something that they don’t know how to measure. And then a year or so later, Nelson encounters me, I peevishly tell him that he doesn’t know how to measure cell division and differentiation in terms of a single numeric metric, and seven years after that, Nelson finally slaps his forehead and admits “Hey, we don’t know how to measure that!”

I don’t want credit for pointing out the obvious to the clueless, especially not when they’re that slow.

His first essay is an exercise in rationalizing away how he could propose this obstacle to evolution while not having the slightest idea how to measure it. His second essay is an exercise in demonstrating that he doesn’t understand basic biology. He has gussied it up with brightly colored diagrams of cell pedigrees that he purports illustrate the problem, but I think are actually more intended to distract and confuse and make you think he’s actually thought deeply about the subject.

Here’s the gist of his conceptual difficulty: he can’t imagine how the first metazoan got from a crude colonial state, where it’s just a mass of identical cells clumped together, to a state in which regions are consistently specialized for specific functional roles, with the simplest example of an animal that contains only two cell types, a mass of somatic cells that take care of feeding and motility, and a smaller mass of germ cells that do the job of reproduction. Why, that would require a whole series of mutations that selection can’t possibly explain! How could selection possibly create a cell that contains a series of instructions to build a cell type that isn’t going to reproduce?

I’m wishing that Nelson hadn’t chosen to focus on biology. If only he were a creationist philosopher of physics, he’d be the one asking, “magnets, how do they work?” and somebody else would get the job of correcting him.

Nelson summarizes the problem as, at the minimum in the simplest possible metazoan, a three step sequence. First, cells have to divide and stick together; second, they have to have a way to make daughter cells differ from one another; and third, there has to be inheritance of that differentiated state in sublineages. He claims that in none of these steps can selection be involved; this complex process had to evolve independently of any selective effects.

That’s nonsense. The first metazoan already had all the tools needed to build these steps, honed by a billion years or more of selection in single-celled organisms. All three of his steps are found in bacteria.

Step one is simply cell adhesion. Step two is gene regulation. Step three is epigenetics. That’s it. These aren’t glorious novelties invented by the first animals, they inherited this toolkit from their ancestors. Bacteria have been sticking together for billions of years, and they’ve been responding to their local environment by shifting patterns of gene expression for just as long. A bacterium in a sugar-rich environment vs. a bacterium in a sugar-poor environment will make long term changes in gene activity that can persist for a few generations using exactly the same mechanisms as an animal embryo sets up germ and somatic tissues; has Nelson never heard of Jacob and Monod?

Nelson’s argument goes beyond pure ignorance, however. He also recruits Lewis Wolpert to his side, which is remarkable. Wolpert is a brilliant and influential developmental biologist who shaped many of our ideas about differentiation, pattern formation, and evolution. He cites Wolpert as postulating as serious problems for evolution the origin of the egg, and in particular implying that Wolpert sees metazoan evolution as violating a principle. Here’s what Nelson says about a particular paper Wolpert wrote.

Evolutionary developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert — whom no one, even in his wildest delirium, would ever mistake for an ID theorist — had long critiqued the scenario on functional grounds, using what he called “the continuity principle.” (1994) The continuity principle requires that any change occurring in an evolutionary transformation be biologically possible, that is, viable and stably heritable in the next generation.

Whoa — eminent anti-creationist scientist critiques an evolutionary explanation! I’m sure this must make you wonder, familiar as you are with creationist tactics, what Wolpert actually said. Judge for yourself, here’s the abstract for Wolpert’s paper, does it sound like he’s on Nelson’s side at all?

