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.

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!

I cannot stand the Huffington Post, that bastion of Newage folly. I really despise the Intelligent Design creationists. So when Huffpo gives space to creationist cretins, I’m done with them. Even worse, it’s an idiot creationist parroting the same old story, that Hitler was Darwin’s fault. I’ll mention just one paragraph of this dishonest bunk.

Hitler’s ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, “came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin.” A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology “weren’t reading the Gospels.”

Here you go, a link to Mein Kampf on Project Gutenberg. Go to town. Search for Darwin — nothing. Or evolution — that is there, but only used in the sense of “higher” and “lower” organisms, and some bizarre notion that nature abhors crossbreeding. God is all over the book, as is Christianity, even if we do grant that Hitler is pushing an idiosyncratic version of that cult.

If you really want to find the roots of Nazism, look to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the “gospel of the Nazi movement”, who hated Darwinism. No honest account will omit Chamberlain…but then, the Discovery Institute writes no honest account.

This is appalling. This video of a supposedly secular high school biology classroom will show you what we’re up against.

These students are simply expressing uninformed incredulity — they can’t imagine how anything could have evolved. And the incompetent apologist of a teacher, who is sympathetic to creationism himself, isn’t doing his job, which is to explain to them exactly how biology explains these phenomena. Instead, he makes excuses: “How could I say to a student, ‘your ideas are trash’?”

It’s not hard. One student at the end says this:

How can like an African-American person evolve from a white person? We’re different skin.

Hey, student! Your ideas are trash!

So’s your teacher if he can’t address these trivial questions. You must be able to tell your students when they are wrong if you’re going to teach at all.

This is a scanned page from a Christian science textbook published by Bob Jones University. I think they’ve been listening to too much Insane Clown Posse.

We’re all just mindless zombies here at scienceblogs, but somehow, BJU is even more brainless. I swear, a creationist could walk by right now and I wouldn’t even drool. But even in my decaying state, and as a biologist, not a physicist, I can answer this one.

Electricity is not a mystery on the level this book is discussing. There is a lot we don’t know about fundamental particles, but we understand the principles of electromagnetism so well that we can use it to build hair dryers and Large Hadron Colliders; to make the argument that we are mystified by it is lying to the kids.

The common creationist argument that we can only know what we directly perceive with our unaided senses is also nonsense. One could argue that we don’t really see people, what we do is gather photons that have been perturbed, we think, by a body, and infer the existence of a person…but that’s sophistry. It is no less ‘seeing electricity’ to say that I can hook up a current meter to a couple of wires and see a needle move in response to the flow of electrons.

That second paragraph is a horror of gobbledygook. Apparently, they think electricity is something like oil, a substance lying in large deposits that must be harvested and poured into your hairdryer to make it work. A current, as mentioned above, is produced by the movement of charged particles, nothing more or less. The sun produces moving charged particles, so it is a source of electricity, and the movement of the earth generates an electromagnetic field, but I can also do the zombie shuffle across the carpet to build up an excess of charged particles and touch the cat to allow them to flow, creating electricity myself, like unto a God. I do not have to create particles to make electricity, I just have to make them move.

Also, if that little girl did not use electricity, she would be dead. All of the cells in your body create charge imbalances by pumping charged ions across their membranes, and using the flow of ions back across those membranes to create chemical energy — they are machines that convert chemical energy into electricity that is used to power little dynamos that create stored chemical energy. We also use the gated movements of charged ions to generate electrical currents in our nerves and muscles, which is how we think and move.

Isn’t it nice how clearly religion is shown to be a science-stopper? Just take common questions, declare them a mystery and that no one has an answer, and presto, religion becomes an authority. An authority stuck at a dead end.

(via @jbrownridge)

Hold onto your hats, don’t be too shocked, but a creationist has lied about science. I’m constantly getting email from fundagelical groups insisting that I must obey and join their One True Faith, and I got one from the Worldwide Church of God aka Radio Church of God aka Grace Communion International aka whatever the heck they’re calling themselves this week. They’re kind of a quirky, long-separated splinter group of the Seventh Day Adventists with their own idiosyncratic theology, but one thing they definitely are: stark raving mad young earth creationists. I was sent this bizarre article, “Cavemen are people, too!”, that grossly misrepresents the science of the recent neandertal genome sequencing. Here’s their summary of the work:

What did the scientists find? Simply put: Neanderthals are human. There was virtually no difference between the two codes. The few differences they did find were so slight that researchers say that they are functionally irrelevant–and that if more Neanderthal genomes could be compared there might be no differences at all!

But that is not all the scientists found. The data suggests Neanderthals are as closely related to humans as Chinese are to Germans, or French to Javanese. Furthermore, the genetic material analyzed indicated that Neanderthals and humans interbred and produced offspring that interbred–and regularly.

Uh, no. Did they even read the paper?

The work by Pääbo’s team found that Neandertal’s were distinct and different from modern humans in a small but significant number of ways; they were our close cousins, but they were also a separate and unique population. The differences were small — 78 genes were identified that were fixed to a different form in modern human populations — but they definitely weren’t irrelevant: everyone is rather excited about the genes associated with the development and function of the brain that differ between the two. The stuff about being related to Chinese, Germans, etc. is totally garbled. What the researchers found is that there was some transmission of Neandertal genes into human populations that were ancestral to Europeans and Asians, but not to Africans. They did not find evidence of regular interbreeding — they found that Neandertals made a small contribution to European and Asian DNA, on the order of 1-4%. And most of this was a result of a few early interbreeding events in the small but rapidly expanding population of modern humans expanding out of Africa.

They didn’t understand the paper at all, and got most of the conclusions completely wrong. You can guess what they conclude, though.

Did you get that? All those supposed pre-man, caveman bones are actually just plain old human skeletons.

It is a startling admission for evolutionists because it throws a monkey wrench into conventional evolutionary theory.

And then they’re off and running. All those prehuman fossils? Either man or monkey, nothing in between. Transitional fossils? If there aren’t any differences between man and ape-man, than there can’t be any. It’s all just “DNA passed down from generation to generation” (Yeah? So?).

The heart of their argument is that one class of ancient hominids had so few genetic differences from us that their differences are negligible, and therefore evolutionary theory is all wrong. It’s bizarre; don’t they realize that we expect that the genetic differences between sibling species recently separated will be much smaller than those between species separated by long periods of time? The discoveries in the Neandertal genome are what we expected, and fit just fine into evolutionary theory.

The author of this little piece instead decides that “science proves the Bible correct”, and that the Neandertals were actually the pre-Flood Nephilim, part of the mob of evil, warring bad guys who motivated God to kill everyone except Noah and his family. Same ol’, same ol’.

Paul was at a Christian homeschooling conference, and was asked outright how old he thought the earth was. He refused to answer.

Silly man. These were Christian homeschoolers in Kentucky. Everyone knows that on that planet, the correct answer is “6000 years”.

Libertarians, you aren’t really going to vote for this kook, are you?

It’s the return of Andrew Rosenberg!

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