This story is getting a lot of attention suddenly: it’s a blog about a biologist reshelving creationist crap in bookstores. It’s good stuff … but I thought we all did this. You mean most people don’t?
Has anyone seen a positive review of Behe’s book from a science source? Discover Magazine joins the ranks of those that find it awful:
As unpersuasive as Behe’s ideas are scientifically, they are even less convincing philosophically. Behe professes agnosticism on whether the designer was a dope, a demon, or a deity, although he seems peculiarly inclined toward the second possibility. His is a strangely impoverished worldview, one that leaves little space for awe, much less for future scientific advance; he never even raises the obvious question of who the designer is and how it works. Contrast this with Darwin’s starry-eyed summation in Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
That’s pretty much my opinion, too. It’s a bizarre exercise in bogus math and bad biology to arrive at a sterile conclusion, with no reasonable future scientific efforts proposed.
Comments are still trickling in and I still get email about this article, where I explain why debate is a poor strategy for dealing with creationists. I definitely don’t argue that we should avoid engaging the public, but that there are a number of reasons why the debate format doesn’t work for resolving conflicts between legitimate science and discredited malarkey. However, I missed one.
Some of you may know that a couple of commenters here resolved to have an off-site written debate on the dependency of the universe’s existence on, specifically, the Abrahamic god. The debate is at the Topical Octagon, but after The Physicist AKA Equus Pallidus put up his first rambling shamble of a post, the debate was terminated for a very common reason: plagiarism.
There is almost no creative, original work on the creationist side. I sometimes wonder if the only reason that ID gets so much attention is that one thing the ID creationists did accomplish was to infuse a collection of new arguments into their side’s corner — over and over again, the same old arguments, even down to the same words, show up in creationist debates. It’s like the scholarly tradition in creationism is a glorified version of cut & paste, lifting paragraphs from other works and stringing them together, and Behe and company at least provided some new source texts from which to steal words.
Although IDists don’t have much new to add. The last talk I heard by Behe was virtually identical, right down to the same old jokes, to the first talk I’d heard from him, ten years before.
How can anyone be surprised at this turn of events? Governor Goodhair of Texas has appointed a flaming, blatant, unashamed creationist and friend of the Discovery Institute, Don McLeroy, to head the Texas State Board of Education. Phil Plait is not amused. But isn’t this part of the grand Republican and Texan tradition of promoting gross incompetence? Isn’t that how we got GW Bush? This is the state of Terri Leo and Mel Gabler. It’s all more of the same.
Texas is going to be soooo interesting in the next year or two. I wonder if this is where the next big court battle is going to occur? McLeroy is just the kind of conservative theocrat who’d provoke it.
The creationist fruit-loop du jour left another comment here in which he tried to taunt me with his proximity (“is Minneapolis-St. Paul close enough to Morris for you?”) which wasn’t very effective, since his IP address said he was commenting from a community college in North Carolina. And then he replied with more wacky comments:
Creationism is only the beginning. Kansas is showing us a whole new way of thinking about everything on the curriculum.
I’m busily tied up for the most of the day at the Twin Cities branch of the University of Minnesota — Skatje is taking the new student tour because she plans to transfer here in a year — but I also took advantage of this visit to get my own copy of Haryun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. My thanks to Aaron Barnes, who rescued a copy from a recycling bin here, It’s a behemoth!
As everyone has said, it’s full of pretty pictures, but the content … well, it leaves much to be desired. It’s mostly a collection of pictures of fossils and animals that asserts a non-existent contradiction between them and what evolution predicts, followed by text that claims most of the fossils we have are fakes.
I haven’t had a chance to look closely, though. Skatje won’t let me have it — she’s leafing through it and giggling.
John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn’t want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo.
The Evolution Sunday project, which tries to recruit clergy to advocate good science at least once a year, has sent out a request for scientific expertise to help them. They’re well-meaning, but they need it. Try reading some of their collection of Evolution Sunday sermons, and what you’ll find is usually attempts to piggyback the validity of truth by religious revelation on the credibility of evidence-based reasoning.
I personally do not support the Evolution Sunday project — I think it benefits religion far more than it does science in that it lends support to superstition and taints evolution with nonsense — but in a truly ecumenical and catholic spirit, I’ll at least mention it for those of you who think otherwise.
Besides, imagine giving me a red pen and a sermon to edit. My eyes would start to glow, I’d channel the damned soul of Abdul Alhazred, and the end result would drive whole congregations mad.
I’d just like some reassurance that there are other targets out there, since
Korn is on the run.
An anti-evolutionary Christian extremist suspected of sending threatening letters to biology professors at the University of Colorado has gone on the lam, according to a staff member familiar with a police investigation into the matter.
Not that I’m panicky or anything, but I am more comfortable knowing he’s in Colorado than just somewhere.
OK, just to be on the safe side, I let the local police know that this guy is on the loose, and that he’d sent me some strange email yesterday. It’s highly unlikely he’d show up here … but if he did, there would be only one reason for him to be here.
