David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom, three creationists working at the Creation “Museum”, have written an outraged op-ed correcting some misconceptions about them. I read this far before I had to stop:

For one, the guest columnist, Roger Guffey, claimed there were no “serious” scientists who are creationists. We are full-time Ph.D. researchers with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, and we will be helping to design the full-scale Noah’s Ark and other attractions to be built north of Lexington.

There are thousands of serious scientists who doubt evolution. At the Creation Museum, we have full-time staff with earned doctorates (one from an Ivy League school) in astrophysics, geology, cell biology, genetics, medicine and the history of geology, plus several adjunct speakers and researchers who hold doctorate degrees.

Our intrepid three claim to be scientists, part of a body of real, genuine, credentialed scientists who support the claims of Answers in Genesis. Let’s stop right there. There’s something you have to understand about the staff of the Creation “Museum”: they all have to sign a testimonial that asserts, among other things, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. These are self-proclaimed scientists who flout the evidence to argue for an absurd conclusion. I’m not talking about “interpreting the same facts” differently, as they like to claim, but ignoring and denying the evidence that refutes their dogma.

That’s all you need to know. David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom are all absolutely certain that the creation of the earth is an event that occurred somewhere near the end of human prehistory, which was itself a very late, geologically recent event in the history of the universe. How absurd is that claim?

The city of Jericho — it’s in the Bible, look it up — is 11,000 years old. Isn’t it remarkable that a city with a population of zero sprang up on a planet that didn’t exist at the time? The chthonic dingleberries of Answers in Genesis would apparently have you believe one of our oldest urban centers must have been floating in the primordial chaos, waiting for Jehovah to conjure up the Jordan river and the West Bank and the Middle East and the Mediterranean and the firmament and the sun and stars.

Six thousand years ago, the Plano culture was hunting bison on the Great Plains. The predynastic Egyptians of the Naqada period were colonzing the Nile. The precursors to the Indus River civilization were making copper tools and growing barley. The Mesopotamians were building city states. The people of the Hongshan culture were carving jade dragons in northeastern China; the Yangshao were producing silk along the Yangtze river; the Majiabang people were cultivating rice and pigs. The ancient Britons were building tombs and erecting wooden posts on Salisbury plain, precursors to Stonehenge. The Funnelbeaker people were trading pottery across northern Europe, while the Chasséen people were living in a village near the site of modern Paris. All this at a time when the human population of planet Earth, according to this risible trio, was two. What did Adam and Eve do? Commute a lot?

People were manipulating the precursors to modern wheat, rice, barley, taro, and soy at least 9000 years ago; Sumerians had invented irrigation 7000 years ago; and Mesoamericans began to tweak teosinte by artificial selection about 6000 years ago. The crops we grow are the product of millennia of selection and cultivation, and show the marks of our ancient biotechnology. The bread that God casually commanded Adam to sweat over and eat for all the days of his life after the Fall was already the product of thousands of years of development.

A middle-aged woman in northern Israel died and was buried with her puppy dog…twelve thousand years ago. We know the first dogs with skeletal indications of domestication appeared over 30,000 years ago. What kind of crazy cosmology do the loons of AiG have when they have to account for a world they claim is 24,000 years younger than Fido and Rover?

There is a colonial colony of shrubs in Tasmania called King’s Lomatia that is probably over 40,000 years old. They can’t produce sexually, so they’ve just been propagating vegatively, clone after clone after clone, right through the whole creation of the world, according to a certain small dismal clan of meretricians. In fact, those plants were well into late middle age when the god of the Hebrews purportedly decided to create real estate.

According to these “scientists,” all of modern geology, from the Himalayas to the ocean trenches, was formed in one immense cataclysmic event that occurred over the course of a single year, four thousand years ago; an event that essentially sterilized all multicellular life on Earth except for one small family and their livestock who weathered the catastrophe in a wooden boat. That was some disaster, and that must have been some boat.

Now the people who believe this unscientific nonsense claim to be “serious scientists.” I don’t think so. They haven’t demonstrated that their superstitions are serious science at all; all they’ve shown is that some few people who are totally nuts can graduate with doctorates. Which is not a surprise, and is actually a far more parsimonious conclusion than their bizarre idea that all of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology are completely wrong.

The Lexington Herald-Leader has posted a copy of the executive summary. Just in case it goes away, here is a pdf of the 18-page executive summary; it’s a strangely fact-free document, relying on surveys and opinion polls to make estimates about economic impact. I’m serious: in the section that justifies the claim that it will bring in 1.2 million visitors a year, the sole source of information given is the results of a nationwide survey in which people were asked whether they’d take a family vacation to see Noah’s Ark, and 3 in 5 said they would.

