Richard Dawkins has a huge list of well-wishers, but William Dembski is unhappy — he sent a birthday greeting, and rushed to complain on Uncommon Descent that it wasn’t posted. Alas, it was, and we can all see what an insincere and sarcastic and snide comment he sent. Richard Hughes gets a gold star for his comment:
If you can’t find your name in an alphabetical list, you might want to stop looking for evidence for god in bacterial flagellum.
Some commenters wondered if the Ken Poppe mentioned in the previous story was the same Ken Poppe who wrote a creationist book, Reclaiming Science
from Darwinism. Yes, it is. He’s at Trail Ridge Middle School, a public school in Longmont, CO, and is listed as teaching 6th grade science. He freely admits to teaching creationist crap to his class, and says that the book grew out of his lessons.
Here’s a newspaper article about a classroom debate on global warming. Class debates are good, I think — they get the students thinking about the evidence and working over how to present it persuasively, although I also think it’s up to the instructor to provide some guidance. Realistically, sixth graders aren’t going to have a good handle on either the facts or the theory, and it’s up to the teacher to give them the battery of data they’re going to use to make their arguments. And sometimes it can go wrong.
Minnesotans are going to be apologizing for this for a good long while (Why? Because we’re so darn nice and we hate to see pain inflicted on others). Cheri Yecke is clawing her way to greater responsibility in the Florida educational system.
On the other side of the equation, state K-12 chancellor Cheri Yecke has announced that she will seek the commissioner’s chair.
Yecke, who has led the education departments in Virginia and Minnesota, came to Florida two years ago, abandoning a run for Congress in Minnesota.
“The whole battle about standards and accountability was fought and won here a long time ago,” Yecke told Times. “Folks in Florida are moving forward in a very positive way. To me, that is just so refreshing. I would like to stay here.”
Yecke was head of our state education department for a time. She’s a creationist sympathizer with a sneaky, conniving way of weaseling the intelligent design agenda into the school curriculum. Floridans, you don’t want her running your education system. You might want to think instead about passing a law not allowing Yecke to approach within 30 yards of any school.
The Paleyists at Uncommon Descent seem to be having a competition to find the most awful thing Darwin ever said. It’s not hard, actually; Darwin was a conventional 19th century Englishman, with all the standard prejudices of his day, tending to assume that Anglo-Saxons were superior in most ways to every other ethnic group on the planet. It’s darned easy to browse through the Descent of Man and find casual assumptions that make us cringe today. So what? We can recognize that Darwin was a flawed human being and a brilliant scientist.
What is bizarre, though, is how some creationists simply have to distort a quote. It’s like a compulsion, I guess, where they can’t be satisfied with anything, and have to make it all a little bit worse, no matter how dishonest their manipulations might be. Chief among the perpetrators of unnecessary quote-mining is slimy Sal Cordova, who left this little comment:
I beat a puppy, I believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power
Charles Darwin
Here’s where the quote came from, and it carries a rather different message than Cordova communicated.
Once as a very little boy whilst at the day school, or before that time, I acted cruelly, for I beat a puppy, I believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power; but the beating could not have been severe, for the puppy did not howl, of which I feel sure, as the spot was near the house. This act lay heavily on my conscience, as is shown by my remembering the exact spot where the crime was committed. It probably lay all the heavier from my love of dogs being then, and for a long time afterwards, a passion. Dogs seemed to know this, for I was an adept in robbing their love from their masters.
Why do creationists lie so? It must be something in their upbringing.
(At the link, you’ll also find a quote Dembski found from Darwin—it’s accurate, and it is Darwin happily citing a colleague’s damning stereotype of the Irish. It’s nowhere near as dishonest as Cordova’s misrepresentation, but it does require ignoring whether Darwin was better, worse, or just like his peers in his unthinking racism. I tend to think he was a little better.)
(via Richard Hughes)
Perhaps you thought Lisa Nowak, the pampers-wearing jealous lover, was enough of a stain on the reputation of astronauts. Here’s another one, though, to give you more excuses to kick them off their pedestal: There’s going to be a “Back to Genesis” conference sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research in Colorado Springs, and among the luminaries in attendance will be Russell Humphreys, Henry Morris III, and this fellow:
Col. Jeffrey Williams, U.S. Army, is a NASA astronaut with graduate degrees in aeronautical engineering and strategic studies. Col. Williams has been with NASA since 1987 and has served twice on the International Space Station, including the recent Expedition 13 project in conjunction with Russian cosmonauts.
