Remember that horrible, stupid, no-good article about chickens and eggs, the one that used the identification of a protein important in egg shell formation to claim chickens had to have come before eggs, with no comparative data, no appreciation of the logic of evolutionary theory, and absolutely no respect for the evidence? Yeah, that one. The article that ought to have embarrassed both the journalist and the scientist involved.

Well, somebody liked it. They liked it a lot. Guess who?

Ken Ham.

He likes it because he thinks it means that chickens couldn’t have evolved, that their putative non-chicken ancestors wouldn’t have been able to lay eggs, so his god had to have abracadabraed them into existence. Then he makes this prediction:

I wouldn’t be surprised if atheist scientists will loudly complain that this study actually supports the creation account in Genesis and then try to attack the research.

No, we’re complaining about this study because its interpretation was mangled beyond belief by the reporter and scientist. It says nothing about the ancestors of chickens or their closest relatives, and so can’t really come to the conclusion that the protein examined appeared de novo in Gallus gallus. It can’t support Genesis. It can’t support anything, because it is bad science.

There have been some recent surveys of attitudes towards evolution and the state of science education in the US, and I’ve mainly used tables in presentations — so it’s nice to see some eye-catching graphical representations of the data. Use these!

One thing surprised me — usually, this datum is presented in a positive light, but it’s always bugged me. 28% of science teachers accept that evolution occurred, and god had nothing to do with it; 47% of science teachers accept evolution, but believe that god guided it. That 47% is typically presented as no problem, these are the teachers on our side. Not in this graph!

Those are teachers who believe in Intelligent Design.

Yes, they are. And complaining that they aren’t those Discovery Institute frauds because they believe it is their god that does the designing doesn’t get them off the hook, it just makes them plain old creationists.

The only difference is that usually the teachers in that 47% aren’t actively trying to undermine the science they present in the classroom, so the situation isn’t quite as dire as the chart implies — but they’re still afflicted with a superstition that is grossly unscientific and an obstacle to embracing the concepts of science. And it’s probably a factor in the graph on the page just above this image, which shows how little time is spent on classroom teaching of evolution: in all of high school, half of the students get less than an hour or two of exposure to the ideas of human evolution.

I can testify to that. Most of my freshman students are remarkably naive about evolution, and from personal experience…I’m one of the percentage of students that had absolutely no instruction in evolution in high school. It wasn’t even mentioned, and I was one of those kids who was largely self-taught in grade-school biology, and was looking for it.

Those slippery rascals at Answers in Genesis have been doing research, they say, and Jason Lisle claims to have discovered something radical.

I have been working for some time on solving the “distant starlight problem.” This is the issue of how starlight from the most distant galaxies is able to reach earth within the biblical timescale. Although light is incredibly fast, the most distant galaxies are incredibly far away. So, under normal circumstances we would be inclined to think that it should take billions of years for their starlight to reach us. Yet, the Bible teaches that the universe is only thousands of years old. Solutions have been proposed by creationists, but we haven’t had a definitive answer…until now.

It has taken a lot of time and effort, but I have found a solution to distant starlight which allows light to reach earth virtually instantaneously. Moreover, I have found both Scriptural and scientific support for this solution. This has led to the development of a new cosmological model which makes testable predictions. I have nearly finished writing a technical paper on this topic, which will shortly be sent to various experts for qualified peer-review. If it passes peer-review, we will publish the paper in the Answers Research Journal. This is our free, online journal. So be watching for it. If the paper gains the support of experts in the field, I may later write a non-technical article that summarizes the model.

Hang on there: virtually instantaneous travel from distant stars to the earth? This would constitute a rather substantial upheaval in our thinking about physics, I would think, and would be gigantic news. So why is he peddling it around to the tame friends of creationism for ‘peer review’? Why is he aiming to publish in a bottom-of-the-barrel fake journal, which is little more than a propaganda broadsheet?

If he’s really made this amazing breakthrough, he ought to be sending his technical paper to more prestigious journals, like Nature and Science and Physics Review Letters and Cosmopolitan. Publishing in Answers Research Journal is an admission of failure.

Oh, well, I’m willing to accept a diamond from a dungheap. Let’s see this paper!

I know, I know already. We’re getting creationist and religious ads appearing on the right sidebar.

