I may have sold Francis Collins short. He may be a useful agent in the battle against creationism, but not in the way he probably intends.

The Discovery Institute – the Seattle-based headquarters of the intelligent design movement – has just launched a new website, Faith and Evolution, which asks, can one be a Christian and accept evolution? The answer, as far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, is a resounding: No.

The new website appears to be a response to the recent launch of the BioLogos Foundation, the brainchild of geneticist Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and rumoured Obama appointee-to-be for head of the National Institutes of Health. Along with “a team of scientists who believe in God” and some cash from the Templeton Foundation, Collins, an evangelical Christian who is also a staunch proponent of evolution, is on a crusade to convince believers that faith and science need not be at odds. He is promoting “theistic evolution” – the belief that God (the prayer-listening, proactive, personal God of Christianity) chose to create life by way of evolution.

Hmmm. So two titans of the credulous and ignorant are battling it out for turf? This may be Collins’ true strength here, that he speaks the language of the gullible as a native.

I know that in the past the Discovery Institute has been particularly damning of Ken Miller: he also speaks that same language, and is in competition for the same niche as the DI fellows. Collins is apparently even worse, since he has now driven the DI to flamboyantly and publicly admit that their whole scheme is aimed at shilling for religion, and that their argument is that evolution, even the hobbled version of Collins and Miller, is incompatible with god-belief.

I hope the NCSE and various lawyers have snapped an archival copy of the entire “Faith and Evolution” website — it will be so useful in the next ID trial.

It’s an aggressively dishonest site, too. It consists of lots of people claiming that modern scientific evidence points more strongly than ever to a cosmic designer, which is a flat lie — finding natural mechanisms for complex processes means their designer god is increasingly superfluous. And Wells, that fraudulent pseudo-scholar, trots out the idiotic ‘we believe in microevolution, the rest has no evidence’ argument. That’s long been the hallmark of ignorant people who know nothing of the wealth of evidence beyond a few small scale, well-documented instances. It’s also nothing but a rhetorical ploy, where they concede a few points to appear more reasonable in their denial of other, equally well supported cases.

A new bill has been proposed in Scarolina. Here it is:

TO AMEND ARTICLE 1, CHAPTER 29 OF TITLE 59 OF THE 1976 CODE, RELATING TO GENERAL PROVISIONS CONCERNING SUBJECTS OF INSTRUCTION IN THE STATE’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, BY ADDING SECTION 59-29-15, TO PROVIDE THAT CURRICULUM USED TO TEACH STUDENTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF MANKIND MUST MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY BETWEEN RELIGIOUS FAITHS AND BETWEEN RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION, AND TO PROVIDE THAT CURRICULUM THAT DOES NOT MAINTAIN THE REQUIRED NEUTRALITY MUST BE REVISED OR REPLACED AS SOON AS PRACTICABLE.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina:

SECTION 1. Article 1, Chapter 29 of Title 59 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:

“Section 59-29-15. (A) The General Assembly finds:

(1) that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution makes wholly applicable to the states the First Amendment’s mandate that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of or prohibiting the free expression of religion;

(2) that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all;

(3) a proper respect for the First Amendment compels the State to pursue a course of neutrality toward religion, favoring neither one religion over other religions, nor religion over non-religion or the inverse;

(4) that atheism is a school of thought that takes a position on religion and the existence and importance of a Supreme Being;

(5) that the United State Supreme Court recognizes atheism as equivalent to a religion for the purposes of the First Amendment; and

(6) that teaching atheism or any of its principals, including, but not limited to, the denial of the existence of a Supreme Being, as a philosophical system of beliefs or in a manner that affirmatively opposes or shows hostility to religion, thus exhibiting a preference for those who believe in no religion over those who hold religious beliefs, violates the First Amendment.