The ICR is a Young Earth Creationist institution that preaches an absolutely literal interpretation of the Bible. How nice that one astronaut is trading on his association with NASA to support such nonsense — I don’t think there’s any doubt that Nowak was deranged, and it seems to me that Williams is equally looney. This hasn’t been a good couple of months for NASA’s image.
Coturnix is organizing an informative google bomb — if you look up Michael Egnor on the web, what should you find? How about lots and lots of critics?
It seems only fair. Teach the controversy!
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If the DI wants to use him as a nice figurehead, it seems like a good idea to make sure that any reporter doing some quick background on the guy discovers that he is not a reputable spokesman for evolution, no matter how estimable his record as a neurosurgeon may be.
We’re so accustomed to hearing about good Christian parents complaining about the material their kids are taught in science class, and lobbying school boards to ban the eeevilution word from the school, that it’s rather nice to see an example of the shoe on the other foot. A school in Sisters, Oregon (I know that place! Nice little town in the Cascades, east of Eugene) fired a teacher for peddling creationist bunkum.
What are we going to do with Michael Egnor? He seems to be coming up with a new bit of foolishness every day, and babbling on and on. Should we ignore him (there really isn’t any substance there), or should we criticize him every time (although he’s probably capable of generating idiocy at a phenomenal rate—he’s got a real talent for it)?
I’m not going to link to the awful “Evolution News & Views” site, and I’ll make this brief. His latest gripe is with the recent Newsweek cover story (that I had some problems with, too), but his argument is silly.
This is your assignment. You are to read the mind of someone named “Lucy.” Actually, you are to find out where Lucy’s mind came from. You can’t meet Lucy. She’s been dead for 3.2 million years. Your only data will be a fragment of Lucy’s fossilized skull and genetic analysis of some apes, men, and lice.
This isn’t a bad dream. This is an exciting new branch of evolutionary biology, and it’s on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And they’re serious.
The article doesn’t claim to be able to read dead minds. It cites a few studies in paleoneurology, where some interesting correlations between hormones and brain-associated proteins with behavior might provide some general insights. If Egnor is going to build straw men, he could at least try to make the stuffing a little less obvious.
He also goes on and on about how he can’t read brains by looking at blood flow in his work. We know. No one claims that we can. Of course, Michael Egnor does use these indirect measures to diagnose general properties of the brain — broad function, health, injury, etc. Unless he wants to argue that the physical state of the brain has nothing to do with the individuals possessing it, in which case he is out of a job, it’s awfully strange for him to claim that we can’t learn anything by examining brains and the molecules associated with him…and the only way he can do it is by inventing this false claim that biologists are saying they can “read the mind”.
He’s going to have to do better than this dishonest junk. I’m getting bored with him already.
The blog Startling Moniker has a nice acknowledgment for being added to my blogroll, but the main interest in that post is that he admits to a guilty pleasure I share: fishing through seedy bookstores. You can sometimes find the weirdest stuff in old bins in fringe bookstores. DaveX explores a Christian bookstore (speaking of masochism…) and finds a copy of Gish’s 1972 Evidence Against Evolution, which of course does not contain any.
I can do him one better—I have this treasure on my bookshelf:
Yes indeed, Henry Morris was announcing the Twilight of Evolution 44 years ago, in 1963. It also has a section on the evidence against evolution, which begins with this not-so-promising paragraph.
In this chapter and the next we shall summarize the evidence against by showing, first, that there is no evidence of evolution occurring at present, and second, that there is no evidence that evolution has occurred in the past. In doing this, it is necessary to start with the Biblical record.
The rest of the chapter consists of bible quotes, the second law of thermodynamics, more bible quotes, mutations cause decay, more bible quotes, Big Bang vs. steady state, and concludes that “the revealed Word of God, supported completely by all true science, teaches that the evolutionary principle, as applied to present processes and events, is not only not valid but is essentially impossible.”
The last chapter also explains the title—we’re in the twilight of evolution because soon enough Jesus is going to appear with a fiery sword and put it to death. There’s a lot of gloom and doom and threats of Armageddon to wrap up this story, so just in case you don’t accept Biblical Science, be prepared to be tortured. One happy note: it also admits that they have no hope of defeating evolution “until Satan himself is destroyed”!