A scenario for the evolution of a simple spherical multicellular organism from a single eukaryotic cell is proposed. Its evolution is based on environmentally induced alterations in the cell cycle, which then, by the Baldwin effect, become autonomous. Further patterning of this primitive organism–a Blastaea, could again involve environmentally induced signals like contact with the substratum, which could then become autonomous, by, perhaps, cytoplasmic localization and asymmetric cell division. Generating differences between cells based on positional information is probably very primitive, and is well conserved; its relation to asymmetric cell division is still unclear. Differentiation of new cell types can arise from non equivalence and gene duplication. Periodicity also evolved very early on. The origin of gastrulation may be related to mechanisms of feeding. The embryo may be evolutionarily privileged and this may facilitate the evolution of novel forms. Larvae are secondarily derived and direct development is the primitive condition as required by the continuity principle.

This is a paper in which Wolpert explains how multicellularity could have evolved, directly answering the questions Nelson raised with his supposedly problematic three steps. How did Paul Nelson miss that?

But wait! There’s more Wolpert abuse!

Nelson has found a paper by Wolpert in which he points out a serious problem in a particular evolutionary strategy, and Nelson, apparently primed by a selective reading of science papers for the magic words “problem”, “difficulty”, “impossible”, or “unlikely” has seized upon it as another instance of Eminent Scientist Critiquing Evolution.

What mechanism is coordinating gene expression among all the members of the colony, such that only one cell lineage will evolve to carry the complete instruction set required to specify the form of the whole? How are mutations — occurring in all individual cells of the colony — transmitted to the next generation? If individual cells continue to reproduce via normal fission, or budding, notes Wolpert, “cell lineages [will be] mutating in all sorts of directions in genetic space.” (2002, 745) Given such genetic chaos, he argues, “we consider it practically impossible” for the collection of cells to “yet retain the ability to evolve into viable new forms.”

Sounds dreadful. I give up, I guess evolution must actually be impossible.

Hang on, though, maybe we should read Wolpert’s paper first. And there what you discover is a story that you would not have expected from Nelson’s peculiarly distorted coverage. It’s a short paper where the authors consider alternative reproduction strategies: not all animals go through a single-cell stage in reproduction, you know. Some, like hydra, reproduce by budding, where a small collection of cells, not just one egg or sperm cell, splits off to form an independent organism. Wolpert is considering which solution is more advantageous for evolution, going through a single-cell bottleneck or through a larger population that would reduce the dangers of mutations? And that’s where Wolpert’s criticisms lie: the asexual budding solution is the focus of his critique, and which is where Nelson draws his quotes highlighting the difficulty of evolution.

In a hydra-like organism that only reproduces by asexual budding, it is impossible to evolve significant changes. There is no way that the genes in the huge number of cells involved in budding can change at the same time, and mutations in individual cells mean that they no longer share the behavioural rules of the majority. It is only through a coherent developmental programme, with all cells possessing the same genes, that organisms can evolve, and this requires an egg.

Huh. So Wolpert is arguing that development from a multicellular propagule is much less evolutionarily flexible than evolution from a single-celled egg. His thesis is explaining why we develop from eggs, not that our evolution is unlikely.

We consider it practically impossible to have many asexual, differentiated cell lineages mutating in all sorts of directions in genetic space and yet retain the ability to evolve into viable new forms. This may not be completely impossible but, taking the broad view in evolutionary terms, organisms that develop from an egg would displace those that do not.

Dang, Paul Nelson. You should be smart enough to know that you don’t quotemine claims from the science literature in an argument with someone who has actually read that literature.

It’s the 7th annual Paul Nelson Day!

How could I forget? Easy, actually, it’s a rather forgettable event in which nothing happens. Seven years ago, Paul Nelson invented a creationist metric, ontogenetic depth, which purportedly measures the complexity of developmental processes and somehow implies that evolution is impossible. At that time, he wasn’t able to tell us exactly what it was or how to measure it, but he promised to explain it…tomorrow. A tomorrow which has so far stretched out to seven long years, and we now annually note the anniversary.

I really don’t care anymore if Nelson ever comes up with a nonsensical rationalization. It’s symbolic. It’s representative of all the promised ‘science’ the Intelligent Design creationists have been claiming to be doing, yet never deliver. Last year I predicted that there would be no revelations from Nelson in 2011, and now I predict that in 2012, I’ll be making the same reminder.

