I suppose it’s good that I have an opportunity to take a chop at the third big branch of the Abrahamic tree, but I really take no joy in being so thorough. Enjoy the spectacle of a delusion Jewish ‘teacher’ misleading his students and lying out of ignorance.

What is it with creationists and fruit? I really don’t get it. This guy is just rehashing Paley, though, claiming that finding a seed in an apple is a more miraculous event than finding a silver dollar in one. Guess what, guy: we can describe the developmental events that produce seeds in fruit, and they don’t involve angels flying in and inserting them. We have entirely natural mechanisms, making the supernatural superfluous.

(via Atheist Media Blog)

Ken Miller makes an interesting proposal to James Randerson: he thinks we ought to reclaim the word “design,” and apply it to evolution. Not in the sense that the Intelligent Designists use it, as a proxy to imply a divine being, but because he says “design” is an emergent property of evolution. It’s an interesting idea, but I have a couple of objections.

One is brought up by Randerson: doesn’t “design” imply a “designer”? It’s a problem that we might possibly overcome someday — I can say the word “thunder” now, without an audience immediately thinking of Thor — but language associations are a really tough nut to crack. Look at all the flailings about over the word “theory”; lay people will hear that word being used by scientists and conclude that the creationists must have been right all along long before they get around to remapping their mental connections to design.

Another problem is of even greater concern. The word “design” carries other implications: purpose, planning, calculation. These are not present in evolution! Miller isn’t even trying to propose purposefulness in evolution — design, he is saying, is a consequence of the natural mechanism.

I don’t think it can work. The creationists know PR and rhetoric, even if they are ignorant of biology, and they picked the word “design” by design — they know full well all the baggage the term hauls, and it’s exactly the freight they want it to carry. They even use the word in the name of their rebranded creationism. Miller may be an excellent rhetorician in his own right, but I don’t think he’s good enough to pull off this switcheroo, which I suspect would be immediately spun by the creationist noise machine as a capitulation.

Taner Edis has written a short summary of Islamic creationism. It’s not a pleasant picture.

Muslims hold a variety of views on evolution; Yahya-style creationists do not speak for all. Some Muslim thinkers accept evolution in the sense of descent with modification, provided that this evolution is explicitly divinely guided. Even such comparative liberals, however, almost always reject the Darwinian, naturalistic view of evolution that is current in natural science. Human evolution meets with particularly strong rejection. Indeed, it is safe to say that most committed Muslims take naturalistic evolution to be religiously unacceptable. Most would consider the evolution of complex life forms through natural mechanisms alone, without the visible direction of a divine intelligence, to be an intellectual absurdity. The Harun Yahya material has no scholarly standing whatsoever. But more sophisticated anti-evolution views have wide currency among serious Muslim intellectuals, including very well-known Western-based scholars of Islam such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

That’s really a shame, that an entire culture has closed itself off to a significant and well-tested scientific concept. I wonder what the Christian creationists here would think of the idea that the Islamic world has achieved the anti-evolution ideal?

Just when you think these guys can’t get any more dishonest, here comes Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots. The tag line on the book is a quote from Ham: “Although racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any person to popularize it.”

Wow. More than Martin Luther, who helped make anti-semitism a favorite German pastime? More than Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped the Ku Klux Klan grow to half a million members? More than Hitler? More than our Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision? More than Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations? More than Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond? More than King Leopold II of Belgium?

This Charles Darwin?

Remind me, once Ken Ham dies, that I have to start a campaign to remember him as the person most responsible for popularizing piglet-raping. Truth doesn’t matter with Ham, so we can freely invent any crime we want and blame him for increasing its popularity. Anything goes, too — he’s certainly willing to stoop to any vileness to defame those he dislikes, so he can’t complain when he gets santorumed.

Florida approved science standards that actually use the word ‘evolution’, but as I noted at the time, the creationist compromise was that it had to be referred to as “the scientific theory of evolution”. It was weird: it is the scientific theory of evolution, as opposed to the non-scientific guesswork of creationism, so what was the advantage to the creationists? All I could imagine is that they somehow thought this enthroned their misunderstanding of the word “theory” as official policy.

Well, the word is out that the creationists screwed up big time, and their own ignorance has turned around and bit them on the ass. They really did think inserting the word “theory” would help discredit evolution (it may still do so, as they try to frantically spin it in their church newsletters, but it’s only going to work among their true believers), but it’s going to have the opposite effect in the public schools.

