Unbelievable. Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, the Turkish crackpot creationist, didn’t like the fact that his critics wrote mean things about him … so he applied to a Turkish court to have all WordPress blogs blocked. And the court accepted his argument, and no one in Turkey has been able to access anything from WordPress.com for a day or two now.

Man, I was once mooned on the freeway by a guy in a Chevy. Does this mean I can get Chevrolet to recall all of their cars in the state of Minnesota now? That would sure teach him.

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If you want to take a look at one of the sources of creationist thought, the workshop where the red-hot anvil of pseudoscience and the inflexible hammer of theology are used to forge the balloon animals of creationism, The Journal of Creation (formerly the Creation ex nihilo Technical Journal) is now online … or at least part of it is. They’re working on it. For now, it’s enough that you can browse through several issues and see how they put up this superficially persuasive façade of analyzing matters objectively and scientifically, while somehow coming to the weirdest and most nonsensical conclusions that flout the evidence but somehow always magically end up supporting Christian theology of some sort.

A perfect example, and favorite bit of insanity off their list, is a review of Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful^* titled “Evo Devo refutes neo-Darwinism, supports creation”. It’s fairly typical: most of the articles that address modern science do this same process of complaining that nothing means what the science says it does, quote-mining a few fragments that are distorted to support creationist claims, and winding up with a triumphant fist in the air and a victory dance while they insist that evolutionary biology is actually a tent-revival meeting for Jesus.

Anti-creationists should browse it anyway. It’s amazing how many of these arguments will percolate into public discussions of evolution — while they can’t be troubled to read any actual science, creationists will devour the bullshit in The Journal of Creation and regurgitate it for you.

^*Hey, I just noticed that my review of that book didn’t make the move over here to scienceblogs. I’ll have to correct that.

If it’s been a bit dead here today, it’s because I’ve been on an aeroplane most of the afternoon, and am now holed up in the lovely little village of New York for a few days of urban thrills.

While I was cruising through the skies, Vox Day has responded to my rebuke of his pathetic anti-scientific efforts. He’s now claiming that if evolution were capable of rates of 200,000 darwins, then we could turn a mouse into an elephant in 20 years, and since we haven’t, then evolution is bogus.

I trust Pharyngula readers are smart enough to see the obvious logical hole. That evolution does not proceed at an extravagant rate dictated by a creationist does not call evolution into question in the slightest. As I mentioned, those extreme rates are observed in extreme experimental situations and involve changes in size of a few percent over short intervals in small and prolific invertebrates. No biologist claims elephants shot up over the span of decades, and it is entirely inappropriate to pretend that those kinds of rapid transformations should apply to the situation Day invented.

I’m sorry, Scott, but thinking you can engage Vox Day in a serious discussion of evolution is an act of hyper-optimistic lunacy. Hatfield has set the terms, and Day has replied … and his argument against evolution, if not nuts, is dishonest. He doesn’t believe evolution could have occurred because he doesn’t think theoretical predictions have been met.

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I gave two talks this weekend to the Critical Thinking Clubs of St Paul and Stillwater. Herewith a brief account of the events therein.

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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.