Has anyone else noticed that you often only need to read the first sentence of anything written at Uncommon Descent to see them screw up royally? Especially, lately, if the author is Denyse O’Leary. Take this, for example.

Textbooks often don’t discuss extinction — the death of all members of a species — in any detail.

That’s news to me. I opened up my intro biology text, which is more a philosophy and history of biology book, and found 23 pages dedicated to discussing extinctions. It’s been my experience that most textbooks will mention at least the Permian and K/T extinctions; they’ll include quite a bit of material on modern extinctions; and they’ll always discuss mechanisms of extinctions. It’s as if these people have never even cracked a biology book, yet feel perfectly comfortable in declaring precisely what’s inside.

Even weirder, O’Leary goes on to quote a section from David Raup’s excellent book, Extinction (damn those evilutionists: they’re always trying to hide the facts by writing books with titles that say exactly what they’re about. Douglas Erwin also has a book titled Extinction — we’re trying so hard to avoid discussing in any detail these subjects, you see.) Raup wrote a book in which he documented the importance of chance events in evolutionary history, arguing that some major events, such as extinction in the face of overwhelming environmental trauma, are not something that any lineage can adapt itself to — some events really are just unpreventable accidents. He also carefully explained that because many major processes are driven entirely by chance, that does not mean that selection is false or doesn’t occur. Evolution has a plurality of mechanisms. O’Leary quoted a paragraph of that, and here’s her take.

In his day, Raup was taking a big risk by even suggesting that Darwinism might not be true, so he wisely merely provides facts that dispute it — and then covers his tracks with a resounding promotion of Darwinism in areas of study that he does not actually address in his book in any detail.

Wha…? That’s simply insane. David Raup was most definitely not suggesting that evolution by natural selection (which is what I presume she means by “Darwinism”) was not true, nor did any of the facts he describe in the book in any way dispute the role of selection. Raup is not in any way on O’Leary’s side. He is not a cunning stealth creationist writing a book to rebut evolution, and hiding his motives in a few false testimonials — he’s an evolutionary biologist, his book supports evolution, and the reason he’s explaining that extinctions don’t refute natural selection is because they don’t, as anyone with a sliver of reading comprehension would be able to tell you after reading his book.

Here’s the other amazing thing about the creationists’ output. The first sentence is stupid and patently wrong, but they always manage to get even stupider as you read deeper.

It bodes ill for a certain southern state that my mailbox overfloweth with tales of idiocy from Florida … it’s gotten to the point where I cringe a little bit when I see “Florida” in the subject line, because I know it’s going to be another delusional school board, another wacky letter to the editor, another Floridian complaining that his state isn’t as stupid as it sounds from all the news. Even the Florida Citizens for Science blog is a reservoir of terrible stories right now.

So I’m going to abstain for a little while from the Florida bashing and give the good guys a chance to catch up. How about telling us some good news? I’m sure there are intelligent, progressive people down there gearing up to fight for science and reason, so let’s hear the positive news from the Florida creation wars. If you want anonymity or don’t like commenting, go ahead and email Florida stories with a hopeful bent to me and we’ll try to present the other side of the state.

This is a good opinion piece in the Charlotte Observer by an Englishman residing in the city. He states right up front that he likes the city and sees a great deal of promise for the future in it, but he has one reservation: the region’s religiosity.

To a foreigner like myself, it’s disturbing that a majority of Americans don’t believe in something as fundamental as evolution (in a CBS/New York Times poll, 55 percent said God created humans in their current form). This erosion of belief in science and rationality is especially troubling for a prosperous region such as ours. American action is vital if we are to defuse the looming crisis of global warming, and Charlotte’s rise as an emerging global city gives us special responsibilities to play a leading role in solving this challenge. But solutions will be impossible without informed debate based on rigorous science.

It’s a polite piece that makes a solid point, that common American attitudes about science and religion are becoming an obstacle to economic progress.

Uh-oh. The word is out. Being an atheist evolutionist means all the porn you could want and being surrounded by big bags of money.

Good thing he left off the orgies. If people know about the orgies, we’d never get any peace.

Compare and contrast: science vs. creationism.

… try Denyse O’Leary sometime. She’s now written a list of predictions from ID, and I don’t think she understands the meaning of the word “prediction” in a scientific context. Eight of the nine are variants on the theme, “there will be no natural explanations for X,” which, try as we might, reveals that our demands for positive, productive explanations from the ID crowd go unheard, and they’d rather just whine that they don’t understand something, so we must not, either.

The one exception: she doesn’t believe the eco-doomsayers who predict that we will destroy all life on the planet. She seems entirely unaware that a) no one claims that — what’s predicted is economic discomfort, displacement of human populations, some species going extinct and others thriving, etc. — and b) this doesn’t represent a prediction of intelligent design, either.

If your brain hasn’t recovered from the ablation it suffered from the laser-like stupidity of Comfort, though, I don’t recommend reading O’Leary — two such traumas on top of one another can be permanently damaging (I can only do it because years of reading this crap has turned my cortex tough as leather.)

Ray Comfort has a blog, and one of his entries claims that the Bible is a science text, and that it is better than science. His style of argument is to first list a “fact” from the Bible (usually something that is completely open to interpretation, and he chooses to interpret it as being in conformity with modern science); then he mentions a corresponding fact derived from modern science, that always agrees with the Bible; then he lists something from “science then,” which is dead wrong.

It’s so clueless it hurts to read it.

[Read more…]

Minnesota is going to be revising their science standards this year. Last time we went through this, it was a circus, with our education commissioner (the notorious Cheri Pearson Yecke) trying to pack the review committees with creationists and doing last minute swaps of committee-approved drafts with drafts edited by creationists. We had John Calvert show up at hearings, along with a few other home-grown kooks, including a guy with a replica of a giant leg bone that he claimed proved there were giants in the earth in those days.

This time around, though, we have guidelines that will limit the nonsense, we hope.

In its call for volunteers, the department offered a list of assumptions that will guide the committee. The assumptions deal with topics ranging from increased science rigor to new graduation requirements.

One assumption stands out. Assumption number seven: “Science standards will reflect the scientific facts, laws, and theories of the natural and engineered world and will not include supernatural, occult or religious ideas.”

Of course, I can hear the ID crowd right now: “ID isn’t about the supernatural — teach the alternative theories! Teach the controversy!” In that article, we already have Dave Eaton (another infamous local creationist) saying he he has no problem with the restriction. You know he’s already planning to try and subvert the process.