Not only will Florida’s students learn about evolution; they’ll also learn that the scientific definition of a theory is different from the everyday definition,
referring not to wild-eyed speculation but to a vast body of observation
and testing that confirms a hypothesis so strongly that it might as
well be considered fact.

You might argue that that is only Wired‘s interpretation, and that maybe the creationists actually have some secret nefarious plan to turn that bit of language into a propaganda victory. We’ve got confirmation, though: the Discovery Institute is furious, and Casey Luskin is squeaking madly about how they were tricked into a compromise that added a harmless phrase to the standards, while allowing the “dogmatism of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)” to stand.

This may have an added benefit. Creationists have benefitted from the public’s colloquial understanding of the meaning of the word “theory,” which differs from the scientific meaning. Now they’re getting chastised by their own for screwing up and mistaking their own quirky ignorance for a useful strategem. We’ve been yelling at them for years that a scientific idea that has reached the status of a theory is a good thing — it means the idea is powerful tool for integrating many lines of inquiry — but maybe now the message will sink in.

Now we just have to do this a few more times.

Creationist: There are no transitional whale fossils!

Scientist: Oh, dear, really? That’s terrible! We should teach the students about that, don’t you think?

Creationist: Yes, we should. That information must go into the science standards for our state.

Scientist: I quite agree. When we mandate that our teachers must offer instruction in the details of whale transitional fossils, the gaps will be so obvious.

Creationist: Good. Let’s insert, “Teachers will discuss the nature of evolutionary transitions, emphasizing the kinds of evidence needed to support claims that land animals evolved into whales, and that cats give birth to dogs.”

Scientist: Well, as a compromise, let’s leave out the bit about cats and dogs, and we’ll have to clean up and standardize the language in committee, but let’s do it. The committee might even make this broader, pushing for discussion of all kinds of transitional fossils, which, of course, are absent. Boy, you sure got me over a barrel, forcing me to include discussion of an evolutionary flaw in our public schools. I hope you aren’t going to continue to outwit me with your Mastery of Science.

Creationist: <preening smugly> Ha ha, our cunning plan is working!

A reader sent me two links to video clips. The contrast is fascinating.

Here’s the first. It’s a nice illustration of the evidence behind our understanding of the evolution of whales, all in 7 minutes.

Now watch a creationist explain whale evolution.

Ouch. He complains that those wicked scientists are trying to turn the bible into a great big joke…but I think this clown does an even better job of that. Try counting the misconceptions — he goes on and on with this story about an animal crawling out of the primordial ooze onto the land and not liking it, and then wishing it could go back into the ocean, where it sucks in its hindlimbs and turns into a whale…and then he calls that story stupid and ridiculous. Guess what: it is! Of course, this ignorant nitwit is the person who made up the story, and it has nothing at all to do with what the evidence actually says.

This is what we have to deal with: morons who think their caricatures are evidence, and this bozo is probably voting for school board members based on how closely they approximate his level of idiocy.

The Florida board of education kept the lunacy to a minimum and actually approved science standards that use the word “evolution”. They still had to do a goofy song-and-dance compromise to include the phrase “scientific theory of” before the dreaded “E” word, just so the creationists can go back to their churches and triumphantly crow that it is still just a theory.

It is one small step forward, at least. I’ll take it. It’s still ludicrous that the creationists think they achieved something by attaching the “theory” dog-whistle to the agreement.

Kevin Beck tells us that finally, Florida has the right spokesman for the creationist situation down there: Carl Hiaasen has written an editorial. If you don’t know Hiaasen, you should — he writes hilarious comic novels that highlight the absurdity of politics and culture and crime in Florida. I’m wondering if he doesn’t see the recent creationist shenanigans in his state as an opportunity for more local color and background research.

He is taking an ironic approach though: it’s all about “boldly going against the flow, in defiance of reason and all known facts,” and you can see that he’s in a win:win situation. If evolution is supported, the state provides better education. If evolution goes down, the state provides more fodder for his books and columns.

Russell Seitz discovers another review of Expelled. It’s by that deluded dolt, Tom Bethell, and it’s a positive review.

It is surely the best thing ever done on this issue, in any medium. At moments it brought tears of joy to my eyes. I have written about this controversy for over 30 years and by the movie’s end I felt that those of us who have insisted that Darwinism is a sorry mess and that life surely was designed are going to prevail.

Deluded much? If he were at all aware of the science of biology, he’d know that evolution is not going anywhere but deeper into explaining life on earth. A propaganda film cannot change the science, although it could, if it were better done, change the culture in damaging ways.

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