Lethal doses of stupid

There are limits to even my capacity to cope with The Stupid, and this video reaches them. It’s interesting in a historical sense, in that it seems to be an old recording — familiar faces look so young, and the whole thing has the clumsy style of a bad 1970s documentary—but it’s a whole half-hour of badly concatenated mish-mashes of creationist arguments. Who knew that Charles Darwin was responsible for the Big Bang theory, or that evolution was the foundation of astronomy? (Don’t tell Phil, his inferiority complex is bad enough.).

It’s rather weird to see old faces that most of you have forgotten or never knew, like Ian Taylor and Luther Sunderland and John Morris, all sitting there mired in the most awful ignorance and propagating lies about Lucy’s knee joint and Neandertal just being an arthritic old man and so forth, and realize that they or their successors are still spouting the same old lies today. Ignorance builds more ignorance, unfortunately.

The incoherence of the whole production is amazing, too. It starts of with this weird set of New Age rationalizations before wallowing in the reactionary pronouncements of fundamentalist kooks like D. James Kennedy … and then at the end it includes a five minute music video with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.

There’s a brief discussion of the video here, brought up by a guy who thought it made good points and made him question his acceptance of evolution. Among the issues he had was that the movie claims that “cro-magnon and other pre-humans were determined to be transitional species from as little as a tooth or a rib,” which is actually an excellent example of an outright lie from the movie. Nope, not true. Cro-magnon refers to a variety of Homo sapiens, so calling them transitional is stretching the word. Transitional forms are far better established than as extrapolations from a single tooth — but the creationists sure milk their mangled story of Nebraska Man for all it is worth, and use it to falsely cast doubt on other explanations.

I’m not even going to try to address the details of that mess. It’s the Gish Gallop on video; if anyone has any specific questions, OK, but the shorter summary is that all the creationists in it are lying out of ignorance and all the scientists are taken out of context.

By the way, if the stupidity in that video doesn’t make your cortex disintegrate into slime, try this one — it’s the intellectual equivalent of huffing a hydrofluoric acid/osmium tetroxide cocktail.

Texans of Fort Worth, Parker, Ellis, and Johnson counties: Vote for Pat Hardy!

There’s a school board election in District 11 of Texas that has a clear choice: Pat Hardy is the pro-science candidate, despite being a conservative, religious Baptist, while her opponent is a deranged lunatic who is quietly outspending her 12:1 while avoiding the public eye altogether. You do not want to vote for Barney Maddox — he is an “ill-informed nutcase”.

Isn’t this weird? Here in Minnesota, we’re affected by the outcomes of local school board races in Texas — allowing ignorant, raving lunatics to make textbook decisions there is going to shape the choices we get to make here. So if you know any Texans, spread the word: Barney Maddox is bad news.

Which one of you little rascals Sokaled AiG?

Answers in Genesis started this so-called peer reviewed journal called Answers, and the latest publication therein is such a confused mess that I’m wondering if it could be a hoax. Here’s the abstract, but I think just the title alone would be sufficient to tell this is codified lunacy: An Apology and Unification Theory for the Reconciliation of Physical Matter and Metaphysical Cognizance.

[Read more…]

The Dark Clan? Me?

There was a lecture at UCL recently by Dr Oktar Babuna and Ali Sadun Engin. They spilled the beans, and we’re all in trouble now.

He then showed just how “insightful” the folks at Harun Yahya can be by quoting from one of their books, The Dark Clan, which explains that evolutionary science is inspired by “a dark clan behind all kids of corruption and perversion, that controls drug trafficking, prostitution rings”. Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.

The Dark Clan actually isn’t bad — nice moody music about vampires and such. I was just listening to a couple of their tracks and was enjoying them.

Oh, wait — they’re referring to this Dark Clan, which is just stupid. I’ll have you know I had to get out of the prostitution business when the Discovery Institute moved in and outcompeted us — they were so much better at it than we were. I’ve had to focus on the squid porn niche instead, which is nowhere near as lucrative, but at least the clientele is less creepy than the Dominionists they cater to.