Seed has farmed out some of their ad space to a generic ad provider, which doesn’t pay us much and which stuffs in ridiculous ads from any old desperate wanker who wants to buy some attention. In this particular case, I know the guy behind the ad: he was one of those obsessed cranks who, for a while, was sending me nagging emails every day demanding that I read his ReVoLuTiOnArY ThEoRy. I guess he got tired of the cold shoulder and decided to buy space on the web, a sure measure of exactly how much validity we should assign to his claims, i.e., none.

Anyway, I read his site so you don’t have to. Really, you don’t: these are ads paid for by impressions, not clicks, so every time you load this page and get served up that ad, you are costing him money. So don’t click on the ad at all, that’s what gives him a sense of accomplishment. The best thing you can do is visit Scienceblogs over and over again, bleeding away the money he sunk into the ad and transferring it to my pocket, and never once click on it.

Anyway, his schtick is really clumsy. He wants you to visit his page in which he makes lots of dramatic claims, and then in order to go on and read more, you have to give him a name and address and get on his mailing list. Don’t do it. It’s like signing up for a subscription to have moldy maggoty tapioca poured in your ear every day.

Here’s what he says if you were to waste your time clicking on his ad. It’s a prediction that Darwinism will expire in a few years.

It’s no different than the Berlin Wall in 1986, Enron in 2000 or the US financial markets 3 years ago: It’s a bubble propped up by academic theorists, atheist zealots, politics and shell games – not hard science.

All that needs to happen is for the right 3-5 scientists to step forward and expose the evolution industry for what it is…. and it’s not a question of “IF”, it’s only a question of WHEN. Darwinism has about 2-5 years left. And when the !@#$ hits the, fan it’s it’s gonna be quite a spectacle.

But that’s not the important part! The real crime is that the “evolutionists” never bothered to tell you how evolution REALLY works. The evolutionary process is neither random nor accident. It’s purposeful, it’s pre-programmed, it’s so ingenious and elegant it takes your breath away.

In fact the evolutionary paradigm I’m about to share with you was first proposed more than 60 years ago. It was an object of derision and ridicule until it won the Nobel Prize for Science in 1983.

No, he doesn’t actually share the secrets with you. You have to sign up for his ego-serving mailing list, and then he’ll tell you. Maybe. He was dunning me with email for a long time, and he never managed to say anything that made sense or even revealed a speck of biological knowledge. He’s an electrical engineer and he’s an idiot. Surprise!

By the way, there is no Nobel Prize for Science. There is a Nobel Prize in Physics, which was won in 1983 by Chandresekhar and Fowler for work on stellar evolution and the formation of elements; I don’t think that’s it. There’s a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, won by Henry Taube for work on electron transfer reactions; even less likely. Then there’s the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, won by Barbara McClintock for the discovery of mobile genetic elements; BINGO. McClintock’s work was certainly surprising, amazing, wonderful…and also difficult to understand, and I can tell you that I’ve always been dazzled by the astounding insight she brought to that work, but no, it doesn’t revolutionize evolution in any way. It’s all pure genetics, no magic, and certainly has no implication of a designer.

As for his claim that Darwinism is in trouble and will end in 2013 — <snore>. It’s a creationist cliche, and they’ve been saying this since before Darwin. Predictions that evolution is doomed have been collected by Glenn Morton in The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism.
The funniest one there is Dembski’s prediction in 2004 that “molecular Darwinism” will be dead in the next five years. The only interesting thing about these predictions is that they set a date for the next creationist-mocking party. See you in 2013!

People are still going to the ghastly Creation “Museum” in Kentucky — it’s actually doing a bang-up business. Fortunately, some of the people going are critics who can see its troubling flaws.

When I went, what leapt out at me was the intellectual dishonesty of the place; it mimics a museum, but it isn’t, and it pretends to understand evolution when it doesn’t. I walked through it with a little alarm bell in my head going “wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong” nonstop.

Ideas Man picks up on another aspect of the “museum”: it’s a temple to fear. Everywhere you go, it portrays violence and bloody conflict, not just as the legacy of our past, but something to prepare for right now. I pointed out the raving paranoia of Ken Ham earlier, and honestly, the museum is the product of a mind convinced that it is persecuted, that there shall be redemption in blood, and that mass murder really is justifiable if God says so.

The whole flood exhibit is particularly appalling. Look at the loving detail in this diorama; those are the sinners suffering and dying in God’s global punishment. There was a very cold video being shown there, portraying children playing innocently in a small village when the awful wave of the coming deluge rises on the horizon…and all are killed. It’s very weird that on the one hand, they portray secular life as depravity and drugs and sex and crime, but on the other, their god is an unholy monster who slaughters children — and that’s OK!

