Unbelievable. Dembski is bragging about getting a peer-reviewed paper published — in IEEE Transactions, so not a biology journal, and it’s a paper about search algorithms — and he misrepresents Dawkins again. He just had to toss in his garbled version of the “Methinks it is a weasel” program in which Dembski has consistently gotten the algorithm stupidly wrong, and he does it again. The man really doesn’t understand selection at all.

To make it even more amusing and even more like a standard creationist on the web, people pointed out to him in the comments that he was still getting it wrong, and what does he say?

I’m growing weary of these quibblings and thus shutting the comments off.

Of course, Bill, of course. We expect you to stick your fingers in your ears and shout “LALALALALA” all the time. Why not just get rid of the troublesome comments at your site altogether?

They’re going to have a “Science” Fair at the Creation “Museum”, which seems extremely cruel. Little kids with some enthusiasm for science are going to show up at that circus and be misled about what science actually is, and see their careers stunted before they even begin.

But let’s be charitable and see what they’re going to do. They’re going to emphasize hypothesis testing, experiment, and good methodology, and they also have a restriction against product comparisons (the stuff of commercials: is Brand X paper towel actually more absorbent than Brand Y?) and simple demonstrations, like baking soda volcanoes. I approve of that, and would like to see conventional science fairs do the same.

Read further into their guidelines, though, and the anti-science emerges. All the projects have to be tied to a Bible verse. Why? I don’t know. It seems to be an arbitrary constraint that the creation science fair held here in Minnesota requires, too.

The real killer, though, is that they demand that the kids adhere to their statement of faith, which dictates what their conclusions should be. They’ve decided what the answers are before the experiment is done.

1. Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation.
2. The days in Genesis do not correspond to geologic ages, but are six [6] consecutive twenty-four [24] hour days of Creation.
3. The Noachian Flood was a significant geological event and much (but not all) fossiliferous sediment originated at that time.
4. The ‘gap’ theory has no basis in Scripture.
5. The view, commonly used to evade the implications or the authority of Biblical teaching, that knowledge and/or truth may be divided into ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, is rejected.
6. By definition, no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

They might as well announce that no biology, geology, or physics will be allowed in their “science” fair — any discipline with a historical component is forbidden, because they have decided what history occurred. The last restriction is the best, though: no evidence but the Bible can be accepted.

The poor kids.

This was predictable. As I mentioned, there was a lecture by a Scientist with a Ph.D. in Science from Harvard on Sunday, by a fellow named Dr Nathaniel Jeanson, which is part of a fairly typical trend nowadays: the devout creationist who grinds his way through a graduate program to earn an advanced degree so he can disregard everything he learned to wave his title like a victory flag and pretend to an authority he does not have. Other well-known examples are Jonathan Wells and Marcus Ross — their degrees are meaningless since they clearly prioritize the trappings of authority over the substance of knowledge.

So Jeff Eyges attended and sent in a summary. It’s no surprise: Jeanson has this fancy degree, but his talk was all straight out of the quaint old 1960s “Scientific Creationism” handbook, full of bogus arguments and obfuscatory handwaving over science the speaker doesn’t understand.

As I told Catherine Dulac, his former dept. head at Harvard, it was an hour-long spectacle of misinformation, half-truths and what appeared to be deliberate obfuscation. Most of this (probably all of it) you’ve heard before. He began by contrasting Evolutionary Theory and Creationism. Evolution, he said, admits only naturalistic explanations, discounts eyewitness testimony (i.e., the Bible) and insists upon uniformitarianism. Naturally, he sees these as weaknesses.

He then listed the similarities; strangely he listed speciation (I thought they didn’t even like the word) under “Microevolution”. He then pulled out what I imagine was the most nihilistic quote by a scientist (regrettably, I didn’t write down the name) he could find, to the effect that evolution demonstrates that there is no purpose to life, no ethics, no free will, etc. He did say that not all atheists have this view, but, of course, it was calculated to appeal to the Christians in the audience; they gasped and shook their heads appropriately (I should mention that the event was sponsored by an evangelical church; yes, we have a few in Boston!). They were primed.