I am reminded of surveys that evaluate how many Americans go to church — many more say they do than show up in church parking lots. This is not a reliable way to make attendance projections. A better way would be to make estimates from known, similar attractions in that part of the country, but they probably didn’t want to mention the bankrupt Heritage USA.

The most hilarious bit in their justification, though, is this:

CBS’ 60 Minutes news program, in conjunction with Vanity Fair magazine, recently conducted a survey asking which archaeological discovery would people want to be made next. The response: Noah’s Ark (43%), Atlantis (18%), Amelia Earhart’s plane (16%), Nixon’s lost tapes (13%), and Cleopatra’s barg (5%). Noah’s Ark continues to capture the imagination of the general public, and this interest spans all social, religious, and economic segments. The Ark and the Flood is one of the few historical events which are well known in the worldwide global circle.

That sort of says it all about the foundation of their “research”. A public opinion poll about what discovery ought to be made next (as if it’s a matter of choice) is irrelevant; the Ark Park is not going to be an archaeological discovery, and the most damning thing about the top two items is that they’re both mythological, and neither the Ark nor Atlantis ever existed. The claim that interest in the Ark spans all segments of society is clearly hyperbole — I don’t see much interest on the part of atheists or scientists, ever.

The ark and the flood are not historical events.

It’s a lot of fluff and wishful thinking. Sorry, Kentucky, you’re being taken for a ride.

Ken Ham is not happy with the Pope. If the Pope claims that his god started the Big Bang, that is an acknowledgment that the Big Bang, which is not in the Bible, actually happened, and you know what that leads to? Madness!

Now, if the book of Genesis is an allegory, then sin is an allegory, the Fall is an allegory, the need for a Savior is an allegory, and Adam is an allegory—but if we are all descendants of an allegory, where does that leave us? It destroys the foundation of all Christian doctrine—it destroys the foundation of the gospel.

Yes! Exactly!

If Genesis is an allegory then the first marriage is just an allegory, so marriage can be anything one wants to define it as!

QED!

Yay! Ken Ham has demolished Christianity! I think I’ll go have some tea to celebrate. Maybe take a nap, or read a comic book.

This brief exchange captures it all.

Just to put it in text: creationist ignoramus posts amazing “fact” in his status:

** Fact- if the earth was 10 ft closer to the sun we would all burn up and if it was 10 ft further we would freeze to death… God is amazing!

Someone politely replies, stating the actual astronomical facts.

to anyone wondering, that’s not true. 1) Earth’s orbit is elliptical and the distance from the sun varies from around 147 million kilometers to 152 million kilometers on any given year. 2) Every star has a habitable zone that is affected by the size of the star and its intensity. The Sun’s habitable zone is about 0.95 AU to 1.37 AU. An AU is the Earth’s average distance from the sun, 93 million miles, so Earth’s orbit could decrease by 4,500,000 miles or increase by 34,000,000 mises and still be in the habitable zone. 3) If your claim was true any moderately sized earthquake could take us out of the habitable zone. sorry.

The facebook status was hilarious enough, but his reply is simply perfect.

Okay thats cool and alll but dont ever comment on my status telling me that i am wrong everrrr again. I didnt ask you did i? Answer: NO

LALALALALA — I CAN’T HEAR YOU!

People don’t realize how insane the literal interpretation of the Bible can get. There is no room for ambiguity or error in the book of Genesis, so when God tells Noah to put at least a pair of every living thing on the big boat, he didn’t offer any exceptions — therefore, every living thing had a representative aboard.

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.
Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

What this means to the Ken Hams of the world is that they can definitively say that every ‘kind’ of creature was on the Ark, so if an animal exists or is mentioned in the Bible, it had an ancestor there. So yes, they claim that dinosaurs had to be on the Ark. The Bible says so!

Which leads to some interesting conclusions. You know what else had to be on the boat? Dragons and unicorns. We have it straight from Answers in Genesis.

Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales because it mentions unicorns. However, the biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature.

Modern readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.

The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick . . . . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.”

To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.

The Unicorn Museum was a joke idea, created to mock the Creation “Museum”, but, ha ha ha, it’s really hard to be more ridiculous than Ken Ham.

Oh, and yes, firebreathing dragons. In a “museum”. To do otherwise would be to demean God’s Word, don’t you know.

And the state of Kentucky is throwing away $40 million in tax breaks on this kitschy exercise in fantasy. Don’t forget the hidden costs, either, or the effect on the state’s reputation.

