Now this is a situation about which I have mixed feelings: fans of creationism are lobbying to free a certain convicted felon and dishonest sleazebag with a petition to Free Kent Hovind. To counter that, another group has started a petition to Keep Kent Hovind in Jail.

Since the “Free Kent Hovind” petition has many more signatures (and read the comments; they’re comparing this con artist to Jesus), I signed the one to lock him away. I really hope, though, that the judicial system simply ignores both pleas and judges him on the evidence.

That’s not news, I know—you can find Mark Twain complaining about them, too. One of the big problems is that any idiot who may well lack any experience in education, or even any interest in education beyond destroying it, can run for school board and actually get elected. Case in point: Ken Willard, one of the Kansas rubes who tried to get Intelligent Design creationism into the curriculum, has just upped the ante and decided to run for the national presidency of the association of state boards of education. It’s incredible—he’s an insurance executive with no competence and no qualifications other than that he’s a fervent dogmatist who wants his religious beliefs taught, and that he has the backing of the Discovery Institute. The association ought to be deeply embarrassed if he can get in, and he just might do it:
he’s running unopposed.

If this boob can rise to the top, you know there’s something rotten in the system.

The Alliance for Science sponsored an essay contest—students were asked to submit an essay on the theme, “Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?”

The winners have been announced, and first prize has gone to Gregory Simonian. Read the whole collection, including the entries from Merve Fejzula, Shobha Topgi, and Linda Zhou — it seems a few high school students are far smarter than the entire gang of evolution deniers at the Discovery Institute.

Now that they’re quite irate about Guillermo Gonzalez failing to get tenure, the gang at the Discovery Institute seems to have forgotten Bill Dembski’s radical plan for dealing with biologists.

If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).

So he’d just get rid of the non-tenured faculty, and banish the rest to a new department with a mocking name. I don’t think these guys can legitimately complain about Gonzalez’s treatment — he was handled far more respectfully than the creationists would deal with us.

Dembski would never become president of any credible university since his plan would destroy the representation of a major discipline on the campus, with concomitant loss of student enrollment, and would utterly demolish the university’s status in graduate and medical schools. It was an insane, stupid thing to suggest then, but it’s an awfully handy counterpoise to the current DI position now.

Among the multitudes who have now seen Flock of Dodos was a woman who recognized one of the faces on the screen, and she wrote Randy Olson with a little anecdote that you might find amusing, and a little bit sweet and charming.

Just watched the film, congratulations to Randy Olson for a well documented
documentary of a topic that deserves greater coverage.

Dr. Mike Behe was the first guy I ever dated, at the tender age of 13. We were
bright kids, and Mike tutored me in math. My dad took us on our ‘dates.’ I ended up
in technology, and he took the bio-science route. When my mom called me last year to
let me know that he was at the forefront of Intelligent Design, I was relatively
dumbfounded. Yes, we went to Catholic school, and yes, we were both science geeks,
but his philosophy and purported science and evidence is completely contradictory to
what we mutually pursued as adolescent theory. I am touching a book on my bookshelf
on Paleoanthropology that I know we both digested, and can’t for the life of me
figure out how he got to where he is now. Must be Lehigh College; California helps
you have a broader non-provincial perspective. Tell Mike he needs to get out of the
sticks.

Yes, she gave permission to post this publicly, as long as we didn’t reveal her name; if Dr Behe wants to get in touch with his old sweetie, he should talk to Randy Olson, not me. Personally, I wouldn’t blame Lehigh, which really isn’t that bad of a place—pin the problem on religion, not geography.

If any of my old Sunday School pals want to write in and rebuke me for leaving the church, I’ll post that in fair return. If you want anecdotes from my old girlfriends, though, you’re out of luck—I married the only one who mattered, and she’s not going to have any surprising stories about how I changed, and there will definitely be no accounts about how we tutored each other in biology.

Have you Floridians been pining away for a museum like Ken Ham’s? OK, no, you haven’t, not in the slightest, but you’re getting one anyway. The Gospel Fossil man is coming to lie to your children!

[Read more…]

This is a fascinating diagram from a zoology text of the 1930s—it’s an illustration of the effects of reproduction rate on the frequency of subsets of the population, and the author was using it to justify eugenics. Up into the 1960s, he was advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded to improve the human race.

Why, this guy must have been one of those evil Darwinists of the kind Michael Egnor, D. James Kennedy and the Discovery Institute deplore, and whose amoral ruthlessness those worthies have blamed on the teachings of evolution! Surprise: these sentiments were expressed by William Tinkle, a creationist, and one of the founding fathers of the organization that preceded the Institute for Creation Research, along with such well-known creationists as Henry Morris and Duane Gish. He completely rejected evolution, natural selection, and the idea that human beings were animals, and published his endorsement of sterilization of “defectives” while Secretary of the Institute for Creation Research. Read more about it at the Panda’s Thumb.