And that quote from the lecture isn’t in error. Here’s what they say on their web site:

The purpose behind choosing the term “dark clan” is to convey the sense of a web-like structure with offshoots in every country, orchestrating the moral degeneration of today’s world. Even though it presents itself as highly modern, its structural design is reminiscent of the historical totemic clans. This dark clan is to be found behind all kinds of despicable deeds, corruption and perversion. It controls drug-trafficking operations, prostitution rings and promotes immorality. The members of this clan manage to portray themselves in a positive light through their collaborators in the media. They enjoy the de facto protection of their collaborators in the security forces and succeed in using the law to their own advantage through their collaborators in departments of justice. They also display a powerful unity against those perceived as enemies. Their greatest enemies are the believers who want to destroy their corrupt business networks, who struggle to make morality, harmony and justice dominant in the world and who strive tirelessly on the ideological battlefield to bring seriousness of the situation to people’s attention.

Oh, yeah, that is so me.

Are our high schools teaching evolution?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

The Ecological Society of America has just published an article that surveys the state of science teaching in the US. Some of the results are somewhat reassuring — the majority of our college-bound high school students are at least getting exposed to evolution to some degree — but they’re also getting taught creationism to an unfortunate degree. Here’s the abstract to give you the gist of the story.

How frequently and in what manner are evolution, creationism, and intelligent design taught in public high
schools? Here, I analyze the answer to this question, as given by nearly 600 students from major public universities nationwide in a survey conducted during the spring of 2006. Although almost all recent public high-school graduate respondents reported receiving evolution instruction, only about three-quarters perceived that
evolution was taught as a “credible scientific theory”. Creationism and intelligent design were reportedly presented almost one-third and one-fifth of the time, respectively, though respondents recalled that both concepts
were presented as lacking scientific credibility much more often than not. The survey results are presented in
composite form and also disaggregated with respect to the strength of evolution-related state standards, red
state-blue state divisions, and the regional location of states within the country.

You can also hear the author discussing the methodology and results in a podcast, which I think is a wonderful idea. (Maybe every paper should be accompanied by a 15 minute podcast in which the author explains the work to a general audience…).

Here’s the good news/bad news data.

i-e964a4c7747b7e9f698a455ed2d71f36-inst_freq.jpg
(Click for larger image)

The good news: look at that, 92% are getting taught about evolution to varying degrees. I also think it’s good news that 26% say they’re getting “in depth” instruction, although, of course, this is self-reported by students who probably don’t know how much depth there is. At least this tells me that a solid majority of teachers are trying, and are not silenced by pressure from the public.

The bad news: 30% are getting taught about creationism, and 20% are learning about intelligent design. That’s a waste of time and resources, and it’s an indicator that the urgings of creationists for a false “fairness” might be having some effect.

Now, of course, maybe they’re learning about creationism in high school because the teacher is slamming it as bogus nonsense, as I do in my university classes. There’s a little good news there, too: over 70% of the time, evolution is taught as credible theory, but as for creationism…

Additionally, when intelligent design is taught, it is
perceived to be presented as a credible scientific theory at
a rate higher (34%) than that for creationism (18%).
This confirms one of the few narrow points of agreement
between intelligent design’s proponents and critics: intelligent design is intended to look more “like science” and
less “like religion” — and to these recent public high-school graduates, it does.

So we can say that the majority of the time creationism is taught, it is disparaged to some degree and is not taught as a credible scientific theory. That’s reassuring. Of course, we could take a glass-half-empty view and note that in those cases where ID is taught, it’s taught as a credible theory an appalling third of the time, and it’s also a successful strategy for boosting the reputation of creationism.

The situation isn’t quite as bad as I feared, although there is a significant minority that are getting taught creationism uncritically in the public schools. What I’m missing is a couple of things. This is information taken from a select population of college bound students, and those students are more likely to have had exposure to science, and are also more likely to be attentive. I’d like to know what impressions other students have of their science instruction.

This is also a collection of exactly that, student impressions. I’d like to see a complement to this study that surveys actual curricula and faculty attitudes. I know how tuned out students can be, so I can’t say that I entirely trust student reports.

Bowman KL (2008) The evolution battles in high-school science classes: who is teaching what? Front Ecol Environ 6(2):69-74.

John West caught quote-mining

It’s no surprise that a fellow of the Discovery Institute would distort his critics, but it’s still entertaining to see the quotes lined up with the manglings. If you’re a real masochist, you can catch West droning out the same old lies on Book TV. I’m not; I heard him speak on this subject once before, and it was infuriating in the depths of his bad history and even worse science.

The genome is not a computer program

The author of All-Too-Common Dissent has found a bizarre creationist on the web; this fellow, Randy Stimpson, isn’t at all unusual, but he does represent well some common characteristics of creationists in general: arrogance, ignorance, and projection. He writes software, so he thinks we have to interpret the genome as a big program; he knows nothing about biology; and he thinks his expertise in an unrelated field means he knows better than biologists. And he freely admits it!

