Almost two weeks ago, I wrote about that creationist teacher who was fired in Sisters, Oregon — Kris Helphinstine had been showing his freshman biology class some PowerPoint presentations designed to cast doubt on biology, rather than to inform the students about the facts and evidence. Now a Bend newspaper has given a few more details of the grounds for firing, and most entertaining of all, has put up copies of the PowerPoint presentations! Aficionados of both bad creationism and bad PowerPoint will savor these.

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Afarensis takes on both Sal Cordova and Jonathan Wells on the subject of anthropology. Would you believe that those two creationist frauds are talking out of their hats and are readily spotted as dishonest kooks when they discuss anything in which their reader has any expertise? I know, I was so surprised myself.

Hmmm…it seems Dr Egnor, shill for the DI, has been criticizing me in some podcasts. I don’t listen to the DI’s podcasts and I’m not planning to start, but fortunately, Orac caught a few of his remarks. It’s all very peculiar: in a previous post, I showed him that it is easy to find lots of information in the published literature that rebuts his claim, I explained how the mechanism works, and I plucked out a single example and described it. What does Egnor call the scientific literature?

…I call it citation chaff. You know, chaff was stuff that pilots would throw into the air during World War II to confuse radar so that the enemy couldn’t see what was going on. And what Darwinists do is cite all kinds of papers, none of which actually address the question being asked and they assume that the person will be so overwhelmed in trying to answer these irrelevant papers that they’ll go away.

Well, his “question” was unanswerable by design: he asked for measurements of increases in information, but also excluded the use of any quantifiable metrics, like Shannon entropy. I gave him a qualitative description of mechanisms and I gave him examples, many examples, but now his fallback is to claim that the very existence of numerous scientific papers on the subject is simply “chaff”.

He should learn from Behe’s example. This strategy of denying the existence of volumes of information on a subject tends to backfire on them—all it accomplishes is to make them look willfully ignorant. That may work with their willfully ignorant followers who think that’s a virtue, but it tends to turn off people who are honestly interested in pursuing the evidence.

There’s a very good reason I reposted an old reply to a creationist today. It’s from 2004, way back shortly after I’d started this blog, and it addresses in simple terms the question of how ordinary biological mechanisms can produce an increase in information. I brought it up because Casey Luskin is whining again. He says the “Darwinists” have not answered any of the questions Michael Egnor, their pet credentialed creationist du jour, has asked.

Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor’s question: How does Darwinian mechanisms [sic] produce new biological information?

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And it’s a right embarrassing spotlight to be caught under, I imagine. A couple of years ago, The New Republic polled various well-known conservatives about their position on evolutionary biology; Digby reviews their responses, and they’re a mess (I also summarized their views diagrammatically way back then). Most wouldn’t be caught dead admitting to believing the kind of nonsense Ken Ham favors, so they’re spluttering evasively and many are embracing with great relief the concept of Intelligent Design.

Digby is making the point that it reveals how uncomfortable the leaders of the conservative movement are with the actual beliefs of their base, but I think it shows something else, too. Intelligent Design has always been a bridge or enabler; it isn’t as tainted with snake-handlin’ bible-quotin’ old school fundamentalism as outright creationism, so the big shot conservative intellectuals are willing to harrumph over it and wax pontifical in its favor, without dirtying themselves with biblical populism; meanwhile, the creationist hoi-polloi can look up to it as an intellectually respectable, cleaned-up and pseudo-secular version of their myth. Very few people on either side actually believe it, but it won popularity as a middle ground where neo-con and religious right could meet.

Ken Ham’s fabulous fake museum is going to open soon, on May 28. There are grounds for concern here.

But Eugenie Scott, a former University of Kentucky anthropologist who is director of the California-based National Center for Science Education, said the information provided in the museum “is not even close to standard science.”

Scott visited the museum recently as part of a British Broadcasting Corp. radio program. Although she didn’t get a tour, she saw enough to know that the museum will be professionally done. And, she says, that’s worrisome.

“There are going to be students coming into the classroom and saying, ‘I just went to this fancy museum and everything you’re telling me is rubbish,'” Scott said.

The Discovery Institute, despite its ability to generate PR, has always been a third-rate stalking horse for the real Godzilla of creationism, Answers in Genesis. The Intelligent Design creationists are an arrogant, stupid minority; the real face of creationism in America is evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity, a mainstream belief, and its adherence to biblical literalism. It’s everywhere. It doesn’t need to send out press releases to promote itself; it’s thriving in churches in every town in the country every Sunday.

Scott is right to be worried. This one museum is going to have a bigger budget than the NCSE, and it’s a load of shit in a slick package. It’s going to impress some people — stupid, shallow people, but there’s no shortage of them in the US, and there especially seems to be a surplus in the media, which will happily eat this crap with a glossy veneer and regurgitate it for the public.

For example, look at this contrast:

Daniel Phelps of Lexington, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, says the museum will embarrass the state because of the “pseudoscientific-nutty things” it espouses, and because it portrays evolution as the path to ruin.

But the Rev. Bill Henard, senior pastor of Lexington’s Porter Memorial Baptist Church, said that Sunday school classes and other groups from his church are likely to visit.

“I think people will enjoy … being able to see a different side from what some scientific findings have shown,” he said.

It’s not at all difficult to find people who will cheerfully enjoy lies — just open the doors and look inside a church.

They need every scrap of brainpower they can get, and the two videos at this link will suck out your brain with the awesome power of their stupidity.

Most of you are probably already familiar with the banana video, which tries to conclude that God exists from the perfection of the video. What you will also find at that link is … the peanut butter video. Evolution is disproven because life (by which he apparently means animals, like ants) does not spontaneously arise in the jars of peanut butter on grocery store shelves.

Seriously.

Not only do we not think that there is a significant probability of abiogenesis to occur in a jar of peanut butter over its short shelf-life, not only are food producers more concerned about keeping existing life from growing in the nice culture medium of processed foodstuffs, but what does this guy expect to see if new life did spontaneously arise? Me, I’d expect there to be some subtle shift in the chemical composition of some tiny spot somewhere in the jar; nothing obvious. Kind of like the fact that there are bacteria living in the jar right now, and they just don’t jump up and say “boo!” when you open the lid.