Joe wrote me a letter because he doesn’t think my arguments against creationism are very good. Unfortunately, his arguments are…well, pretty much the standard inconsistent and incoherent tripe I always get from creationists. But at least Joe has an excuse: he’s only 12.

By the way, his email actually was in Comic Sans. Part of it, anyway: a large random chunk in the middle was set in good ol’ Comic Sans.

Hello. This is not Spam. I would like to have a discussion on your post ‘The five best arguments for creationism ever.’ (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/the_five_best_arguments_for_cr.php) Where you try to disprove theory’s made by creationists on a news paper article I left a comment but I feel that your points are not strong and I (being a twelve year old kid) would like to argue them further the other way. Here is the comment that I left (well i changed it a bit from my original comment).
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. We have lots of evidence between evolution with in a species BUT NOT BETWEEN SPECIES its called the missing link!

The “missing link” is copy from tabloid journalism. There is no “missing link”, scientists are not looking for one, and it’s silly to argue that we have to find something that evolution does not predict.

It’s populations that evolve, and we have plenty of examples of transitional forms. Look up ring species, or Tiktaalik, or whale fossils, or any of the hominid fossils. What you are calling the “missing links” are out there, and closing your eyes won’t make them go away.

2.Just because the earth is obviously old doesn’t mean that this point is incorrect as got could have easy created a pre-aged earth (god dint create Adam and eave as babies, he created them pre-aged.

OK, that’s fine; you’ve just invoked a major magic trick by a deceiver god. That is a possibility that would account for the existence of all that evidence for evolution, but then you don’t get to deny the existence of “missing links”; that’s part of the evidence for an old earth that your trickster deity salted in the ground.

3. The compound eye is an example of irreducible complexity so complex that it cannot be any less complex its ether an eye or it isn’t there is no evolution in the middle. Another example of irreducible complexity is blood clotting.

Irreducible complexity is a dead issue, I’m afraid. It’s no obstacle to evolution, the examples of IC that creationists frequently trot out, like the clotting cascade, are explainable by natural processes.

4. It is true that some creationists think that ‘the bible uses allegory to explain the creation of the earth. It is a story, so employs figures of speech and other literary devices to tell the story of how God created man e.g. Genesis “days” could also be read as “ages”.’ but I don’t see what the newspapers point is there.

The newspaper tried to suggest that there were reasonable scientific arguments in favor of a young earth, that is, an earth less than ten thousand years old. It was wrong; there are none.

By the way, you haven’t presented an argument here. Have you run out?

5. Evolutionists have not, cannot ant will not prove evolution… mainly because they have not cannot and will not find the missing link.

This is the same as your first argument. I guess you really are done.

So you’ve managed to come up with a grand total of three arguments: the first is built on a misconception and denial of the evidence; the second simply argues that it was all magic; and the third simply regurgitates an intelligent design creationism buzz phrase. That’s a rather poor performance.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have a problem with many science teachers teaching evolution. If you are going to teach students evolution you need to teach students all the opposing theories. I

however Evolution and Creation may not be opposite and it may be that they merge together as the book of genesis is taken by many to be a story of figures of speech and literary devices and therefore can mean that evolution may merge into that. And personally given better evidence I may be able to accept that idea however I refuse to believe that man evolved from any other species because man is created in gods image and any other species are not.

Your refusal to believe in the evidence because you don’t like the conclusions is fairly typical creationist thinking, and it’s also illogical and wrong. There is no reason to accept the book of Genesis as a legitimate source of scientific information, and your refusal to consider the possibility that it isn’t a science text and gets all the science wrong puts you out of the realm of scientific thinking.

Via Sandwalk, this is a clip of Paul Nelson praising Jonathan Wells and his godawful gemisch of bad scholarship and lies, Icons of Evolution. They were making a big to-do over the ten-year anniversary of publication of this ghastly hackwork, and here Nelson is piously praising the premise.

It’s infuriatingly dishonest. Notice what he repeats over and over: the textbooks “diverge from the actual evidence,” they’re “out of touch with the actual evidence,” we “need to take these standard stories back to the evidence.” This, from the Discovery Institute, a propaganda mill with no evidence for their fantasies about design at all. There is such an egregious disconnect between what Nelson says and what he and his cronies do that I half-expected his sanctimonious head to explode. If you’re an intelligent design creationists, you do not have the privilege of hectoring others about evidence.

Furthermore, he’s spewing this nonsense in praise of Icons of Evolution, a book to which honesty and evidence are words in a strange foreign language…yet Nelson claims the message of that book is that textbook authors need to be “scrupulous about accuracy” — and yet those scruples are never applied to Wells, and further, Nelson is more than a little self-serving here: he is co-author on another awful DI production, Explore Evolution, which is little more than a warmed-over edition of Icons, and which has also been panned in reviews.

