Julie Haberle, the born-again who splattered Minnesota billboards with creationist apologetics, has revamped her website. It’s prettier and twice as stupid now; it still has the very clumsy bulletin board that was utterly ruled by evolution supporters poking holes in her bad arguments. What the site primarily has, though, are the quote mines — this place is a gold mine of quote mines. For instance, right up front and center they have this:

“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story – amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

–Henry Gee

Ardent Evolutionist, Dr. Henry Gee, Senior Editor, Biological Sciences for the journal Nature as written in his book, In Search of Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 126-127.

I thought this was hilarious and so typical. I actually spent some time talking to Henry Gee at SciFoo, and this very subject came up. He gets quoted all the time by creationists, and he also gets whined at by scientists who say he has to be more careful to avoid this kind of misrepresentation (he is, of course, a strong supporter of science and evolution who thinks creationists are lunatics). Caution does not get the important ideas said, though, and we can’t sit here policing our words, afraid that some idiot will scavenge them and use them to lie. Haberle’s whole site is a testimonial to the willingness of creationists to distort scientific statements wholesale. She has a series of issues where she tries to call into question basic evolutionary ideas by doing little more than quoting out of context little snippets from books she hasn’t read.

The Henry Gee book is a beautiful example. She hasn’t read it, she certainly couldn’t explain what it’s about (it’s an excellent summary of the principles and philosophy of cladistics), and most amusingly, she got the title wrong. It’s
In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}.

Some fellow calling himself “homersimpson123” (who thinks he is doing the world a service) has uploaded all of the Kent Hovind DVDs to bittorrent, as well as the horrendous gemisch he uses in his presentations. Since Hovind is rotting in jail for a good long while, this is your chance to torture yourself with some truly awful nonsense.

(hat tip to DaveX)

First Luskin, now Vox Day rushes to say something incredibly stupid (so what else is new?) about the new hominin fossils.

It doesn’t matter what the evidence is, evolutionary biologists are happy to change their story to suit.

Errm, what?

There’s a problem in principle with his objection: yes, that’s what scientists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to follow the evidence where it leads, not cling to a story in spite of the evidence. Religious fruitcakes like Day are the ones who think sticking to a falsified story in spite of the evidence is a virtue.

There’s also a problem in detail. He’s buying into one of the many extremely poor media stories about this discovery that claims the difference in ages of the two specimens means Homo habilis could not possibly be a human ancestor. In this case, the media aren’t entirely to blame — some of the authors have been making similar claims — but it’s still bogus and contradicted by the conclusions of the actual paper.

Day also complains that there are different versions of the theory of evolution, and cites this story as an example. He’s screwed up pretty thoroughly: while there are different mechanisms that play a role in evolution, this is an example of a historical detail, not something broadly related to theoretical concerns, and it does not call into question any mechanisms. In particular, scientists arguing about the precise relationships of species within a specific mammalian lineage does not mean there’s room for god-went-poof explanations.

These guys should just read John Hawks, who actually knows something about the subject.

But this idea of contemporaneity of H. habilis and H. erectus is neither interesting nor new. Recall yesterday’s story about the African and Asian clade hypothesis? News stories had the same lede — “hominid family tree more complex than thought.” This is the ultimate paleontological “dog bites man”: “Human Evolution A Bush, Not A Ladder.” It’s just not interesting anymore.

He goes on to say that there are very interesting things about these fossils: they just aren’t the ones that a poorly informed media or the actively delusional creationists are battening on.

Amateurs. The Discovery Institute has already weighed in on the recently discovered hominin fossils, and wouldn’t you know it … Casey Luskin squeaks that we must simply disown Homo habilis, and of course he claims that Jonathan Wells has been vindicated in his ‘refutation’ of a straight line of human descent. And of course he quote mines scientists who say the transitions in human evolution are complex and incompletely understood — as if anthropologists have been claiming to have a complete and perfect answer.

The real irony, though, is that little Casey Luskin, pretentious junior lawyer, pompously declaims that he must “favor abandoning theories that aren’t working.” Exactly what theory is he abandoning? The theory that humans descended from an African ancestor with a smaller brain, that they evolved from more primitive apes? Because that theory isn’t refuted at all by the latest evidence, although I’m sure he’d like to pretend it is.

What this evidence reinforces is the observation that humankind was not a specially privileged lineage, that the ape family tree was diverse and complex, and that we had distant cousins who were following several different paths in their history. This is no comfort to creationists of any ideological stripe.

Don McLeroy is the new head of the Texas State Board of Education, and if you want to get an idea of what we face, there’s a transcript and recording of a talk by McLeroy on the web.

It’s awful. It’s mostly incoherent babble. He quotes a lot of odd irrelevancies, declares naturalism to be the enemy, compares evolution to the Matrix, and openly admits his advocacy of Intelligent Design creationism as a strategy to advance the goals of himself and his audience, and he says “we are all Biblical literalists, we all believe the Bible to be inerrant”. He also quotes Phillip Johnson:

So what do we do about our Bible in the intelligent design movement? According to Johnson, the first thing to do is to get the Bible out of the discussion. Remember, even if you don’t bring the Bible into the discussion, the naturalist has already put it into the discussion. And Johnson states “it’s vital not to give any encouragement to this prejudice and to keep the discussion strictly on the scientific evidence and the philosophical assumptions. This is not to say that the Biblical issues aren’t important, the point is the time to address them will be after we have separated materialistic prejudice from scientific fact.”

So give ’em a little time. They’re not going to mention the Bible in their efforts right now, but all this ID stuff is simply a cunning plan to eventually sneak Biblical literalism into the public schools.

And this is the fellow they’ve put in charge of public school education in Texas.

How unfair that The Unicorn Museum would be compared to Ken Ham’s “Museum” — everyone knows creationism is fake, but unicorns, because they are so lovely and sweet and happy and phallic, must be real.

This is very serious. The proprietors want to put up a billboard to compete with the Creation “Museum’s”, and you can vote and donate. I would love to see unicorns praised over goofy Australian nutcases.

Melanie Phillips is fulminating against Dawkins for the strangest of reasons. She chews him out for dismissing dowsing, crystal healing, conspiracy theories, reptoids, etc. as charlatanry — not because she believes in any of that nonsense, but because, in essence, it’s all Dawkins’ fault. You see, once upon a time, everyone was too busy believing in rational religion to dabble in magical thinking, but once science caused the collapse of Christianity, the irrational woo-woo silliness rushed in to take its place.

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