Café Philos has a very good summary of the John Freshwater affair — he’s the bad science teacher who thought the captive audience in his classroom was a fine target for proselytization for his cult. He’s also the lunatic who burned a cross into a student’s arm.
Oh, dear. Earlier, I wrote about Ken Ham’s visit to the Pentagon, a soul-shuddering thought if ever there was one, and it seems Ken has read it. He has replied with a blog entry titled Biology Professor Calls Me “Wackaloon”. Ken, Ken, Ken. You act shocked at the thought that one guy publicly stated that you were Mr Flaming Nutbar, but you shouldn’t be. Millions of people, including some of the most knowledgeable biologists in the world, think just about every day that you are an airhead, an ass, a birdbrain, a blockhead, a bonehead, a boob, a bozo, a charlatan, a cheat, a chowderhead, a chump, a clod, a con artist, a crackpot, a crank, a crazy, a cretin, a dimwit, a dingbat, a dingleberry, a dipstick, a ditz, a dolt, a doofus, a dork, a dum-dum, a dumb-ass, a dumbo, a dummy, a dunce, a dunderhead, a fake, a fathead, a fraud, a fruitcake, a gonif, a halfwit, an idiot, an ignoramus, an imbecile, a jackass, a jerk, a jughead, a knucklehead, a kook, a lamebrain, a loon, a loony, a lummox, a meatball, a meathead, a moron, a mountebank, a nincompoop, a ninny, a nitwit, a numbnuts, a numbskull, a nut, a nutcase, a peabrain, a pinhead, a racketeer, a sap, a scam artist, a screwball, a sham, a simpleton, a snake oil salesman, a thickhead, a turkey, a twerp, a twit, a wacko, a woodenhead, and much, much worse.
You’re a clueless schmuck who knows nothing about science and has arrogantly built a big fat fake museum to promote medieval bullshit — you should not be surprised to learn that you are held in very low esteem by the community of scholars and scientists, and by the even larger community of lay people who have made the effort to learn more about science than you have (admittedly, though, you have set the bar very, very low on that, and there are 5 year old children who have a better grasp of the principles of science as well as more mastery of details of evolution than you do.)
Maybe you should write a blog entry calling attention to each insult given to you. I think that’s your calling, and it’s probably god’s intended mission for you in life, to inspire contempt.
(I encourage each and every one of my readers to express their true feelings about Ken Ham in the comment thread here. Then I want Mr Ham to write an indignant post complaining that “So-and-so called me a “disgrace to brain-damaged clowns””, or whatever — that’ll keep him occupied for years, and will distract him from his campaign of abusing the minds of young children. Be creative.)
Ken Ham, chief wackaloon at Answers in Genesis, was invited to speak…at a Pentagon prayer breakfast.
Just let that sink in.
There are people at the Pentagon who are in charge of planning where your sons and daughter and nephews and nieces and other beloved family members and friends will be sent to put their lives at risk. There are people there who can send missiles and bombers anywhere in the world. There are people there who control nuclear weapons.
And they think Ken Ham is a fine-and-dandy, clever feller.
It’s almost enough to make me wish I could pray. It’s not just Ham, either — it’s that the people with the big guns have prayer breakfasts.
And then, somehow, he segues into babbling about the existence of life on other worlds. He doesn’t think there is any. Look at the logic this kook uses:
The real world is the biblical world–a universe designed by God with the Earth at the spiritual focal point, not an evolutionary universe teeming with life. … Extraterrestrial life is an evolutionary concept; it does not comport with the biblical teachings of the uniqueness of the Earth and the distinct spiritual position of human beings.
Because the bible says we are the focus of the entire universe, there can’t possibly be any competitors. Of course, this means that his god created this vast, empty, uninhabitable space for no reason other than that we’ll have twinkly little stars in the sky at night…but hey, that’s the crazy Christian deity, always doing irrational stuff and encouraging his followers to be equally nuts.
Barbara Forrest is sending this message out everywhere — they need concerted public action to forestall a dreadful legislative disaster that is looming large in the state of Louisiana. You can help!
We in the LA Coalition for Science have reached the point at which the only possible measure we have left is to raise an outcry from around the country that Gov. Jindal has to hear. What is happening in Louisiana has national implications, much to the delight of the Discovery Institute, which is blogging the daylights out of the Louisiana situation.
