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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A few years ago, Mel Gabler died, and I put up my response below. Now his wife, Norma Gabler, has also died. Good riddance at last. Those two did an awful amount of harm to American science education by inflicting their ignorant opinions on textbook selection in Texas.

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I read this which led to this, where I learned a few months late that Mel Gabler was dead. This Mel Gabler. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Gabler had a good 89 year run in which he spread poison and ignorance and lies, and made his wretched mark on the textbook industry. He was a dishonest old man who reviewed biology textbooks through the lens of his own stupidity and religious prejudice, and he was darned good at it.

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Here’s a representative slice of average Americana: Parade magazine. I don’t read it, and I suspect most of you don’t either, but we aren’t average—we’re freaky flaky outliers. If you want to see what ordinary Americans are thinking, though, it’s a useful place to look. Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, “Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?”

About a third of the respondents currently answer “yes,” which is actually quite a bit better than I feared. The real scary part is the comments, though, and there are a lot of them. Here’s a quick sampling of the creationist point of view:

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Larry Moran sneers at the creationist habit of stoking their numbers by claiming that M.D.s are “science professionals”, and therefore bolster their generic claim that ‘growing numbers of scientists are defecting from the Darwinist camp’.

I’ll make Larry’s sneer even fiercer by pointing out that many of them are dentists.

(I have nothing against doctors and dentists, of course, and have nothing but respect for their important skills. Most are not scientists, however, and don’t think like scientists, and don’t even pay much attention to the basic scientific literature. Claiming scientific legitimacy by tallying up your fan base among dental hygenists is like claiming Al Gore should have been the president because Canadians liked him better than Bush. Worse, because scientific conclusions are not determined by popular vote.)

If you’re interested in the sordid history of bannings at Bill Dembski’s prissy little blog, here’s a compilation. It’s an ugly little story.

If you’re interested in the history of bannings here, I keep a public list. It isn’t quite so easy to get banned at Pharyngula, although a few are making a strong effort.