(B) The State Board of Education shall examine all curriculum in use in this State that purports to teach students about the origins of mankind to determine whether the curriculum maintains neutrality toward religion, favoring neither one religion over other religions, nor religion over non-religion, including atheism. Related to non-religion, the examination must include a review as to whether the curriculum contains a sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus preferring those who believe in no religion over those who hold religious beliefs. The duty to review curriculum imposed by this section is continuing and must reoccur periodically after the initial review in order to assure compliance with this section.

(C) If the board’s examination determines that any curriculum fails to maintain the neutrality required by subsection (B), the offending curriculum must be revised or replaced as soon as practicable, but no later than the beginning of the next academic year.

(D) This section does not prevent classes being taught pursuant to Section 59-29-230.”

Let’s pare that down to its hard kernel of illogic.

1. The US government is required to be neutral on religion. Hooray!

2. Atheism is non-religion, therefore it is a religion. What?

3. The school curriculum must be reviewed, and anything that teaches religion or non-religion must be revised or replaced.

4. Oh, by the way, we exempt courses that teach about the Christian Bible from this requirement.

This lovely muddle of confused thinking was composed by Senator Michael Fair, who is a conservative (given) Republican (of course) insurance agent (which makes him qualified to pass laws on education and science, I suppose).

We can also distill the bill down a little further.

Schools can’t teach anything that doesn’t support my sect’s religious views, because that would be a violation of the First Amendment.

(via Sensuous Curmudgeon)

While I’m off at meetings, you could be voting to help me win Eric Hovind’s iPod Touch. All you have to do is CLICK ON THIS LINK. Note that it has to be that link — it’s got an imbedded code in it to let the tabulators know that the incoming click comes from me, PZ Myers, so that the Hovind crew will know that they owe me a new toy.

This is the fourth creation minute video, and I think it’s the last one you should have to watch. Sometime after this they’ll tally up all the page views, and somebody will win.

This one, by the way, has Hovind defining science — “knowledge derived from observation and study” — and then giving six uses of the word evolution: cosmic, chemical, stellar, organic, macroevolution, and microevolution. Then he says that only microevolution is scientific. Wow. The cosmologists are going to be surprised that all that physics they’ve been doing is not science; the nuclear chemists are going to learn to their disappointment that all that work on fusion is unobserved and unstudied; the astronomers are going to have to remove the Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams from their textbooks; the biochemists have merely been imagining their work on metabolism and molecular biology; and the paleontologists, biogeographers, systematists, molecular geneticists, and bioinformaticians haven’t been observing and studying anything.

Only the population geneticists get to be called scientists. They’re going to be a bit surprised, too, because as a discipline you’ll be hard-pressed to find a group more unanimous in their support of evolution.

I know, it hurts so bad to be exposed to so much stupid, but it will be worth it when I get to show off my fancy gadget from Creation Science Evangelism. I’m going to especially enjoy all the creationist videos on it, and I hope they even have it engraved or slap a CSE sticker on the back of it.

I hope this isn’t like that Father Ted episode where they were going to lottery off a car, and had arranged ahead of time that Father Dougal would have the winning ticket number of 11. (They almost lost that one because Dougal confused himself by holding his ticket upside down…).

Texas senate Democrats say they have the votes to block Don McLeroy’s appointment to the board of education. Could this be the end of the creationist kook’s reign of ignorance? I’m not placing any bets on this one.

(via Lonesome Mongoose)

Hah, I knew it had to happen. Phil Plait is now obsolete — he hasn’t been keeping up with Creation Astronomy!

We live in a Universe of breathtaking size and grandeur-but where did it come from?

Secular astronomers tell us it formed without a Creator about 14 billion years ago. The Bible tells us it was created by God only thousands of years ago. Which model does the evidence support?

The answer to this question might surprise you!

Recent discoveries have plunged the evolutionary model into a crisis. This site is dedicated to documenting this unfolding drama, and exposing the bankrupt evolutionist model for what it truly is.

That’s right: astronomy is a theory in crisis! Go ahead, watch the videos that will make Phil tremble in fear and doubt. And he thought the moon-landing-was-fake loons were crazy enough.

