Kurt Zimmerman is pissed off. He’s not a very bright guy, and he doesn’t know much about biology or history, and he’s extremely annoyed that not only is the local school teaching his kids stuff he didn’t know, but they’re actually telling them that his sources of information are wrong. You see, the only level of education we’re allowed to raise children to is the Kurt Zimmerman level…which is a little scary. I was kind of hoping that sending my kids off to school would produce progeny who are smarter than me, and now I learn that they’re only supposed to produce kids who are dumber than Kurt Zimmerman? How dismaying.

Anyway, Zimmerman is upset because he found a biology textbook that defines creationism as “the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days”. This is mostly factually correct (one might quibble that the bible actually says their god created the earth in six days, and doesn’t really say much about the universe as a whole…but really, when you’re dealing with that degree of lunacy, 7 is the same as 6 is the same as canned beans), but seeing “myth” in the same sentence as “bible” has made Mr Zimmerman quite unhinged.

Zimmerman asked in December that the school immediately quit using the book “Asking About Life” in his son’s class and all classes.

He said it could “mislead, belittle and discourage students in believing in creationism and pointedly calls the Bible a myth.”

It’s not misleading at all, it doesn’t belittle students except in the sense that students who believe something that is wrong will be faced with a direct statement that they are wrong, and I should hope schools would discourage people from believing in stupid and fallacious mush! It also doesn’t go as far as I’d like or that Zimmerman thinks it does: it does not call the bible a myth. It says that it contains a myth, which it does. It would be nice if we did have a high school biology book that called all of Christianity and Judaism a collection of myths, but we don’t. Yet.

But Zimmerman has accomplished one triumph: he has won himself a brief spot on Fox News. The really astonishing thing about this clip is that the two Fox interviewers, Barbie and Dullard, actually come off as dumber than he is.

The good news, though, is that the local school board has decided not to decide anything about the book for 30 days. That’s committee-speak for “let’s wait for the noise and notoriety of Mr Zipperhead to die down a bit, so we can ignore the whole stupid proposal”.

Oh, this is interesting: a commenter looked up the book on Google Books and got the actual, full quote from the book.

In the 1970s and 1980s, antievolutionists in Arkansas, Tennessee and
Louisiana passed identical bills calling for “equal time” for teaching
evolution and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was
created by the Judeo-Christian god in six days. But a court ruled that
the “equal-time” bill was unconstitutional on the grounds that it
violated the separation of church and state.

That’s even biblically accurate. And it’s a very reasonable context in which to mention the topic of creationism.

After tweaking Paul Nelson on his six year delay in explaining Ontogenetic Depth, he has posted a reply. No, it’s not the long promised explanation. Instead, here’s what he’s got:

• PZ Myers’ criticisms don’t count and were all wrong!

• But, well, he now realizes Ontogenetic Depth is a “a poorly expressed and unusable idea.” (He’s quoting me there.)

• So he has invented Ontogenetic Depth 2.0!

• But he still hasn’t defined it.

• But he promises to write a whole series of posts explaining why I was wrong!

Jebus. I tend to avoid the ID blogs because I’m not interested in watching someone masturbate in public. Nelson hasn’t persuaded me at all that he has anything sensible to contribute. But sure, moving his hands more will accomplish the end he’s actually working towards.

Speaking of expert and professional wanking, would you believe Casey Luskin and Dembski are still obsessing over Dawkins’ old “weasel” program? The level of pitiful incompetence over there leaves me flabbergasted.

It’s Paul Nelson Day, the yearly event in which we make ludicrous pseudo-scientific claims and promise to back them up tomorrow, as celebrated last year.

Nelson, some of you may recall, is a creationist who made up this wacky claim of “Ontogenetic Depth”, saying he had a way of objectively measuring the complexity of the developmental process in organisms with a number that described the distance from egg to adult. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell us how one calculated this number, or how it actually accounted for the complexity of a network, or even how we’d get a number that was different for a sponge and a cat. But he did say he’d get back to us with the details tomorrow…six years ago.

We’ll keep waiting. We’ll also keep making accurate predictions. Last year I predicted that we’d still be waiting in 2010, and look! We are!

I’ve put on a turban, closed my eyes, and am waving my hands over a crystal ball, and predict…we’ll still be waiting in 2011. Check back next year and let’s see if I’m right!

I hope I didn’t catch something in the Antipodes. There seems to be something awful going around down there: Ken Ham, Ray Comfort, and now…Gary Ablett, Sr. He’s an Australian rules footballer with a few seedy drug-related incidents in his past — he’s also a world-class moron. He’s just written a long and mostly incoherent complaint about atheists for the Herald Sun, a cheesy tabloid in Australia.

Maybe it’s the football — they play without the heavy armor American footballers wear, so maybe he’s got brain damage. After all, Jason Ball wrote a nice rebuttal, and he’s Australian, too, so it’s obviously not a Southern Hemisphere epidemic.

