Some guy in Virginia didn’t like this op-ed by David Barash, and didn’t like being characterised as an “illiterate troglodyte,” so he set out to demonstrate that he was an illiterate troglodyte. He wrote a letter that’s simply non-stop bogosity.
OK, this is the final straw. The Intelligent Design creationists send out press releases, they peddle textbooks in our classrooms, they publish dishonest books of pseudoscience, and now … and now, they’ve come out with a popular magazine.
I’d complain some more but I’m afraid they’d kick sand in my face and beat me up.
(via ERV)
Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself “Concerned American-Christian” <geologists4truth@yahoo.com>, and I have a suspicion that it’s Krazy Korn himself, since he’s so obsessed with the subject.
And of course Korn is free and able to fire off these crazy diatribes—the police aren’t sure he constitutes an official threat. I bet the Boulder biology faculty are especially careful to lock their doors at night, and are feeling a little jumpy about sudden loud noises, too.
Why me, O Lord, why me?
One of the more recent books sent to me is Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Michael Dowd. I have read it, and I’m feeling biblical.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
Psalm 22:1
The New York Times is reporting that Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist, has sent a mass mailing of his fancy, glossy, Atlas of Creation to scientists all over the country. It’s an 800-page, professional piece of work, even if the contents are garbage. These Islamic creationists must have access to bucketloads of money.
While they said they were unimpressed with the book’s content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost. “If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100,” said Dr. Miller, an author of conventional biology texts. “The production costs alone are astronomical. We are talking millions of dollars.”
It probably helps reduce the cost that they just rip off their artwork and consider shots of chewed wads of gum scientific illustration, but still, that’s loads and loads of money … but not enough to send a copy to some peon at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. The positive news is that there are limits to their budget! Hooray!
I’m still disappointed to be left out. All I’ve gotten so far is the Discovery Institute’s Explore Evolution, which is probably on a par with Adnan Oktar’s book in the erroneous vapidity of its content, but isn’t quite as bulky. Here it is on the shelf with a few of my other introductory biology books:
It’s rather easy to miss—it’s that narrow yellow spine, fourth from the left. What you can’t tell is that the pages are on thick stock, unlike the flimsy stuff legitimate biology texts use to keep the size physically manageable — Explore Evolution is about a tenth the length of the copy of Life next to it. I know, you’re going to complain that Life tries to cover all of biology, while EE only discusses evolution … but the page count for just the chapters that mention evolution in the title in Life is about the same as the total length of EE, and that’s ignoring the fact that evolution is implicit in much of the rest of the book. Oh, and if we discounted all the pages that are wrong in EE, the comparison would be even more devastating.
It’s something I suppose, but getting a pimple of a creationist book in the mail just doesn’t compare to the mountain of idiocy all those other guys got. It’s just not fair.
And I did get my new copy of Stuart Pivar’s Lifecode book, which … well, you’ll have to wait until I finish reading it to find out. Maybe I’ll put up something this evening.
Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron’s math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show’s statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski’s got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he’s got to make this ridiculous taunt:
Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that they won’t. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that we’ve found the tomb of Jesus? And to think that until just recently the skeptics didn’t even think that Jesus existed.
They won’t be interested because the author is Dembski, a man with no credibility. They also won’t be interested because it’s a dead issue; none of the skeptics I know or read were at all impressed with Cameron’s methods or interpretations, and certainly didn’t make any declarations that Jesus’ tomb had been found. I saw the program, and I thought it was crap from beginning to end. I think the universal consensus was that Cameron was a laughingstock and the whole sorry episode was a joke. But now Dembski thinks he has accomplished something by debunking a claim we rejected months ago?
I have this mental image of Dembski strutting around the dusty roads of Texas and finding a dead horned toad, partially consumed by birds, dessicated and defleshed and clearly long deceased. He gives it a kick, and then pompously declares that he has slain the ferocious dragon that had the godless skeptics cowed. And he writes a paper about it.
If you’ve been wondering who the ‘non-religious Darwinist’ (according to the DI, that is) who sent threatening notes to the University of Colorado at Boulder faculty might have been, wonder no more. The Colorado Daily News has revealed his name: it’s Michael Korn.
You can read Korn’s website and decide for yourself whether he fits the DI’s description of the culprit. Personally, I think the forensic skills of the gang of IDists have failed spectacularly, once again.
Paul Nelson isn’t happy that I explained that W. Ford Doolittle is not denying common descent when he says there was a large and diverse pool of organisms swapping genes at the base of the tree of life, and he presents a very revealing counter-argument:
Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates:
All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor.
I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life, you’d find that same image.
Maybe among Nelson’s clique, they imagine a single cell; I don’t know of any biologists who would, though. Do they also imagine a single pair of humans giving rising to the modern population, too?
Lineages do not have descent through single individuals or pairs in any evolutionary explanation. It’s always populations. Humans arose as descendants of a group of our ancestors who also apparently maintained a loose and slowly weakening genetic contact with the root stock and closely related primates — there was a gradual separation of the lineage over time and embodied in many individuals. The rise of life in general was even less tidily bounded in the absence of strong isolating mechanisms — the little buggers were promiscuously sloshing genes back and forth among all kinds of cells.
I’m afraid that all Nelson has accomplished with his complaint was to reveal yet again how naive and simplistic the creationist view of biology is. And we already knew that … there’s nothing new there at all.
Oh, and do take a look at Nick Matzke’s mocking of his claim about textbooks. He seems to think the bars on a cladogram represents single, discrete individuals? I think Nelson has just flunked Evolutionary Biology 101.
Recall those threats made against evolutionary biologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder? You can read the text of some of them at the Panda’s Thumb now. This is clearly the work of a deranged Christian cultist and creationist kook. We at the Panda’s Thumb also know who the author was, since he didn’t conceal his identity in the letters, and have tracked down his website, and yeah, he’s one of those wacky creationists and a fervent convert to Christianity from Judaism (we are not linking to that information until the police or other sources confirm it).