SB 733, the LA Science Education Act, has passed both houses of the legislature, and the governor has indicated that he intends to sign it. But we don’t have to be quiet about this. There is something that you and everyone else you know who wants to help can do:
The LA Coalition for Science has posted a press release and an open letter to Jindal asking him to veto the bill. The contact information is at the LCFS website.
It is time for a groundswell of contacts to Jindal, and this must be done immediately since we don’t know when he will sign the bill. The vote in the legislature is veto-proof, so any request for Jindal to veto the bill must stress that the governor can make this veto stick if he wants it to stick. Please contact everyone you know and ask them to contact the governor’s office and ask him to veto the bill. Please blog this. If you have friendly contacts in your address book, please ask them to also contact the governor’s office.
We want people all over the country to do this, as many as possible, since Louisiana will be only the beginning. Their states could be next. Here are the talking points:
Point 1: The Louisiana law, SB 733, the LA Science Education Act, has national implications. So far, this legislation has failed in every other state where it was proposed, except in Michigan, where it remains in committee. By passing SB 733, Louisiana has set a dangerous precedent that will benefit the Discovery Institute by helping them to advance their strategy to get intelligent design creationism into public schools. Louisiana is only the beginning. Other states will now be encouraged to pass such legislation, and the Discovery Institute has already said that they will continue their push to get such legislation passed.
Point 2: Since Gov. Jindal’s support for teaching ID clearly helped to get this bill passed in the first place, his decision to veto it will stick if he lets the legislature know that he wants it to stick.
Point 3: Simply allowing the bill to become law without his signature, which is one of the governor’s options, does not absolve him of the responsibility for protecting the public school science classes of Louisiana. He must veto the bill to show that he is serious about improving Louisiana by improving education. Anything less than a veto means that the governor is giving a green light to creationists to undermine the education of Louisiana children.
You can pull additional talking points from the LCFS press release and our online letter if you want them.
Now we have to get the message out to people. People can contact the governor and and also contact their friends, asking them to do the same. We need to create a huge network of e-mails asking people to do this. Where they live does not matter at this point. What is happening in Louisiana has implications for everyone in the nation. The Discovery Institute does not intend to stop with the Pelican State.
You can read the open letter to Jindal; you can call him at 225-342-7015 or 866-366-1121 (Toll Free); fax him at 225-342-7099. Anyone anywhere in the country should hammer the message home. If Jindal has any national political aspirations, this willful destruction of science education in his home state is going to follow him around like stink on a skunk.
Would you believe that Andy Schlafly, head kook at Conservapædia, wrote a letter to Richard Lenski, demanding release of his data to Schlafly and his crack team of home-schooled children? Schlafly is a creationist and ideologue of the worst sort; he has no qualifications in biology, and only wants the data because he doesn’t believe it, and would no doubt then use his vast powers of incomprehension to garble it.
That isn’t noteworthy, though. We expect creationists to act like indignant idiots when the facts are shown to them. What’s really cool is that Lenski wrote back.
Dear Mr. Schlafly:
I suggest you might want to read our paper itself, which is available for download at most university libraries and is also posted as publication #180 on my website. Here’s a brief summary that addresses your three points.
1) “… your claims, that E. Coli bacteria had an evolutionary beneficial mutation in your study.” We (my group and scientific collaborators) have already published several papers that document beneficial mutations in our long-term experiment. These papers provide exact details on the identity of the mutations, as well as genetic constructions where we have produced genotypes that differ by single mutations, then compete them, demonstrating that the mutations confer an advantage under the environmental conditions of the experiment. See papers # 122, 140, 155, 166, and 178 referenced on my website. In the latest paper, you will see that we make no claim to having identified the genetic basis of the mutations observed in this study. However, we have found a number of mutant clones that have heritable differences in behavior (growth on citrate), and which confer a clear advantage in the environment where they evolved, which contains citrate. Our future work will seek to identify the responsible mutations.
2. “Specifically, we wonder about the data supporting your claim that one of your colonies of E. Coli developed the ability to absorb citrate, something not found in wild E. Coli, at around 31,500 generations.” You will find all the relevant methods and data supporting this claim in our paper. We also establish in our paper, through various phenotypic and genetic markers, that the Cit+ mutant was indeed a descendant of the original strain used in our experiments.