Unless I forget. I might. It’s hard to remember a specific day on which creationists fail — that’s like every day, you know.

The Creation “Museum” makes it to the peer-reviewed literature

I’m afraid I don’t have access to this specialty journal, Curator: The Museum Journal, so it’s a good thing the author sent me a copy of his article on the modern treatment of human origins in museums. It’s amusing, since part of it is a substantial comparison of the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington DC, but there is also a thorough discussion of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” in Kentucky. The Creation Museum does not come off at all well.

Asma highlights a couple of things that leapt out to me, as well. It’s not really a museum — there’s no opportunity to explore or think, you’re given a script to follow and you may not deviate.

When I visited, I discovered no way to break off the tour at any point prior to Consummation. About two hours in, I started to get claustrophobic; the spaces seemed to get tighter and darker as I walked the eschatological narrative. I decided to step away–just as racism and crime were being blamed on Eve’s taste for forbidden fruit. I tried to find an exit to the cafeteria (“Noah’s Cafe”) so I might nourish my weakening spirit. To my horror, I discovered that one cannot actually exit anywhere along the pathway. The herding is so absolute that when you attempt to backtrack, you find that the doors you’ve been entering have no handles on the opposite side. Like someone in a haunted house, you must complete the entire circuit.

The other striking thing about it is that it is an empty shell, a hollow façade. Go to any other respectable museum in the country, such as the Science Museum of Minnesota (which does have a bit of a pop-science, entertainment quality to it), and you can find extensive collections and research facilities behind it. The part that most people visit is the public relations side, with nicely laid out exhibits and explanatory material and hands-on elements. Behind the scenes, you’ll find large rooms with shelves everywhere and buckets and barrels and crates full of specimens, the smell of formaldehyde and alcohol, and spaces full of beetle larvae gnawing away at carcasses. Not at the Creation “Museum”, though!

It’s not quite accurate to call this evangelical center a “museum.” It contains almost no “information,” unless you count as information speculations on how Noah kept dinosaurs on the ark. It offers no new observations about nature, unless you think that inferring a Designer can be called observational. Unlike most other nature museums, it has no “research” component whatsoever. When I asked Mark Looy, vice president for AiG ministry relations, where the research labs and archive collections were located, he confessed that he didn’t understand the question. “This is a museum,” he finally said, chuckling.

That’s revealing. These people don’t even know what a real museum is.

When you finally spill out of this ball of confusion into the gigantic gift shop, you become keenly aware of the unholy mixing of piety and profit. Someone is making a fortune on this stuff. The museum speaks directly to the anxieties of a fearful subculture that sees its family values under attack by a rising secular tide. The visitors at the Creation Museum feel like David, facing the secular giant Goliath. They see themselves as underdogs of righteousness who’ve chosen an origin story that’s different from the science story. Like bad reality television that drives up ratings with violent and abusive scenarios, the museum drives up profits by demonizing science. The search for meaningful origin stories is understandable, of course, but the museum’s suggestion that science causes nihilism and racism is inexcusable.

It’s actually a relief when the paper leaves the Creation “Museum” and focuses on comparing the AMNH and Smithsonian. Both are great museums, and even more glorious in contrast to that silly place in Kentucky. Asma does mention one failing of the AMNH — it made me happy to see that someone else noticed.

Near the end of the Spitzer Hall, a video kiosk presenting near-life-sized images of science administrator Ken Miller, Catholic biologist Eugenie Scott, and geneticist Francis Collins, waxes philosophical about evolution and faith. Collins, a “theistic evolutionist” who founded an organization called BioLogos in 2007 to explore religion-and-science intersections, offers most of the edifying reflections. Collins has since moved on to be the director of the National Institutes of Health–he was nominated by President Obama–but the AMNH is clearly happy to present his theory that religion and science are allies. The atheist new-guard–Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, for instance–is not invited to convey its message of religion-and-science incompatibility. The AMNH wants to reassure and accommodate visitors. The kiosk video feels like a bit of a sop, however: tacked on the end of an otherwise strong exhibition in order to pacify a specific visitor contingent.

