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.

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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?

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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.

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Dodos on Showtime, extras on YouTube!

First, an important message from Randy Olson:

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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?”

William Jennings Bryan, enemy of science and cephalopods

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A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That’s his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it’s a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There’s a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity.

The description in the book of this image is like so:

Subtlety was not one of [William Jennings] Bryan’s strong suits. His campaign poster from that same election [1900] depicted, among other things, a sort of Lady Liberty archetype attacking a giant octopus with an axe.

This is clearly an incorrect interpretation. The octopus is central and beautiful, and if that were actually Lady Liberty, she ought to be half-naked. I think it’s Bryan advocating an uprising of the servile classes to destroy loyal invertebrate-Americans, the treacherous dog. I’m glad he lost the election.