What the “museum” actually is is an effective exhibit of intellectual terrorism — you will accept its worldview, or you will die horribly. And if you already accept that view, you can smugly wallow in the certainty that all those elitist jerks who think they’re smarter than you will suffer.

Let’s ask ourselves, once again, what the museum actually does. If it in fact does something very well and if the thing that it does it does as a function of its central narrative, we ought to assume that that is its primary ideological function. It is from this perspective that we’ll understand the Museum as a work of art, an ideological work of art, art for the sake of ideology or, perhaps, better, ideology for the sake of ideology.

What exactly did the museum do?

It scared. It scared us because it’s scary. And it’s scary because it’s supposed to be scary.

So why is it supposed to be scary? How does its fear function?
Let’s see if we can hear anything from the horse’s mouth:

One of the things that Ken Hamm told us when he was was giving his presentation was along the following lines: “you know, a lot of people ask me why we have such a realistic scene of Adam sacrificing an animal right when you walk into the Corruption room, but actually that’s one of my favorite exhibits because it shows the importance of sacrifice. It shows that we need to sacrifice to live after the Fall.”

Did you notice the weird shift that happened there?

Sacrifice is an important theme in Christianity, right? Well, of course. After the Fall, we are all mortal and our morality means suffering. Our suffering means loss. Loss means economy and sacrifice. On the traditional account, Christ “pays the infinite debt for us.” In other words on the traditional account, self-sacrifice is the redemption of suffering.

That’s not exactly how it works in the Creation Museum’s logic: there, sacrifice is demanded because the world is a bloody place. We don’t see Adam suffering: we see Adam sacrificing. Christ’s death isn’t taken to redeem the suffering of Adam, it’s a grotesque mimicry of the sacrifice we saw him doing. Suffering is passive. Sacrifice is active.

It’s a violent world. The message of the “museum” is to revel in that violence, because it is God’s will. And you can help!

Here we go again, another creationist who doesn’t understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He’s criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way.

I’ve never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result of a mindless, purposeless process and thus fundamentally untrustworthy as a reality-processor. (Would you want to buy a “word-processor” made by a random, purposeless process? Would you trust it?)

I’ve never heard a Darwinist complain they’ve been given a crappy brain never designed for abstract thought, or, indeed for thought at all. And yet, according to the self-same Darwinist, the brain is not designed for anything, just like the heart is not designed, the knee is not designed, the eye is not designed, etc. They all just popped out of the ooze, on their own, for no purpose, and if you’ve got problems with that, you’re not very Bright™!

I’ll complain! I have a very bad brain for the purposes I want to use it for. It’s pretty good, but prone to awkward mistakes, for deciphering behavioral cues and inferring intent in my conspecifics, which is still a useful skill, but other functions, like the ability to search out fruit and tubers, or to coordinate a hunting party, or to detect predators lying in wait, I’ve let slide out of a lack of utility. I’d like a brain that could hold more than half a dozen numbers at once in my head, or that wasn’t prone to perceptual errors, or that could process written information a bit more efficiently than this linear, one-word-or-phrase-at-a-time parsing. I wish I had a memory that could accurately record events and scenes, rather than storing a few key hints and reconstructing the rest. I’d like a brain that was actually evolved for doing mathematics naturally, rather than requiring years of discipline and training to acquire the skill artificially.

We really do have very untrustworthy brains. The capacity for abstract, rational thought is a byproduct of general cognitive capacity, and doesn’t come easily to any of us. We have to work at it, and some of us, as is well demonstrated by creationists, never quite get the hang of it.

We even build crutches for brains. Math is a crutch. Science is a crutch. Philosophy is a crutch. Artists, too, use learned heuristics to get their minds to operate reliably in that unnatural mode. We rely utterly on these kinds of intellectual tools to focus our brains efficiently on problem solving, rather than doing what comes naturally, which usually involves snarfing down cheeseburgers and having wild monkey sex with other bipeds.

So yeah, we have crappy brains never designed for abstract thought. What we have are brains shaped by the exigencies of survival — we have big brains simply because of chance and the fact that having a smaller brain, in our peculiar niche, meant you either died or didn’t get laid. We make do. We haven’t been gifted with brains that would be better suited to our current urban/technological lifestyles.