He then began to weave tortuous arguments from geology and astronomy, disciplines in which he apparently has no training and upon which he isn’t qualified to draw (I’m not sure he’s qualified to draw upon biology). Astronomy – the galaxies are positioned at discrete distances from the Earth, in all directions, which is what you’d expect to see if we were at the center. Geology – the basalt layer on the sea floor, coupled with the ion exchange cycle, only allows for an age of 62 million years. The mud flow process allows for only 12 million years. The inconsistency shows the unreliability of the evolutionary model. Radiometric dating is, of course, unreliable as well. For uranium to decay into lead takes 1.5 billion years, however, helium retention (apparently, zircon crystals containing lead that decayed from uranium have also contained helium; YEC’s claim that over millions of years, the helium would have escaped) would indicate an age of 6,000 years. Not only does this demonstrate the inconsistency of the old-Earth model, but it serves to validate the chronology of the young-Earth model (because, of course, when the methodology supports our a priori conclusions, we accept it!).

He then dealt with the geological strata. He talked about layers in the area around Mt. St. Helens, along with peat, as a possible precursor of oil, at the bottom of a lake that has since formed, and opined that similar activity with greater force, multiplied many times, occurred during the Flood. He quoted one of his new colleagues at ICR (he quoted them quite a bit, actually) as saying that the Earth doesn’t look old; it looks flooded!

He then got around to Biology. According to him, biologists admit that abiogenesis is the “worst” problem as regards evolution. Also (and you can hear this coming) – there are few, if any, transitional forms, and they’ve been looking for decades. (I was surprised he even allowed for the possibility of “a few”; I’m not sure what he meant.) Finally, of course – irreducible complexity. He drew upon his own doctoral work on calcium regulation in the blood, as well as bacterial flagella and blood clotting. Naturally, he neglected to mention the refutations of IR that have been in circulation since before Dover.

Then he got into some very weird territory. He gave a brief description, for the sake of the lay churchgoers, of DNA, RNA and proteins, and then put up a chart giving the degree of similarity in Cytochrome C sequencing between organisms, expressed as percentages. He drew attention to the fact that the degree of similarity between yeast (for example) and humans is the same as that between yeast and plants, and that this is true across the board for all organisms. David Levin, a professor of Molecular Biology from Boston University was there, and, as both you and he subsequently explained to me, Cytochrome C is an extremely old gene, and we would therefore expect the sequences to be the same for all organisms. The strange thing is that each organism had a different figure assigned to it – yeast was 39% similar to all other organisms; others had different figures – so I really don’t understand what he was trying to say. He then plotted the figures on pyramids, and said something along the lines of requiring geometric shapes of increasingly higher dimensions to express it properly. I told Dr. Levin, “I couldn’t understand what that was all about.” He told me it was deliberate obfuscation, and I said, “Thanks, that’s what I thought!” As I said, it was all very strange.

Jeanson ended by attempting to use his take on creation “science” as justification for his conservative Christian theology – the evidence points to a creation made specifically for us; the reasonable response is one of gratitude and praising the creator, who is then within his rights to manifest just wrath over our not praising him and expressing gratitude. Although I’m 52 and have been observing it all of my life, the fact that they don’t see this as a projection of their own damaged egos and a product of their pathologically low self-esteem still floors me.