The Smithsonian, by contrast, seems to avoid this careful placating, sensitive tiptoeing, and accommodating consideration. Refreshingly, the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins does not treat the visitor with kid gloves. The curators do not seem nervous about evangelical blowback. They don’t waste time and space repeatedly reassuring visitors with plaques and videos about the dignity of everyone’s diverse cultural beliefs.

Asma also does mention the message of these respectable museums — they actually do have a moral, even in these sections on human evolution, and it’s ecological. Creationism is over, don’t you know.

The developers of these new exhibitions worked to engage the emotions of visitors: their hearts as well as their heads. Of course, no contemporary museum is complete without a cautionary morality tale at the end, and both the AMNH and Smithsonian follow form. In the 1940s and 1950s, museum directors like Albert Eide Parr at the AMNH began to redirect their giant institutional “arks” toward the new mission of ecology education and research. In 1943, for example, Parr begged an esteemed group of curators at the Field Museum to follow his lead and focus the new museum message on local ecology rather than exotic safari-type entertainment. And besides, he argued, the old mission of educating citizens about evolution had been
successfully accomplished. That’s right– curators in the 1950s believed that evolution theory was now firmly entrenched in the common sense of mainstream America. The irony is delicious. Dim the lights, cue the diorama of Ken Ham’s evangelical anti-Darwin displays, and watch the rapid spinning of Albert Parr in his grave.

But Parr’s message has been rekindled by the recent mainstreaming of the environmental movement. Museums keenly feel the responsibility of eco-ethics. To that end, both museums stress the way that humans–uniquely, among our evolved animal brethren–can significantly transform our environment. We have become ecological niche-makers. This brings new drama to our consideration of the future. Both exhibitions educate us about the facts: the earth is getting warmer, habitats and species are disappearing, natural resources are depleting, populations are rising beyond sustainable levels, and so on. But both exhibitions resist the heavy-handed doom-and-gloom approach, and give us instead some more nuanced glimpses into our possible future. The AMNH presents an optimistic response to the apocalyptic characterization that sometimes colors eco-ethics. We are encouraged to learn that “humans have an extraordinary capacity to improve the future. Given the wondrous achievements in human history, from the wheel to computers and spacecraft, our potential for advances in art, science and technology is incalculable. By taking an active role in transforming our world and ourselves, we will affect our destiny, for better or worse.”

I think that’s appropriate. Creationism really is a freakishly weird fringe belief that is inconsistent internally and with the evidence, and needs to be dealt with with ridicule and laughter, which isn’t exactly what museums are good at. Our prospects for the future are a serious matter that can be discussed rationally, and museums — the real ones, that is, not the “museums” — are well equipped for that.

Asma ST (2011) Risen Apes and Fallen Angels: The New Museology of Human Origins. Curator: 54(2): 141-163.

The lunacy has not reached its peak yet!

Ken Ham was asked what Answers in Genesis would do next, after building a gigantic wooden boat on dry land in Kentucky, and now Mark Looy has confirmed it: they have big dreams. They want to build a copy of Solomon’s Temple. Don’t panic, though, they promise “it’s not going to be some kind of secular temple where all sorts of weird religious ceremonies are held.” That’s a relief. I thought they were going to build a place for pagan orgies.

But wait! That’s not all! They also want to build a full-scale copy of the Tower of Babel!

Uh, hang on there…haven’t they read their bible? Building a tower to heaven was what triggered the wrath of their god!

Well-deserved! Bravo!

This year’s Upchucky award, which is “bestowed upon that person or organization who persists in denying evolution despite a blizzard of empirical evidence,” has gone to a particularly deserving entity: Answers in Genesis. Their plan to build a giant “life-sized” model of a fictitious boat and use it to miseducate children is a brilliant example of upchuckiness.

