What is a diploma worth?

Larry Moran thinks we need more rigorous admission requirements, and Donald Kennedy is not very happy with the state of creationist textbooks.

Kennedy is currently serving as an expert witness for the University of California Regents, who are being sued by a group of Christian schools, students and parents for refusing to allow high school courses taught with creationist textbooks to fulfill the laboratory science requirement for UC admission. After reading several creationist biology texts, Kennedy said he found “few instances in which students are being introduced to science as a process—that is, the way in which scientists work or carry out experiments, or the way in which they analyze and interpret the results of their investigations.”

Kennedy said that the textbooks use “ridicule and inappropriately drawn metaphors” concerning evolution to discourage students from formulating independent opinions. “Even with respect to the hypothesis that dominates them—namely, that biological complexity and organic diversity are the result of special creation—critical thinking is absent,” he added.

[Read more…]

The most important battle in the history of mankind!

The most important battle in the history of mankind!

A bit more than a week ago, I mentioned this interview I did for a site called One Blog A Day. The comment thread on the interview has grown in a peculiar way — John A. Davison and his pet sycophantic monkey, VMartin, are babbling away in a most painfully lunatic fashion, cruelly egged on by wÒÓ†. It’s hard to beat this comment for delusions of grandeur:

[Read more…]

Anyone in Columbia, Missouri reading this?

Did you also attend this Intelligent Design quackery talk by John Marshall? Report in, please, and let us know how stupid it was (there is no doubt that it was stupid, we’re just interested in measuring the degree.)

Marshall is yet another M.D. who became a creationist because he looked objectively at the evid… oh, wait, no. None of them do that. It’s because:

But Marshall began to look into what he said were holes in the theory. And after becoming a Christian, Marshall found it hard to reconcile evolutionary theory with Genesis, the biblical account of how God created the earth and everything on it in six days. Marshall has since become a proponent of the view that there are some natural systems that cannot be adequately explained by natural forces, and therefore must be the result of intelligent design, or ID.

Isn’t it curious how religion is such a powerful force for inoculating people with appalling inanity?

Creationism means never having to admit you know nothing, but you still get to pretend to be an expert

The core value of creation science is dishonesty. I was reminded of this yet again by an account by Todd Feeley of a RATE conference. RATE means “Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth”, and they are an excuse for creationist frauds to get together and spout off misleading pseudoscientific babble to a gullible audience. There’s always trouble when someone who is not gullible and actually knows something about a subject attends, as in this case. Feeley asks the organizer a question:

[Read more…]

What are you doing, Al?

Al Gore is generally a good guy, and I think his message on global warming is an important one. He’s still traveling around, giving his slideshow that we’ve seen in An Inconvenient Truth, but apparently he has added some new material — and these aren’t slides that make me very happy.

The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans.”

Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope. In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this “rise of humans” was God’s creation of mankind — apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption “Adam & Eve” above this starting point.

Wha…?

He might as well have shown the chart of global temperature vs. number of pirates — it’s nonsense that completely undercuts the serious of the science he’s discussing.

It’s strange how this one little slide makes me far less enthusiastic about the prospect of another Gore run for the presidency. Even if he doesn’t actually believe in a literal creation event for mankind, he’s not above pandering to the ignorant.

Creationists drown puppies!

In addition to being a contemptible ghoul who uses a tragedy to attack an unrelated concept, evolutionary biology (we are all on the same page, right? The evidence so far is that the Virginia Tech killer was a mentally ill young man with a confused Christ complex, not a ruthless atheist proponent of evolution who was following the advice of Charles Darwin’s ghost), this “full time creation evangelist” Grady McMurtry makes a revealing admission:

Therefore, he [McMurtry] asserts, people should not be surprised when mass shootings occur, such as the one on the Blacksburg university campus on Monday. “And at Virginia Tech, what do we have?” he asks rhetorically. “We have a person who, unfortunately, thought that humans had no more value than cats and dogs — and unfortunately, I think, probably felt the same way about themselves.”

The creationist continues explaining his premise. “And so what happens? If we are nothing but thinking animals, [and] if you have excess people, then you can just put them in a bag, throw them in the river the way you would too many kittens or too many puppies.”

What was that last line? Being an evolutionist means you’re as casual about human deaths as creationists are about killing kittens and puppies?

CREATIONISTS DROWN PUPPIES!!?!

Puppies?

i-349be7f16e53f4f7d1aaf5f98a0386e3-puppy.jpg

And kittens?

i-2dbc741f48408d723c7d6947001455ad-kitten.jpg

I dare not contemplate what they would do to the cute little ducklings. And think of the bunnies! Dear god, don’t let the creationists near the adorable baby bunnies!

i-861b8a78eed7e56134522595058d0615-bunny.jpg

I have to go lie down, I’m so distraught.

Creationist humor?

Zeno makes an obvious point: creationists have no sense of humor. He singles out this tedious comic strip running on the Answers in Genesis pages, called CreationWise, and of course when anyone thinks of an unfunny religious apologist with a strip, they think of Johnny Hart. But even worse than any of these is Dan Nuckols. Seriously, if you enjoy cartoons, if you have any sense of humor or even an appreciation of the skill it takes to put together an amusing story in a few panels, don’t follow that link; it’s like snorting ammonia, it’ll ruin the flavor of everything for a few days.

Zeno does point out that sometimes they are inadvertently funny, in ways the artist doesn’t intend. This strip doesn’t make any sense from a religious perspective, but it is mildly amusing if you imagine someone like me behind the door.

i-6500662818ecbc3263326f57f46e58a0-stupid_squid_cartoon.jpg

Nah, it’s not particularly funny even then. Just true.


OK, since Blake hinted at it, here’s a link to his improved version of the cartoon.