I am not a geneticist or a molecular biologist. In fact, I only know slightly more about DNA than the average college educated person. However, as a software developer I have a vague idea of how many bytes of code is needed to make complex software programs. And to think that something as complicated as a human being is encoded in only 3 billion base pairs of DNA is astounding.

Wow. I know nothing about engine repair, but if I strolled down to the local garage and tried to tell the mechanics that a car was just like a zebrafish, and you need to throw a few brine shrimp in the gas tank now and then, I don’t think I would be well-received. Creationists, however, feel no compunction about expressing comparable inanities.

[Read more…]

Florida: Land of the Delusional

Donna Callaway, a member of the Florida Board of Education, has an editorial that has to be read to be believed. This is a woman who has drunk deep of the Kool-Aid.

First, she’s babbles about how surprised she was that the revision of the science standards included major elements, such as evolution, of which she disapproved. This seems to be hard for many people to grasp, especially some of those who are appointed to education boards, but the board members are administrators, not scientists. To write the science standards, they actually recruit knowledgeable, qualified people to put together a document that reflects the current state of science: it doesn’t matter if the bureaucrat in charge of implementing the standards doesn’t know the science. Problems arise when one of these paper pushers decides to impose her brand of ignorance and attempt to override the efforts of the standards writing team (a situation that arose right here in Minnesota several years ago, with Cheri Yecke’s efforts to sabotage our state science standards.)

Callaway is alarmed at one of the Florida standards: “Diversity and Evolution of Living Organisms. A. Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.” Your alarm is irrelevant, Donna. You aren’t a biologist. That standard is accurate and properly represents the opinion of the scientific community. If instruction in the state of Florida is to prepare students for understanding the reality of biology rather than the errors of your ideology, then that is what should be taught.

Not only does she not have a clue about what her job entails, but she’s swaddled in meters-thick layers of delusion.

If there is a victory for those who oppose the evolution standard as written or amended, it is that they stood shoulder to shoulder, not in a fanatical, demanding way as many may have expected. Rather, they stood kindly with a sense of calm assurance, with open and transparent reasoning that confused their opponents who expected a religious battle. This was never that battle; it was a battle over student rights. Those rights were not recognized.

Well, they might have confused their opponents, but it wasn’t because they were open and transparent and reasonable — it was because they were batshit insane. Have they already forgotten the orange man?

As for whether there was no religious battle, note that this editorial was published in the Florida Baptist Witness and, well, read on.

I left the SBOE meeting emotionally drained but reaffirmed by the love for children and the respect for others that I saw in those who hold beliefs with which I can identify. And, speaking of identity, I began my comments to the SBOE with an acknowledgement that I have a religious identity. That identity urges me to use the Master Teacher as my example.

(Trust me, I don’t think she’s talking about Richard Feynman here.)

The model He set for us 2,000 years ago is so appropriate for today. He allowed Himself to be questioned. He never thrust his belief on anyone. He allowed both Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman to question Him, each from an opposite end of the human spectrum. It was as if He said, “Ask me questions. I will answer. It may not be what you want to hear, but there is more. I invite you to come and see. Decide for yourself.” Learning took place under those circumstances.

We very much want that kind of learning experience to occur for our children. When they are not just allowed, but encouraged to debate issues, they explore them, search for evidence, think critically, and then have an ownership of the knowledge they gain. Adults have a right to do this. How can we deny that to our children?

In the immortal words of that masterful tactician, Bill Buckingham, “Two thousand years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?” Oh, right, we’re supposed to believe these bozos are promoting Intelligent Design with purely secular intent. If there is a god, why does he keep promoting his most stupid followers to school boards?

Is this going to be the major creationist strategy?

It seems to be all over the place, with both the Discovery Institute and the various overtly (as opposed to the DI’s stealthy) religious creationists. It’s the one message they are all pounding out consistently.

It, of course, is the argumentum ad consequentiam, the Great Godwinization of the debate, the constant claim that Charles Darwin was the evil monster responsible for the Holocaust, all modern racism and oppression, anti-semitism, whites-only seating on buses, slavery, eugenics, abortion, man-on-pig sex, gun control, job discrimination, illegal aliens, feminism, the birth control pill, hedonism, Mexicans, atheism, hippies, and anything other than the average social mores of 1950s America, and therefore evolution is false.

