Fatal fruit of an evil tree

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.

i-a208c63830e0c8a7971f51fe57661b28-tinkle.gif

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.

Where is that magic memory hole button again?

Oh, no — DaveScot can’t find Gonzalez’s article that he published in 2001 on the Scientific American website! It’s a CONSPIRACY! The Darwinist Establishment is suppressing his publications and rewriting history!

Uh, wait … no, it was a “technical glitch” that also made a couple of other articles inaccessible, and the editors aren’t at all interested in losing the Gonzalez, Brownlee, and Ward article.

It’s particularly ironic that the gang at Uncommon Descent, which has a reputation for hiding their
gaffes in the amazing UD memory hole after they’ve been exposed, should accuse Scientific American of the kind of perfidious rewriting of their files that they do quite routinely.

It’s a good sign when the creationists are embarrassed to answer

Avidor has a video of an exchange between a defender of science (DFL) and creationist coward (R). It’s amusing. Kate Knuth (DFL) asks a simple question—whether Tom Emmer (R) believes the earth is thousands of years old, or billions of years old—and Emmer runs away from the question. First he babbles about how he has a different science than she does, and then he justs asks her whether she’s an evolutionist.

It’s just weird. They know enough to realize that they sound awfully silly when they claim the earth is ten thousand years old, but they don’t know enough to think that maybe they’re wrong.

Alas, poor Guillermo Gonzalez

Les Lane has a summary of Gonzalez’s unfortunate tenure situation. To nudge your memory, Guillermo Gonzalez is the Discovery Institute fellow who was working as an assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University; he was recently denied tenure there and is protesting the decision.

It’s an awkward position, but very common — academia isn’t an easy career to break into. It also doesn’t help that Gonzalez fails to understand the process.

[Read more…]

Protest AiG’s silly “museum”

On 28 May, there will be a protest demonstration at Ken Ham’s folly, the creationist exhibition near Cincinnati. This is not about shutting down the foolish building, but using its own PR focus on itself, turning media attention to the fact that a lot of people consider it backward, insane, and kooky.

I like this guy’s attitude.

According to Edwin Kagin of the RfR, the rally is not challenging the right of AIG to present their world view. “They can teach that things fall up if they wish,” said Mr. Kagin. “We are simply trying to show that the views they are promoted are not accepted by those who do not share their fundamentalist religious views, and their effort to sneak those teachings into the public schools.”

Right — don’t sit quietly, don’t be polite, MAKE SOME NOISE.

Mitt Romney, theistic evolutionist…and this is supposed to be a good thing?

What is going on here? I read Mitt Romney’s comments on evolution on TPM Cafe and was surprised at how many people think it was a positive development.

Is this a first? Mitt Romney isn’t pandering to religious right voters or flip-flopping on an issue important to them in this interview, in which he reveals that he opposes the teaching of intelligent design:

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

While governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney opposed the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.

“In my opinion, the science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed,” he said. “If we’re going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that’s for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class.”

How about that?

Read the comments over there. People are calling it “startling”, “intelligent”, and that it’s brave of him to accept a basic tenet of biology. What the hell are they talking about?

[Read more…]

A new creationist argument

It’s always so exciting to see a new creationist argument…until you actually look at it and see how silly it is. And they’ve been getting more and more desperately absurd as the years go by and the flaws in the old arguments get harder and harder to support. Once upon a time, they could just say it rained really hard for 40 days to flood the earth. When it was pointed out that you can’t wring that much water out of the atmosphere, they had to contrive all kinds of elaborate conditions for earth prior to the flood, with deep reservoirs and a “vapor canopy” of crystalline hydrogen to keep huge volumes of water under pressure above the earth. That was awfully silly, so now this new argument tries to rescue it with “evidence” for some mighty weird conditions on God’s earth.

[Read more…]

Dodos on Showtime, extras on YouTube!

First, an important message from Randy Olson:

i-ed88e8f7d24c86c3a9290e94cf7a99d2-FoD_showtime.jpg

Second, another important message from Randy Olson: one of the DVD extras for the movie has been released to YouTube! It’s got my picture in it, but skip that, watch for…

  • Jack Cashill’s little falsehood about Haeckel’s embryos. He accuses SJ Gould of sitting on the problems of Haeckelian recapitulation for 25 years, only mentioning it in 1995. Of course, Gould published a whole book in 1977, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, that laid out the failures of Haeckelian recapitulation in pedantic detail. Cashill also claims “…the Haeckel embryos which are being reproduced in every single significant textbook1 in America as the single best proof2 of Darwinism3…”; how many errors can you count in that short sentence? I get at least 3.

  • And most importantly, catch the cynical quote from Michael Behe at the end of the clip. It’s worth watching for that alone.

    “My kids don’t go to public schools, what do I care?”