Given that Jason has addressed most of the silly claims of this poor pious twit, I’ll just mention one thing that caught my eye: the recycled fatuity so common to creationists. Ablett makes an old argument against evolution.

Let’s take another example. Evolution teaches that matter plus energy (light or heat) plus time equals biogenesis, the cause of new life.

Yet our entire food industry relies on the fact that the evolutionary formula doesn’t work. For example, if you take a jar of peanut butter (matter), expose it to light and heat (energy) and add time you will never get new life (biogenesis) in that jar. And are we grateful about that! Why is new life impossible in a sealed jar? Because we are missing the most important aspect: information.

The very reason food is sealed is to keep information out, it’s only if and when the seal is broken that a contamination can occur because information has got inside the jar! We need to take this fact very seriously because in the food industry this experiment is conducted over a billion times a year collectively, and has been doing so for more than a hundred years, which proves that the absence of information renders life impossible.

Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s practically verbatim from this quaint exhibition of stupidity by Chuck Missler (also, not from Australia or New Zealand — he’s an Idahoan).

No scientist gives much credibility to the ancient Peanut Butter Earth hypothesis. We suspect that life arose in a chemically active watery environment, not a big brown glop of concentrated fats and proteins in a jar in the Archaean. We’re also not surprised that life doesn’t spontaneously arise everywhere anymore: conditions on Earth are very different from those in the abiotic/early biotic period, and what’s more, any new life that arose now, improbable as that is, would face a world populated by bacteria with 4 billion years of evolutionary refinement behind them. So it’s a very, very stupid argument.

The rest of Ablett’s arguments are just as inane, and are similarly ripped off almost literally from common creationist canards. There’s nothing original and nothing intelligent anywhere in it — it’s just sad how feeble these guys are getting.

Interestingly and entirely unsurprisingly, big chunks of Ablett’s article were plagiarized. It seems like most of their stuff can be traced back to a small population of ur-creationists in the 1960s, and there brains have been locked up solid ever since.

Man, I must have smacked Michael Ruse really hard. Over and over, he repeats one simple, common phrase that I applied to him — it must have been painfully memorable.

I have been called many things in my time, but I truly believe that “clueless gobshite” is a first. In a way, I am almost proud of this. After all, if you are in your seventieth year and someone feels so strongly about your ideas that they refer to you in this way, then you must be doing something right. Or if not exactly right, you must have ideas that others want to challenge so strongly that they pull out this kind of language.

It’s a very peculiar phenomenon. Here is the post in which I casually referred to Ruse as a “clueless gobshite”; I criticized him and Andrew Brown much more strongly than that one remark would imply, yet it is all that stuck in his head. He repeatedly agonizes over the cruelty of my remark, and acts as if all I had to say about him was one vicious, cutting cliche, and he encapsulates every criticism in that one insult. Further, he hangs himself on a cross and tries to claim he didn’t deserve even that, that his crime was of being too reasonable, of being generous and charitable.

And yet, I am excoriated at every turn. Why? Simply, because I am an “Accommodationist.” I think that some kind of intellectual meeting is possible with religious believers, including Christian religious believers.

Oh, poor Michael Ruse, that gentle-souled and open-minded fellow who merely wants to reach out to his fellow human beings with sympathy—how could he deserve such unkind criticism? I clutch my pearls with one hand, place the other on my brow, and gaze skyward with eyes welling tearfully, and then swoon upon the fainting couch installed handily near my desk. Michael, Michael, Michael…how could we abuse you so?

Actually, with good reason, and my attacks on his flawed character have been even stronger than you’d guess from his limited quoting. What prompted my rudeness wasn’t his pious apologetics for the common man, but that Ruse visited the Creation “Museum”, ignored the lunacy on display (except to express his sympathy with it), and went on to identify the real culprit in this anti-intellectual abomination.

Michael Ruse went to Ken Ham’s house, twirled about among the exhibits showing dinosaurs with saddles, Noah’s ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth, exhortations to accept Biblical literalism, and accusations of malice and dishonesty against every sensible biologists, and what do he and Andrew Brown do? Why, blame the atheists, of course.

That is insane.

What the hell is wrong with Ruse? How can he stand among the lies, with little children being told abominable fabrications, and think then that the pressing problem is people who demand evidence for their beliefs? I was unimpressed with his momentary show of self-serving “open-mindedness”; but I was disgusted with his completely inappropriate neglect of a genuine problem to fling blame at the people who have consistently opposed every facet of that monument to ignorance.

Michael Ruse really needs to carefully read my original complaint, because I’m not giving him a rhetorical slap because he’s too open-minded. I’m kicking him to the curb because ideas matter (something I would think a philosopher would care about), and he espouses a kind of waffling relativism that acts as if young earth creationism and science are equivalently deserving of respect, and that if atheists would just shut up we’d all be living in a happy, loving relationship with Ken Ham.

He’s not just a clueless gobshite. He’s a traitor to reason.