There was a half-hour lunch break, then an hour-long Q & A. Most of the church folk had left, but a few remained, along with several scientists and science-oriented people. Dr. Levin began by bringing up the genomic data, describing it as a problem in logic for which the only answer is common descent. Jeanson claimed to be unfamiliar with the data! (I’d think even an undergraduate Biology student would be familiar with it at this point; I’m hard-pressed to understand how a recent PhD grad – from Harvard, no less – doesn’t know about it.) Levin offered to get up and give a five minute presentation; Jeanson wasn’t interested. The chimpanzee genome came up as well; Jeanson said he thought it was based upon the human data and incomplete at that; Levin told him that wasn’t the case, that we have the complete genome and have had it for some time. He also mentioned tree ring dendrology, that we have specimens going back 11,000 years. Again, Jeanson said he wasn’t familiar with it. He ended up saying that a good deal; apparently, there wasn’t too much data with which he was familiar! At that point, a man stood up, agitated, said he was a doctor and that he’d been a Christian for thirty years, that he converted because of the “differing opinions” about evolutionary theory, and started going off the deep end about the inconsistencies in carbon dating and how it related to tree ring dendrology. Dr. Levin, who was a model of patience and restraint, told him that it was irrelevant; the tree ring data is used to calibrate carbon dating, but is obviously independent of it.

Other people brought up similar issues, forcing Jeanson to back down on a couple of points. One fellow challenged him on irreducible complexity, and got him to admit it’s really just a semantic device, that it doesn’t serve as evidence for creation. The fellow asked, “Then why include it in your talk?” Jeanson had no answer. He was also pressed about the Cytochrome C similarities, and acknowledged that it actually did support common ancestry. A young woman noted that he had no problem questioning the opinions of scientists, but that he seemed unwilling to question the Bible, which was written by poorly educated men 2,500 – 3,000 years ago. He replied that he’d studied the Bible extensively, had found it to be reliable and consistent, and that when he’d thought he’d found an inconsistency, it turned out to be the result of his own “wrong thinking” (His mental processes would appear to mimic the scientific process, in that they seem to be self-correcting!). He also began using the word “paradigm” repeatedly, which made me think of Marcus Ross; it’s the term he uses to sidestep his critics. In fact, that’s what the Q & A consisted largely of – Jeanson avoiding direct confrontation and claiming ignorance of data. My perception was that the whole thing was making him uncomfortable, but I’d hate to think that in five years, no one at Harvard confronted him.

There were numerous challenges, and, toward the end, the Christians started to get a little feisty as they felt increasingly threatened – Bible quotes, atheism leads to Nazism, that sort of thing. All in all, though, it was rather tame. As we were leaving, Dr. Levin was engaged by a couple of fundies. They said God created the trees with rings to make it look as though they were old; he suggested that made God a deceiver. No, no, he’s given you free will; you have a choice… the same tired apologetics. On the one hand, God hides himself enough so that we have to have faith, on the other, he gives us enough evidence so that we are without excuse and he’s justified in holding us “accountable”. And, of course, it doesn’t matter whether or not we think it’s “fair” – he’s God; he can do whatever he likes! It’s like arguing with very stubborn, developmentally challenged children (which, as I suggest from time to time on Pharyngula and Ed Brayton’s blog, is how I feel they should be treated).

As I mentioned, I came home and wrote an email to Dr. Dulac, the Chair of the Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard. I’m absolutely appalled that this young man, who disavows a century and a half of empirical data and repudiates the basic principles of science, was given a PhD by one of the most prestigious universities in the country. First Kurt Wise, now this kid. As I told Dr. Levin, “One is an anomaly. Two is already becoming a habit!”

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There is another account from the Boston Atheists. Jeanson is same ol’, same ol’.

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Yet more reports: the Boston Skeptics and Aaron Golas summarize the talk, and you can download a recording.

This is exactly what we need everytime one of these frauds speaks: a mob of skeptics to descend upon it and shred it publicly and on the web.

Here’s a little secret about getting a graduate degree: it helps to be a little bit crazy. You are dedicating a good chunk of your life to the pursuit of some very abstract knowledge after all, and as a reward, you get faint hopes of landing a low-paying job in your field. A bigger secret: you can even be a lot crazy and still manage to land that degree (you, in the back: stop pointing and snickering at me!)