Leaving creationism

We occasionally get threads full of deconversion stories here: atheists arrive at their conclusions by some very different paths, where sometimes it was an easy and natural transition, and sometimes it was painful, agonizing, and there are still deep wounds left from parting the ways with religion. Today, though, I’d like to ask a narrower question: How did you come to accept evolution?

Some of you will find the problem odd, because you’ve never believed in anything else. I know when I was growing up, despite going to Sunday School and all that nonsense, my church never mentioned the subject of evolution, either to approve or disapprove; my public school classes never discussed it, either, to their disgrace. I grew up devouring books on natural history at my local library, and absorbed the evolutionary explanations within them, only getting formal training when I entered college. It was quite a shock to me to discover what kind of absurd twaddle other people thought was real science!

But others may have been instructed early on in creationism as part of their religious upbringing, and the process of learning had to involve a lot of unlearning as well. Where were you on the continuum? Was your childhood science untainted by religious dogma, or were you a full-on bible-thumping young earth creationist, or something in between? How did you wrestle the myth to the ground and drop-kick it into the local lake?

Ken MacLeod was a youthful creationist who got better, if you need an example. He brings up another interesting point, a perspective that I share: once you recognize the fallacies behind creationism, you also realize that creationism’s promoters are not simply deluded folk — they are monsters of malice who are intentionally trying to undermine science education because it conflicts with their religious values, and they are perfectly willing to lie and slander to achieve their goals.

What quote-mining shows is that some people who produce creationist material are conscious liars. Behind these pseudo-science hacks are worse people yet. These are theologians who have the education to understand the conflict precisely. It’s not one between ‘science and the Bible’. It’s a lot more stark than that. It’s a conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible (what is loosely called ‘literalism’) and normal scientific method. There would be a certain integrity in acknowledging the conflict, admitting that there was no obvious resolution, and pointing out that we are not always given to comprehend the intent of the Ancient of Days. That at least would allow young people from these traditions to study biology and geology and astronomy without the constant arguments at home interrupting their thoughts like a buzz of static across their brains.

There’s one further ironic revenge visited on all this. A frequent complaint against the New Atheists is that they’re only arguing against fundamentalism, and ignoring the broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. This isn’t exactly true, but to the extent that it is, they’ve hit a sweet spot in the market. When I rejected fundamentalism I didn’t turn to broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. I didn’t start wondering if maybe there was something to be said for Anglicanism. I just went straight over to atheism. If this is typical, and I think it is, then there must be many for whom the New Atheist books are like water in the desert. We need no condescension from those who have already found an oasis.

I’ve interacted with a lot of creationists over the years, and one thing I’ve learned is that they aren’t necessarily stupid people: they are often accomplished, literate, successful in fields that aren’t science, and entirely capable of following some of the most byzantine threads of logic. And yet, when they are confronted with the logic of evolution, which is relatively simple and clear and also backed by impressive amounts of empirical evidence, they balk and begin to reach desperately for the worst arguments, striving to debunk the truth with dishonesty to an exceptional degree.

It’s one of the reasons I encourage students to listen to the other side. If the student has any knowledge of biology at all, they find the lies they use appalling and horrifying. And I do not hesitate to call them lies: they know better. Anyone who can ferret their way through the chaos of the Bible is smart enough to understand how to read a lucid Charles Darwin for meaning.

MacLeod’s last point about the New Atheists is also valid. Encountering fundamentalism was the trigger that woke me up to the follies and fallacies of creationism, but it also made the conscious blindness of less toxic religions obvious. Over and over again, I have witnessed the silence of the churches. Over and over again, a creationist rides into town, spouts his lies and nonsense, and who rebuts them? Usually, only the atheists. Even the liberal church congregations sit quietly, many of their members even attend these talks with muted assent, and the general attitude even from sects that don’t demand adherence to beliefs in a young earth is…let them abide.