3. “In addition, there is skepticism that 3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000.” We make no such claim anywhere in our paper, nor do I think it is correct. Proteins do not “appear out of the blue”, in any case. We do show that what we call a “potentiated” genotype had evolved by generation 20,000 that had a greater propensity to produce Cit+ mutants. We also show that the dynamics of appearance of Cit+ mutants in the potentiated genotypes are highly suggestive of the requirement for two additional mutations to yield the resulting Cit+ trait. Moreover, we found that Cit+ mutants, when they first appeared, were often rather weak at using citrate. At least the main Cit+ line that we studied underwent an additional mutation (or mutations) that refined that ability and led to a large improvement in growth on citrate. All these issues and the supporting methods and data are covered in our paper.
Sincerely,
Richard Lenski
Wow. That was far more polite than they deserve, but good for Dr Lenski. Unfortunately, Schlafly will now use the reply as an opportunity to smugly regard himself as a serious player, and he will also ignore the substance to continue to deny that evolution occurred. But maybe, just maybe, someone in the collection of deprived children subjected to Schlafly’s tutelage will notice that real scientists can give substantial replies to his usual ignorant nonsense.
Here you go:
It was a good performance, but I think he tried a little too hard to cram a whole lecture into a few minutes — but then maybe that’s what you need to do on Colbert, ride hard over his attempts to derail you. I also disagree with his premise that creationism has its roots in anti-authoritarianism and rebelliousness, which he touched on briefly here but goes on at length in his book…but yeah, he’s dead on target when he points out that ID has no evidence, and is basically trying to cheat its way into the curriculum.
That dreadful propaganda movie is opening in Canada next week, not that I expect it will be a box office smash there after flopping here. However, there’s a weird comment on the blog of Canada’s greatest quote-stringer and maker of delusional word hash (Forgive me for linking to Uncommon Descent in the last post and Denyse O’Leary in this one). She’s babbling as if she expects picketers waving big signs and chanting on the sidewalk. Did anyone, anywhere picket this movie? I haven’t heard anything about it — my regional atheist group even organized a field trip to go watch it.
Oh, well. I hope no car backfires as she goes up to buy her ticket, or we’ll hear all about the atheist snipers who were trying to prevent her from seeing the silly thing.
Bill Dembski seems to be a bit peeved at those theistic evolutionists — they keep siding with the evolutionary biologists, whether they’re Christian or atheist or whatever! And all that despite the fact that the atheists often roll their eyes and laugh when the theistic evolutionists start babbling their vague claims about a guiding deity. The “biggest detractors” of ID have been his fellow Christians. How can that be?
I’ve got two answers for that. One: selection. When someone in an embattled school district wants a speaker to come in and explain evolution to them, they’re going to pick someone who isn’t also notoriously godless, out of a reasonable fear that it will start more fires than it will put out.
Two: knowledge. Those theistic evolutionists may not like us mean atheists much, but we both agree 100% on the evidence for evolution. Dembski is baffled by the fact that theistic evolutionists “shaft the ID community,” but he shouldn’t be — it’s because the ID community abandons common standards of evidence and wants to redefine all of science. Scientists, both atheist and Christian, easily find common cause in opposing IDiocy.
We’re also still happy to argue. For instance, here’s a little exchange that Dembski had with Ken Miller, and I think they’re both wrong.
A year or so ago, when Richard Dawkins’s website posted a blasphemy challenge (reported at UD here — the challenge urged people to post a YouTube video of themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit), I asked Ken Miller for his reaction. He pooh-poohed it as “a clumsy attempt to trivialize important issues.” The obvious question this raises is whether systematic efforts by atheists to trivialize (and indeed denigrate) important issues is itself an important issue.
Hmmm. Miller says the blasphemy challenge trivializes important issues. Dembski agrees and talks about important issues, too.
What are they?
Is the concept of Hell an “important issue”?
Is it the idea that you can be damned for disbelief in a bit of dogma, or the whole idea of damnation itself?
Is the Holy Spirit an important issue?
How about the concept of an afterlife?
Maybe the important issue is the defense of a patriarchal Semitic sky god with a host of psychiatric issues, like low self-esteem, outbursts of destructive anger, and an obsession with genitalia and diet?
Both Dembski and Miller miss the point. Those are trivial issues, relics of foolish old mythologies, and the purpose of the blasphemy challenge was to appropriately trivialize the trivial. I think the challenge was an excellent idea — we need to demystify and desanctify the tired and falsified beliefs that parasitize our culture. The only important issue in the challenge was the promotion of irreverence about ideas to which some people in society still cling in futile trust.
