Poor little Ken Ham gets no respect. He sets up this fancy museum, he keeps pushing his silly ideas, and what happens? Smart people like Daniel Phelps, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, calls him a moron. Deservedly.

I don’t need to say much, though. The scathing excoriation of Ham has already been done:

You said that unicorns are real. You claim that the Beowulf story is evidence of human cohabitation with dinosaurs. You say that sometimes religious genocide is OK. You think that the government is training people to talk to aliens. You believe that evolution is a random process, a process of blind chance, which is just factually wrong. You target children because they can’t defend themselves and trust you (talk about a cowardly act). You believe if a 2-year old understands it, it must be cutting edge science. You believe that observation and measurement cannot trump “common sense.” You believe you do the type of science that you need faith to understand instead of, you know, understanding to understand. You believe…whatever the fuck this is. You employ the nanny-nanny boo-boo defense. Your ilk do not even try to publish outside of their little circle, and you set up a bogus journal to pretend that you were scholars, THEREBY AVOIDING THE DEBATE YOU CLAIM TO CRAVE. You stare at evolution, describe evolution, and then say, “It’s not evolution.”

And yet you wonder why someone with an education and responsibilities and a reputation would not talk to you? Despite this record of shame (I could have gone on and on just looking at my website alone), you have the balls to claim that you won something by [being] so catastrophically ignorant as to be not worth speaking to?

KEN, WE ARE TIRED OF TRYING TO TALK TO YOU. WE HAVE MOVED ON TO RIDICULE. THIS IS WHAT YOU DESERVE, YOU PIG-IGNORANT SLAVE.

I think Ham needs to put up another self-pitying post for each of the insults in there.

It’s true. While I was in Guelph, a sneaky-looking fellow handed me a disc, and told me it was just for me — and that it included the lie-correcting subtitles.

I appreciate it. I still haven’t bothered to watch it, but someday, maybe while I’m dying of some gruesome disease, I’ll want some horrible external pain to distract me, and then I’ll play it. Or maybe I’ll show it as a test of machismo — how long can I bear the stupidity before growling and mauling the machine into silence?

I knew there was a creationist connection to Halloween. Glenn Branch figured it out:

When the distinguished philosopher Philip Kitcher recently addressed the creationist movement in his Living With Darwin, he judiciously assessed creationism in its latest incarnation as historically respectable but currently bankrupt, and proposed to describe it as “dead” science. “In light of its shambling tenacity,” I replied, “‘zombie science’ is perhaps a preferable label.”

Read the rest for the real horror story — the zombies have taken over the Texas educational system.

Steven Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science has put up an investigative report on the swift-boating of Christine Comer, the former Texas Education Agency employee who was forced to resign after she recommended a lecture by Barbara Forrest. The creationists have been trying to claim that Comer had a long history of insubordination and misconduct, and that that is why she was fired — none of which is true. Instead, there’s a pattern emerging that when the faction of creationist dentist Don McLeroy took over, there were changes in the administration that look more like harassment to drive out employees who didn’t follow the creationist agenda.

Texans have a tough fight to make down there — keep plugging away!

Gordy Slack is going to be doing a reading from his book on the Dover trial today, at 4:00, on the Western Washington University campus.

If you want more drama, there will also be a panel discussion tomorrow, Wednesday, at 6pm. Slack, will be there, as will Josh Rosenau of the NCSE and TfK, and for hilarious comedy relief…Casey Luskin, mindless attack mouse of the Discovery Institute. Don’t miss it for the laughs.

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I just got word that you get a third shot at Slack. He’s speaking in 234 Biology at 4pm on 29 October on “Do Neo-Creationists get anything right?” I’m guessing the answer will be “no”, I hope.

Imagine that you are running for the State Board of Education, and you receive a questionnaire from a science organization trying to get a feel for your positions on issues important to them. Here’s the first question:

1. As a State Board of Education member, which of the following organizations would you trust to inform your decision-making in regards to science? Check all that apply.