And then Nelson says the “response was much more hostile than I would have guessed.” He claims the hostility was because they were airing “dirty laundry,” which is simply wrong. The hostility derived from the fact that it was an appallingly bad work of misrepresentation and misleading innuendo, all on the service of an intellectually bankrupt theology.

On top of Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, Wells rehashed the same lies again in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. It’s become obvious that the Wells has gone dry: he’s simply repeating the same errors and phony arguments over and over again. This is not a man or work that warrants praise, but only condemnation and contempt.

In the past, I’ve focused on one specific issue that Wells repeatedly brings up, the idea that Haeckel’s embryos are some kind of ongoing problem for evolution. There are a lot of articles on Pharyngula on this subject, but I’ll just point to this one omnibus summary of links to articles on Haeckel and Wells, and briefly explain the nature of this ‘controversy’. There is a 19th century observation, made by multiple scientists and easily replicated today, that embryos go through a period called the phylotypic stage (and in vertebrates, called the pharyngula stage), in which species within a phylum exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity to one another. This is simply a fact: stop by my lab and I can pull out a series of slides of birds and mammals and reptiles and fish and show you how they all exhibit a set of characters, the presence of a tailbud and pharyngeal arches and somites and so forth, that are the hallmark of this relatively well-conserved stage. Now in the 19th century, Haeckel over-interpreted them to postulate a recapitulation of evolution within the development of an embryo, an idea now known to be false; Wells strategy has always been to point to an obsolete and falsified explanation for the similarities to argue that the evolutionary relationships are untenable. It’s a sleazy sleight of hand. Recapitulation theory is not in any way endorsed any more, but the similarities at the phylotopic stage are undeniable…yet Wells condemns any textbook that even shows photos of embryonic similarities.

That’s the central problem here. We have a phenomenon, the similarities between embryos at one stage of development, for which the creationists have no explanation, so they’re reduced to frantically denying the phenomenon. This isn’t the way science should work. The phenomenon is real; that these common similarities between embryos is better explained by common descent than by design may make creationists uncomfortable, but what a scientist should do is find an answer, not try to wave the problem away (or worse, accuse everyone who has seen these similarities as guilty of fraud).

I’d go further than to argue that the creationists are trying to hide data that defies their ideology. They’re trying to bury something that is almost paradigmatic of juicy, exciting science. There are a couple of properties of significant scientific questions that I consider emblematic of exactly the kind of work that is of great value.

1. It has to address a universal phenomenon. The problem of phylotypy isn’t representative of all of life by any means, but it seems to be a near-universal within the animal kingdom. Why do organisms as diverse as insects and mammals exhibit this morphological bottleneck in their development? It’s a great question; it doesn’t deserve to be swept under the rug as the creationists would like to do.

2. It has to be a non-trivial problem. Trying to figure out exactly what is going on in phylotypy isn’t easy, because the current best hypotheses all involve interactions within complex gene networks, not the most tractable problem, and solving it will require both comparative and computational tools. It’s the complexity of the subject that makes it both challenging and rewarding to solve.

3. One thing guaranteed to spur interest if the postulated mechanisms are controversial. Proposed mechanisms for phylotypy are non-Darwinian: they involve selection for intrinsic properties of networks of developmental genes that establish large scale properties of embryonic patterning. Notice that it isn’t anti-Darwinian, or the creationists would be happy with it; the mechanism fits within the context of our understanding of evolution, but extends it somewhat to include conservation of a kind of sophisticated, modular array of genes that work together to build the body plan. It’s not just the alleles that matter, but the connections between them.

4. Maybe I should have mentioned this one first. A key quality of good science is that it is doable — we have to be able to sit down and do measurements and experiments. Truth be told, a lot of ordinary science doesn’t engage the first three principles I listed above as much as it permits the rapid and routine collection of data. The phylotypy hasn’t been quite so tractable, and to move beyond a kind of morphological phenomenology that has characterized much of the work so far, requires comparative analysis of large dataset of developmental gene expression data. Until recently, that kind of information simply hasn’t been available.

I used the past tense there: that data hasn’t been available. But that’s changing fast now with new techniques in molecular and developmental biology, and later today I’ll summarize a couple of beautiful recent articles that have revealed some of the underpinnings of the phylotypic stage. The creationists weren’t just wrong, they’re on the wrong side of history, and day by day they are bing shown to be increasingly far off base.