So, see, I can picture both Miller and Dembski as being in the same boat with religious foolishness, but Miller has several saving graces that Dembski lacks: Miller is not trying to poison public education in this country, he’s actually very knowledgeable about biology, and he can give a coherent and accurate talk about real important issues. He can share some goals with a militant atheist like me, where neither of us have much sympathy for a militant creationist like Dembski.
Oh, my. Bobby Jindal was on TV, and he got asked about evolution. Here’s his answer to a question about whether he had doubts about evolution.
One, I don’t think this is something the federal or state government should be imposing its views on local school districts. You know, as a conservative I think government that’s closest to the people governs best. I think local school boards should be in a position of deciding the curricula and also deciding what students should be learning. Secondly, I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. Some want only to teach intelligent design, some only want to teach evolution. I think both views are wrong, as a parent.
One, that is an incredibly dumb answer. Devolving the responsibility for deciding science content onto a local school board is a horrible idea; has he never attended school board meetings? They are run by, at best, well-meaning people who care about local schools, but unless it’s a school district in a district with a university, you’re not likely to find any scientists on them. More typically, they’re going to contain a mix of very bad people: ideologues who want to shut down public schools, or push their unsupported nonsensical agenda, or the local cranks who’ve upgraded from writing letters to the editor of the town paper.
If he wanted to let the school board manage budgets, that’s one thing; unfortunately, thinking that a hodge-podge of random community members with few scientific qualifications are adequate to evaluate the science content is a classic instance of conservative idiocy. Standards must be determined at a higher level by a carefully chosen pool of competent, qualified experts.
Second, nobody is withholding information from students. Here, this is the complete curriculum for the intelligent design part of the syllabus:
A magic man done it.
There, finished! There are no experiments that need to be summarized, no details that need to be explored, no complicated mechanisms that need to be explicated. Parents can exhaustively cover the subject in a moment or two some evening, or perhaps Mom could could scribble it down on a note in her child’s lunch. If they’re ambitious, they could send them off to a Sunday School, which might be taxed by the sudden increase in difficulty over the usual pap they dispense, but they’ll cope, perhaps by dumbing it down a little more.
One thing is for sure, we shouldn’t marshal the resources of our public school to teach such trivia, nor should we dignify the vacuity of ID with a place in the curriculum when there is nothing to teach.
Jindal’s “ideas” are utterly ludicrous, nothing but the warmed over inanity of the Discovery Institute’s usual “teach the controversy” foolishness. This is a “Republican superstar”? Man, but that party has become a bucket of rejects and peckerwoods, hasn’t it?
Over the years, I’ve developed a rough classification system for creationist screeds. One of the most common is the ‘deluded parrot’, in which the writer just repeats the same tiresome old canards we’ve heard a thousand times before: “If man evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?” is a common example. Then there are the ‘malevolent vermin’, which you don’t see much of on the web — because they usually write profanity-laced threats to my personal email, and are quick to gloat over my prospective tenure in hell. The ‘pious aunties’ aren’t quite so vicious, but they are shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover there are people who don’t worship Jesus with every breath, and they write letters that tend to end with the standard phrase, “I will pray for you.”
And then there are these precious few where you read them, and the text is incoherent and fractured, like the writer has stripped the gears of his brain and every once in a while some random thought goes spinning wildly, and everything is out of sync everywhere. These are people who make no sense. I was sent this classic example, a bizarre example where the author no doubt thinks he’s making a profound point, but there has to be some really crazy logic at work here.
Evolution explains designer
Evolution versus creation is a false dichotomy. Evolution as a viable mechanism causing the ascent of man also explains the existence of the creator.
If man could evolve to his present status physically, culturally and technologically within the age of this planet (approximately 4.5 billion years), then obviously the technology required to build species entirely of one’s own choosing could be developed within the age of the universe.
Considering the amount of time that has elapsed, which is endless, and the quantity of appropriate locations for life to evolve, also endless, a coincidence of impossible magnitude would be required for us to be the first intelligent designers.
The dichotomy is stubbornly maintained by those who fight for freedom from the morality of Christians. It is also stubbornly maintained by those who fight for freedom from the result of the immorality of the atheists, who believe they will have to answer to no one.
Uninterrupted evolution reaches a climax when an intelligent designer evolves. At that point the designer easily outpaces random natural selection because of the deliberate nature of intelligent design. The Christian has more confidence in evolution and technology than atheists have.
JIM GRIEB
Brutus, Mich.
So, can anyone translate this? Somehow, I think he’s promoting Christianity, but how he got there from his starting point isn’t clear. It’s probably something quantum.