So it means precisely nothing when someone brags about finding a Ph.D. willing to espouse utter nonsense. It happens all the time — the degree in itself is not an indicator of credibility. It always amuses me to see the creationists getting so excited at finding someone with a doctorate willing to stand up and disavow everything he supposedly learned so that he can praise Jesus and declare the earth to be only 6,000 years old.

For example, right now a creationist with a Harvard science degree is lecturing in Boston on Evolution: Bankrupt Science; Creationism: Science You Can Bank On. Obviously, Dr Nathaniel Jeanson is one of the fruit loops who plodded through a graduate program.

The good news is that the Boston Skeptics are on his tail and will be reporting on the event. I’ll be looking forward to the dissection.

Some very persnickety people have been demanding that I apologize for riding a fiberglas dinosaur at the Creation “Museum”, because it had a sign saying it was intended only for those under the age of 12. I’ve thought about it. There is that sign, after all, and if I’d looked a little more carefully, I might have noticed it.

But then, I realized that I still would have clambered aboard. There isn’t the slightest twinge of repentance in my heart. I’ll even encourage everyone else to jump on, if you go there — it’s irresistibly ludicrous, and is a good way to thumb your nose at the goofballs running that show. Of course, now they’re going to have a guard hovering around it all the time, so it may be a little trickier. You may also get tased.

If you absolutely must have an excuse, though, it’s easy. Ken Ham claims that the world, which by all objective, scientific measures is 4.5 billion years old, is actually only 6,000 years old. Scaling ages by this metric, that means that greying 52 year old geezers like me are only 36 minutes old — obviously, I was created with the appearance of age. 36 minutes is much, much less than 12 years, so I was clearly within the allowed range. What that sign really means is that you must be under 90 million scientific years to ride the dinosaur.

Ken Ham is whining about me again — this time, I am “this atheist professor”. He really chokes over my name, doesn’t he?

Anyway, that’s not interesting. What is bizarre is this photo and question:

Where were these taken?

Answer: In the AiG parking lot when the 285 atheists visited.  As one looks at the messages on these bumper stickers, we need to pray for these very lost people who so desperately need the Lord.  Actually, I believe some of these messages really do reflect what the devil offered Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, “you shall become as gods…”

This is creepy on two levels: that Ken Ham sent his goons out to photograph the cars of visitors, which speaks of a very deep paranoia, and that he finds these simple bumper stickers to be satanic. He needs to pray for people who voted for Obama? People who value ethics and doing good are desperate need of the lord?

He’s a sick, warped man.

Kevin Miller, screenwriter for the propaganda film Expelled, has a new project in the works that follows in the Christian movie tradition.

Creation, Resurrection Pictures’ first original film project—a humorous and tearful story of a high school biology teacher’s struggle to expose the lie of evolution, based on the life of creation evangelist Dr. Kent Hovind and written by Kevin Miller the writer of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for production in 2010.

I was rolling my eyes, nothing more, as I read that, until I hit those magic words, “Dr Kent Hovind”…then I had to smirk. Seriously? Tax cheat and fraud and recipient of an advanced degree from an unaccredited split-level diploma mill in Colorado, with a dissertation that begins “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind”, and that is little more than a collection of magazine articles snipped out and pasted in a scrap book…and that is Kevin Miller’s hero?

I predict that there will be a wee bit of truth-stretching in that screenplay.

Cool, I’ll accept the title. One of the reporters who joined us in Kentucky has a nice article on the Creation “Museum” trip in the Star Tribune. One thing I appreciate about it is that he actually quotes us on the scientific flaws in the exhibits.

There is a very silly quote from Ken Ham, of course.

“Our own, full-time Ph.D. scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts,” replied Ham. “This man is obviously very angry at God and relishes in mocking Christianity — spending a lot of his time fighting against someone he doesn’t believe exists!”

No, repeating a lie does not make it true. There is no research backing up the “museum” — there is ideology and religion and a crack team of highly educated crackpots.

And he repeats his desperate ad hominem — yes, I’m an atheist, and yes, I dislike religion. So? That has nothing to do with the validity of those ghastly ignorant exhibits.