Same with hearts, knees, and eyes. The current forms have been sculpted by time and chance to be good enough to keep us alive. All of them show signs of suboptimality, I can safely say as a fellow who needs glasses, has to watch his blood pressure and cholesterol, and has been plagued with a wobbly knee since he was a teenager. I’ll keep my back, prostate, and teeth in reserve, if we really need more examples of problematic ‘design’.

I’ll leave the strawman claim of derived structures popping whole and complete out of some mysterious ooze out of the argument, too. That’s just stuff you say when you’ve got a particularly stupid, malfunctioning brain. Although, actually, it does make my argument for me…

Last week, the hilarity was that Rand Paul refused to say how old he thought the earth was. The new chew toys are creationist apologists for ignorance trying to justify it, while also refusing to state how old they think the earth is. The amusement lies in the way these guys puff themselves up into a state of moral superiority while claiming that scientists are dogmatists…because, you know, they know stuff.

I don’t know the age of the earth, but I know that someone who thinks that someone who doesn’t know the age of the earth should have a position on the age of the earth anyway is a dogmatist. What else could he be?

This is the curious thing about people who hold to Darwinism: they demand that people with no scientific expertise hold scientific opinions. But on what basis? Many people can’t hold them on a basis of scientific knowledge, since they don’t have sufficient scientific knowledge to hold them. There is only one basis upon which they can hold them, and it is the basis upon which Darwinists demand they hold them: on the basis of authority.

Nah, it’s simpler than that. We read the books — even the simple books for the lay public — and they describe the evidence for the age of the earth, and they also explain how the data is used to explore deeper into geology. I’m not a physicist or geologist, but it’s relatively easy to get an overview of the host of data used to support estimates of the age of the earth, to see the degree of detail geologists have at hand, and it’s also even easier to see that working geologists and physicists, people with in-depth training in their fields, are not arguing over whether the earth is 6000 or 4.6 billion years old; the issue is settled.

It’s not dogmatism, it’s pragmatism. The depth of science is so great that no one brain can even grasp the whole of a single subfield, so we trust our colleagues — at least, we trust them as far as they demonstrate cooperation with the tacit rules of the institution of science, which safeguard to some extent the reliability of a scientific claim. The relevant scientists say the earth is 4.6 billion years old, and they are all willing to show their work, so I’ll provisionally accept it until I see a reliable source provide cantrary evidence. A cowardly creationist who won’t even set a rough date is not a reliable source.

It’s fine if someone doesn’t know how old the earth is, if it’s not at all relevant to what they do. I don’t do spot checks on plumbers and carpenters and electricians who come by my house, making sure they know the date of the Permian extinction before I let them do their job. But there are a couple of situations where I think it is appropriate to insist on some basic understanding.

If you are a scientist of any kind, you’d better be aware of the general location in space and time of your planet. It’s not too much to ask, most of us went through a nerdy phase (lasting practically our entire life) in which we devoured all kinds of general knowledge, and we kind of figured out how old the earth is in 4th grade. If we were a bit slow. We also puzzled out that the planet was a rough spheroid in an elliptical orbit approximately 8 light-minutes from our sun. Other kids might have been accumulating baseball knowledge or memorizing the lyrics to pop songs, but Our People learned other things.

If you are a politician, you don’t need to know the scientific data directly, but you’d better be competent to delegate, and you’d better know who in the scientific and engineering community, and that means it’s a good idea to have some information about the scientific consensus. You don’t want to appoint somebody to head the department of energy who thinks the power grid taps into electricity from the sun, or that oil was created in situ in the last 6000 years. It matters when Rand Paul runs away from a basic scientific question, because it means he doesn’t have the competence to judge who will be a good advisor or not. It also tells us that he does not have the political courage to fight for good science-based policy.

The third category is most appropriate here: if you are a creationist who regularly complains about “Darwinists” and promotes intelligent design creationism, yet declaims at length that you are so abysmally ignorant that you can’t even make up your mind whether to trust elementary geology, then nothing you can say about any science is trustworthy. It’s fine to admit that you are an empty-headed goober who hasn’t bothered to look up any relevant science at all, but when you set up a soapbox and pontificate about the insupportability of “Darwinism” from your platform of self-admitted lack of knowledge, you’ve upgraded yourself from silly schlemiel to arrogant putz.

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One other hilarious addition: this inane creationist has posted a citation that he thinks supports his agnosticism on the age of the earth: it’s an articled describing how astronomers are revising the estimated age of the solar system — between 4.566 billion and 4.567 billion years old. Oh, yeah, baby — a little more uncertainty, and 0.000006 billion years will look reasonable!