Anyone with half a brain can see right through this argument: Darwin could have been a baby-raping cannibal and it wouldn’t have affected the validity of his arguments one whit. That Darwin was actually a fairly conservative British gentleman who was also an abolitionist and advocate for fair treatment of all races (although, admittedly, not equality of all races) similarly doesn’t affect the status of his theory, but does allow us to comfortably celebrate the man, and not just the work.

Furthermore, it is ahistorical nonsense. Darwin’s ideas were a relatively late addition to Western culture, arising in the last half of the 19th century. Many of the evils Darwin is blamed for, like slavery and anti-semitism, preceded his birth, and many are even literally endorsed by by a book the liars for Jesus revere, the Bible.

This is an argument that relies entirely on a deep and all encompassing ignorance on the part of the listener to be accepted — they have to be oblivious to the rules of basic logic, they have to be complete blanks on even the roughest outline of history, and they have to be willing to allow visceral reactions to the key words the creationists are spitting out to be tied to unrelated concepts. They have to be stupid and uneducated. This is the state the creationists must perpetuate if their argument is to succeed.

Who is making these transparently idiotic claims? John West, Ken Ham, Geoffrey Simmons, D. James Kennedy, and Tom DeRosa to name just a few. These are people leading a campaign to keep your children stupid.

The latest to jump on the Darwin-caused-Hitler bandwagon is — and I dislike linking to her bad prose and pathetically transparent inbred link-farm — is Denyse O’Leary. Watch how quickly she spirals into lunacy in a single paragraph.

Darwin was instrumental in discrediting the traditional way of looking at human beings. This is a fact that everyone admits and many celebrate. How often have you heard that Darwin’s great achievement was to knock humanity off its pedestal and show that we are merely evolved animals, accidentally evolved at that? And that had everything to do with the Holocaust.

It is true that one thing Darwin accomplished was to challenge the traditional exceptionalist view of human beings as somehow privileged — a hierarchical view that was also used to rank races within the human species — and this was a good thing. While he didn’t always meet his own standard to “never speak of higher and lower,” it was a commendable goal.

But notice how O’Leary twists it: we are merely evolved animals, as if our status as animals somehow excuses our abuses of our fellows. I always wonder if people who make this argument also pull the wings off flies. Darwin did not demote humanity, he elevated it and all life on earth to the exalted position of equal products of long eras of evolutionary history.

This had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

The idea of making Jews extinct in the sense that the dinosaurs are extinct – as the Nazis tried to do – was derived culturally from Darwin, not from the Church. Also derived from Darwin and his supporters – rather than the Church – was the view of Jews as simply a gene pool rather than a race/religion/culture/Jesus’s family/God’s chosen people/essential part of history/essential part of our neighbourhood/people we know. The stew of traditional issues sometimes overflows into violence, but not into a eugenics program.

Look right there, in O’Leary’s preferred view: Jews are “God’s chosen people.” Some people, apparently, are better than other people; we are therefore justified in exterminating those other people if they get in the way of the chosen ones. And who gets to say who are the chosen ones? Why, the chosen ones themselves.

The biological view that arose from Darwinian thought is that there are no specially preferred groups. Jews are as unique and valuable as Palestinians, Chinese, Basque, Germans, Italians, Swedes, New Guineans, Inuit, or Canadians. “Simply a gene pool”? What nonsense. If the other is “simply a gene pool,” then so are we, and none of us have grounds for demanding privileged status.

As for the claim that the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews was derived from Darwin, all we have to do is look at Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies to see how false that claim is. Luther published in 1543, 316 years before Darwin, and in that little pamphlet lays down an 8-point plan for destroying the Jews.

  1. “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. …”
  2. “Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. …”
  3. “Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. …”
  4. “Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. …”
  5. “Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. …”
  6. “Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. … Such money should now be used in … the following [way]… Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed [a certain amount]…”
  7. “Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow… For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.”
  8. “If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews’ blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country” and “we must drive them out like mad dogs.”

In the blinkered, shuttered, moldy attic of O’Leary’s mind, the fact that Darwin used the word “race” in the title of his book is far more evil than the fact that an influential leader of the church ranted openly about hating the Jews and published specific plans for their destruction.

Here’s what’s really appalling. This whole argument on their part is so blatantly stupid and false, yet somehow the diverse group of leaders of creationism in this country have all informally reached a consensus that their followers are ignorant enough that they will actually accept it. Sense, reason, history, logic, the plain and documented facts can all be ignored — they can delude themselves and lie, lie, lie, and the state of the creationist mind is so abysmally benighted that they can reliably expect a large following to believe them.