1. American Association for the Advancement of Science _____
2. The Intelligent Design Network ____
3. The National Academies of Science _____
4. The Discovery Institute ____
5. The American Institute of Biological Sciences _____
6. Answers in Genesis ____
7. The National Science Teachers Association _____
8. The Institute for Creation Research _____

This shouldn’t be at all hard. Take your time.

Now if you’re anything like me, you would have checked off a, c, e, and g.

Compare your answers against those given by candidates for the Kansas State Board of Education. I don’t think I would want to vote for Kathy Martin or Dennis Hedke.

I’ve been asked to publicize another creationist quote mine. Gene Myers, a former vice president at Celera who was one of the leaders in sequencing the human genome, has been quote by Tom Abate in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, “What really astounds me is the architecture of life…The system is extremely complex. It’s like it was designed… There’s a huge intelligence there.” This quote is one of the stock items used by Muslim and Christian creationists everywhere.

He was interviewed by TonkaFocus, and asked flatly whether he was an Intelligent Design creationism supporter. His answer:

I am not. I am being taken out of context and upset about this. Abate [SF Chronicle reporter] interviewed me shortly after we had completed the genome and for a moment I waxed poetic about the complexity of what was there and the elegance of the ‘design’. Evolution is very real – it is directly observable in the time frames of mutating bacteria, e.g. the acquisition of antibiotic resistance.

Case closed on that one. Not that any creationists will care.

Some teachers were at a workshop in Atlanta to talk about their experiences teaching evolution, and how to overcome some of the problems. They’ve had it worse than I have.

Some students burst into tears when a high school biology told them they’d be studying evolution. Another teacher said some students repeatedly screamed “no” when he began talking about it.

Other teachers said students demanded to know whether they pray and questioned why the had to learn about evolution if it was just a theory.

I get remarks on my student evaluations (last year, a group of students must have collaborated, because there were a half dozen evaluations that said exactly the same thing: “This class taught me to love Jesus even more!”, which they may have thought would hurt my feelings, but I just laughed.) I’ve had some students who talked to my colleagues about this evolution stuff — they were apparently afraid to confront me. I do get some forthright creationists, but they don’t respond with tears…they try to argue with me, which is just fine. But otherwise, the only screams I get are when I return exams.

The solutions are a little vaguely stated, but OK — they are actively responding to the problem.

A few years ago, Pratt started holding meetings – open to parents, students, church members and others – to address their questions about evolution. She holds the annual session a few weeks before she begins the unit and gets about 200 people.

“It used to be that the whole unit was a struggle, and we were butting heads,” Pratt said. “This meeting helps everyone understand that science teachers are not the enemy. Now, the kids are showing up ready to learn about evolution.”

Other teachers said they try to fix students’ misconceptions. They explain how humans and apes share a common ancestor that no longer exists, not that humans and apes evolved from one another. They say that while “theory” may describe a hunch in everyday language, in science it is defined as an explanation supported by factual evidence to describe events that occur in our world.

Graham Balch, a biology teacher at Grady High in Atlanta, addressed the controversy head-on. He had his students read about Cox’s actions and the response she got. They learned about efforts across the country to water down lessons about evolution and how other public and private schools teach the material. They debated the cause of the conflict and whether evolution should be taught in public schools.

As for myself, the way I handle it is not to push atheism in the classroom (you’re shocked, I know), since that would lead into arguments that aren’t part of the subject matter of the course. What I do instead is teach a historical approach to the issue of evolution, showing that there really wasn’t an Evil Atheist Conspiracy at work, but simply scientists who were making honest evaluations of the evidence: 19th century geology was driven by profits to be made from coal and railroads and canals, not ideology, and Darwin arrived at his conclusions in spite of his upbringing in a faith. And once you’ve gone through the evidence, it becomes really easy to spend a lecture or two ripping up creationists, because the students can easily see how creationists are not operating in good faith and are in denial of the facts of geology and biology.

Some still argue with me now and then, but usually my problem is keeping the other students in the class from brutalizing the poor credulous sap’s arguments too cruelly.