Your greedy, grasping host would really like to snatch an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind, so once again I’m reminding you to click on this link — each click counts as a vote for me. And oh, boy, is Eric Hovind’s latest argument a winner: the current level of the Colorado River is several thousand feet lower than the peak elevations of the Grand Canyon, therefore the river must have flowed uphill to cut the canyon when it was formed. I know a few seven year olds who could take that argument apart.

Yeah, I know, it’s cruel of me to send you over there to witness such awesome stupidity, but think of it as simply a harsh way to jolt you into wakefulness in the morning, like a bad cup of strong coffee.

We had hopes that the mad creationist dentist, Don McLeroy, would be booted from the Texas Board of Education. No such luck: I just received this call to action in the mail.

Moments ago at a surprise meeting, the Senate Nominations Committee voted to send the nomination of Don McLeroy, R-College Station, to the full Senate for confirmation as State Board of Education (SBOE) chair. This sets up a major showdown on the floor of the Texas Senate, likely next Monday or Tuesday.

Even though we have already asked you to call your senator about this issue, now we must do so again: please take a moment to contact your senator and tell him or her to vote against Don McLeroy as SBOE chair. (See below for some simple examples of why the Senate should reject McLeroy. Click here to find your senator.)

Though numerous news outlets reported that McLeroy’s nomination was blocked after an embarrassing hearing before the Senate committee last month, it appears a flurry of calls from religious-right pressure groups has reinvigorated McLeroy’s nomination. Many of these groups are claiming that McLeroy is a victim of religious persecution:

“It is hard to believe that in the United States of America, religious discrimination at the level of the Texas Legislature has occurred. Dr. McLeroy is being vilified and condemned because he is a Christian and holds a Biblical worldview of creation.” — E-mail alert dated May 19, 2009

That kind of accusation is both ridiculous and offensive. McLeroy’s nomination is in trouble because the board under his chairmanship has made Texas a national laughingstock. The decision to confirm or deny McLeroy’s appointment is a clear referendum on the outrageous antics of the State Board of Education.

It requires just 11 senators to reject a confirmation. But we need your help to find 11 reasonable senators who believe education policy should not be held hostage to the personal and political agendas of extremists on the state board.

The religious right recognizes the importance of having McLeroy as board chair. If we don’t match their passion and determination, we can expect two more years of “culture war” battles fought on the backs of Texas schoolchildren.

This is the fool we have to get off the board. The man who declared, “Somebody’s gotta stand up to experts”.

Please, Texans, save us. Call your representative right away.

Yesterday, I tore into a reeking pile of creationist bogosity by Peter Heck. This morning, he sends me email.

Dr. Myers,

Someone sent me a nasty email that included a link to your blog. I found it a pretty thorough shallacking! Not that I’m opposed to that. If I put arguments out in front of people, I have no problem when they’re hacked up by the experts. I actually sent the column to three biologists I know and trust before it was published. They don’t agree with my views on some of these issues, but I knew they would challenge my science. They all recommended I take out the first paragraph or make it less condescending. But then folks like you might not have read it! But what each of them said in response to the article was that my conclusion was not scientifically flawed: that Britt’s suggestion that swine flu proved the Darwinian model of macro-evolution was incorrect. I’d be interested to know if you disagree. Thanks for your time and for taking an interest in my article,

Peter

This is a rather disingenuous reply; he wasn’t just shellacked, he was exposed as a dishonest fraud who knew nothing at all about the subject he was critiquing. I didn’t just criticize a few niggling errors in his article, I ripped it apart from stem to stern and pointed out that he was ignorant and unscholarly…and now he comes back and offers the feeble excuse that he had three biologists look it over? Who were these biologists, and why didn’t they point out that the article was nothing but a crudely hacked together raft of creationist fallacies?