I often hear the argument that not only is creationism bad science, it is bad theology. I don’t accept that argument at all. In part, it’s because all theology is bad, and if we’re going to start winnowing out particular religious beliefs on the basis of their nonsensical nature, we can’t stop with Genesis literalism — Jesus and Mohammed and Vishnu are all going to have to go, no matter how socially progressive their advocates might be. And it’s also because I see all those churches, each with their brand of theology, all almost entirely silent on the theological errors of their neighbors. Bad theology apparently doesn’t matter that much.

Shades of Ontogenetic Depth!

I’m pleased to see that the Intelligent Design creationists do actually occasionally challenge themselves — it’s just too bad that they trip and fall flat every time they do. Over at Uncommon Descent, that hotbed of hot air hosted by William Dembski, one poster slipped the leash and asked an uncomfortable question: how do we calculate Dembski’s measure of ‘complexity’, CSI, or Complex Specified Information? She didn’t know. It turns out that almost 300 comments in the subsequent thread are spinning their wheels — they don’t know either.

Doesn’t this sound just like Ontogenetic Depth, the magic metric Paul Nelson invented to describe the history of complexity of life on earth, which he couldn’t define and couldn’t explain how it was calculated? An immeasurable metric is a curious thing to hang a science on, I think.

By the way, we’re coming up on the 7th anniversary of Paul Nelson’s failure to deliver a promised explanation. I’m getting old here. He must be hoping to just outlive me.

Danged dirty hippies!

The fine folks at Answers in Genesis are working themselves into a good lather over the fact that they were expelled from homeschool conferences for being too obnoxious and intolerant. Recall that the the Christians doing the banning are also young earth creationist/evangelical/fundamentalist crazies when you read this characterization by Nathan Ham, Ken’s son:

Some Christians today are like the hippies of 50 years ago who used the word “love” to justify their fornications and sins against the word of God. The hippie culture is often pictured as a group of drug-addicted, fornicating drunks whose catchphrase “make love, not war” gave their movement a false sense of piety.

Sir, I have known many hippies in my life, and I have greatly admired them. I resent the fact that you have such a grossly muddled idea of what being a hippie is all about to the point where you think the puckered-sphinctered, pursed-lipped, suit-wearing, dogmatic, jebus-lovin’ dingleberries of the Great Homeschool Convention’s Advisory Board are anything like hippies.

They’re all the same, I’m afraid: Stepford Creationists

Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I’m already functioning on a pool of fatigued neurons). Zedler really is an idiot; the entire interview is a series of non sequiturs as Zedler blindly recites from the creationist script. Here’s an example:

Mother Jones: Are you a creationist?


Bill Zedler: Evolutionists will go “Oh, it just happened by chance.” Today we know that’s false. Today we know that even a single-celled organism is hugely complex. When was the last time we’ve seen someone go into a windstorm or a tornado or any other kind of natural disaster, and say “Guess what? That windstorm just created a watch.”

First sentence: No credible scientist claims evolution is a theory solely of chance. It wouldn’t be a very interesting theory if it were, now would it?

Second sentence: I know it’s false that Bill Zedler has sex with chicken corpses.

Third sentence: Yes, cells are complex. So? Complexity can be produced by chance, so announcing an irrelevant fact does not challenge his strawman version of evolution, anyway.

Fourth sentence: Job 38:1. “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind”. So the last time anyone claimed a windstorm created a watch, it was their god. Scientists aren’t the ones claiming that purely chance forces assemble functional complexes.

I have to say that ol’ Bill Paley was a smart guy for his time, a persuasive writer, and extremely influential…but every time some clueless creationist drags out a watch analogy, I want to build a time machine, go back to 1743, and strangle him in his crib.

Of course, then someone else would invent some catchy but irrelevant parallel, and creationists would be endlessly recycling the same tired metaphor, whatever it was. It’s been over 200 years; can they please come up with something original now?