Now he also tries to salvage something by claiming that he was still correctly rebutting “Britt’s suggestion that swine flu proved the Darwinian model of macro-evolution was incorrect”. Go ahead, read Britt’s article (note also that Heck’s article did not include a link to the source); you won’t find him claiming proof of anything, nor will you find him discussing macro- vs. microevolution. He straightforwardly and entirely correctly describes viral evolution as a very real phenomenon with real-world consequences.

Here’s part of Heck’s flogging of a straw man.

In a recent article for Live Science magazine that attempts to prove Darwin by using the swine flu of all things, author Robert Roy Britt sneers, “Anyone who thinks evolution is for the birds should not be afraid of swine flu…if there’s no such thing as evolution, then there’s no such thing as a new strain of swine flu infecting people.” His supposedly witty remarks were meant to mock creationists, castigating their “junk science.”

But the intellectual dishonesty inherent in Britt’s statement is almost as obvious as his failed attempt at humor. Britt is using a common ploy of Darwinists: confuse people into believing that their utterly unsubstantiated speculation of species-to-species macro-evolution is synonymous with the universally accepted scientific fact of adaptation and development within a species (sometimes called micro-evolution).

Britt described an actual fact: viruses evolve. This isn’t just short-term physiological adaptation, but the acquisition of new properties by recombination and mutation that produces novel strains, strains which then succeed or fail (from the virus’s perspective) by how well they thrive and spread in their hosts. He consulted two competent experts, who he named in the article, and linked to other articles that summarized some of the general points he was making.

The only intellectual dishonesty was Heck’s, in claiming that an article about viral evolution was claiming proof of the evolution of frogs, lizards, or whales.

But if he wants to get into the argument about, for instance, whale evolution, I’d be happy to carve him to bits. The whole creationist version of the micro/macro evolution distinction is complete nonsense. Scientists do make the distinction, usually reserving macroevolution for the larger scale accumulation of change over time that produces new species or lineages, but they don’t argue that one is unsupported speculation.

What you have to understand is that the concept of macroevolution came first, although it wasn’t called that; it was just called evolution or transformation theory, among other things (“evolution” was a term that actually became popular relatively late). Darwin himself examined biology largely on a grand scale, looking at biogeography and populations and fossils, and making an argument on the basis of what we would now call macroevolutionary phenomena for changes in form of species over geological time. He wasn’t alone, either; many other authors preceded him in seeing that the evidence supported a history of evolutionary change. What made Darwin particularly persuasive, though, is that he coupled the evidence of changing species to a hypothetical mechanism, natural selection. He didn’t have the tools or the details to work out how heritable change was accomplished, however; that took the discovery of genetics and molecular biology to allow us to see how this ‘microevolution’ actually worked.

When creationists argue that they believe in microevolution, but that macroevolution is dubious, they’ve got it backwards. Large scale historical change was confirmed and thoroughly documented in the 19th century! Darwin was a bridge, who explained how small scale, natural processes could produce the known variation between species, and the triumph of 20th century biology was to confirm and expand upon our understanding of how those changes occurred. Neither macro nor micro evolution are speculative. Neither one is lacking in evidence.

Heck was merely flaunting the tedious ignorance of creationists, which is no longer ever surprising. He was also making a dishonest pretense to knowledge, which is also not surprising, and is one reason to never, ever trust anyone who claims to be a creationist — it’s a synonym for lying, stupid fraud. I don’t even trust his letter. Does anyone really believe that he will regard the series of arguments he made in his article as “hacked up”? I would bet that he’ll be thumping the same old lies again next time he preaches in front of his fellow phonies.

I’d also still like to know who his biology consultants were. I’m sure they’ll remain anonymous and mysterious, lest we discover that they are yet another batch of creationists with a collection of pretend knowledge and made-up “facts”.

I’m slamming the door shut on yet another thread that will not die, which was in turn the progeny of another enduring thread — as you might guess, this one was fueled by a thickheaded creationist’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence. Alan Clarke, if you start regurgitating creationist BS here again, I will shut you down. Otherwise, if necessary, converse here.