Greg Laden visited the creationist science fair so we don’t have to

As I might have guessed, it seems to have been rather unimpressive. No genuinely outré exhibits, just more average work with bible verses slapped on. He does observe that quote-mining the bible means these kiddies are going to burn in hell someday, which does add a little frisson of horror to the exhibit, but since it’s just as much an unsympathetic fantasy as the Christian belief that we godless people are hellbound, I’m afraid it’s still not enough reason to have compelled me to drive across the state to see it.

What use is an appendix?

Here’s an excellent and useful summary of the appendix from a surgeon’s perspective. Creationists dislike the idea that we bear useless organs, remnants of past function that are non-functional or even hazardous to our health; they make up stories about the importance of these vestiges. Sid Schwab has cut out a lot of appendices, and backs up its non-utility with evidence.

The study I cited most often to my patients when asked about adverse consequences of appendectomy is one done by the Mayo Clinic: they studied records of thousands of patients who’d had appendectomy, and compared them with equal thousands who hadn’t. (Back in the day, it was very common during any abdominal operation to remove the appendix. Like flicking a bug off your shoulder. No extra charge: just did it to prevent further problems: took an extra couple of minutes, is all.) The groups were statistically similar in every way other than presence of the worm. There were no differences in incidence of any disease. It’s as convincing as it gets, given the impossibility of doing a prospective double-blind study.

I have a personal interest in this: I was nearly killed by my appendix at the age of 9, and had it removed. I haven’t missed it since.

Dr Michael Egnor challenges evolution!

Time magazine has a science blog, Eye on Science, and the writer, Michael Lemonick, doesn’t hesitate to take on the Intelligent Design creationists. A recent entry criticizes the Discovery Institute’s silly list of dissenters from ‘Darwinism’. Not only is the number that they cite pathetically small, but they rely on getting scientists whose expertise isn’t relevant.

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I haven’t been doing any Vulcan mind-melds, either

Contrary to popular myth, I do not sit around instructing my family in the fine points of evolutionary biology, nor do I subject them to tirades against creationists. In fact, I almost never discuss those subjects at home. So why is my daughter giving competent discussions of Intelligent Design creationism? I know it’s because her facebook pals have been babbling about creationism, but still…

I wish she’d absorb genetics and developmental biology out of the atmosphere around here, so she could go off and give my lectures for me instead.

The Haeckel-Wells Chronicles

Lately, the Discovery Institute has stuck its neck out in response to the popularity of showings of Randy Olson’s movie, Flock of Dodos, which I reviewed a while back. They slapped together some lame critiques packaged on the web as Hoax of Dodos (a clunker of a name; it’s especially ironic since the film tries to portray the Institute as good at PR), which mainly seem to be driven by the sloppy delusions of that poor excuse for a developmental biologist, Jonathan Wells. In the past week, I’ve also put up my responses to the Wells deceptions—as a developmental biologist myself, I get a little cranky when a creationist clown abuses my discipline.

In case you are completely baffled by this whole episode, here’s a shorter summary.

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Creationist email: weird company

I’ve mentioned before that I get lots of wacky email from creationists. I usually throw it out, but there’s this one kook who is persistent and sends me stuff like this:

Control must be taken from the people, and turned over to one individual, Satan!

Anyone with an eye towards God, and God’s word, can easily see the events of the Lord’s prophecies taking place around us today. The non-believers would have the world believe that mankind is in control of it’s own destiny without the benefit of our creator, Yeshua God. These Godless people today are preaching evolution, creation by accident, and that mankind has the answers to all of the problems we are facing today without the help or need of our creator.

It goes on and on in that vein for pages, with buckets of bible verses quoted to ‘prove’ that biblical predictions are true. Boring! Not even wacky enough to deserve a mention!

Except for one thing I happened to notice this time: the list of people it is being sent to. It’s a very short list which includes a few names I don’t know, but has a few I do. This guy thinks the best audience for his screeds contains me, Juan Cole, and … Ann Coulter.

It’s a discombobulating concatenation. I don’t think we’re exactly similar in our interests.

Just be sure to put Jesus in the list of authors!

Our old pal Kazmer Ujvarosy of the American Chronicle has a long and boring rant against the whole system of peer review. There’s nothing really new in it; we know peer review is flawed, and practically every scientist can give you gripes about cronyism and bad reviewers and yadda yadda yadda, but at the same time, no system is ever going to be perfect, and we work within the bounds of what is effective. Ujvarosy, of course, is peeved because creationism doesn’t get any respect in the science journals. Changes to the policies of review, however, won’t change the fact that Intelligent Design creationism is baloney.

What I find interesting in his cranky essay, though, is that he reveals two things that have emerged before, but that the creationists deny.

In the final analysis if the scientific community is to remain productive intellectually, a protective system must be provided for the creative minority, however erratic or zany their ideas may seem to the incomparably zanier Darwinists. A repressive evolutionist environment, forced upon the community of scientists by a secular and aggressive Darwinist priesthood, stymies creativity and literally fossilizes thought. Science writers contribute to this unhealthy state of affairs by tending to accept wholesale anything these quacks — no matter what credentials they have — spoon-feed them in the name of science.

“a protective system must be provided for the creative minority”…what he’s asking for is a kind of special-case protectionism where non-science is given a slot in the science publication process. Like Behe admitting that one of ID’s goals is to change the very definition of science to allow the supernatural in, that’s what Ujvarosy is also asking for — special treatment. A redefinition of peer-review that will remove the normal (albeit sometimes poorly implemented) quality control. A system that allows authors to replace the usual demand for rigor with his idea of being “creative” (read: “insane”).

Here’s another, uh, revelation:

In any case the theory of creation positing that our universe has a seed origin, which seed is Jesus Christ, is so heretical in scientific circles that no editor conditioned to the doctrine of Darwinian evolution from a simple beginning would touch it.

That’s what we need! A system for evaluating scientific work that gives special privileges to Christians!

Never mind

Warren Chisum, the Texas legislator who peddled an anti-evolution memo, has, well, ummm, finally read what he was trying to legislate.

On Tuesday, the Pampa Republican distributed a memo written by Georgia GOP Rep. Ben Bridges to Texas House members’ mailboxes. The memo advocated that schools stop teaching evolution and contained links to a Web site that warns of international Jewish conspiracies. It also directed readers to the group that created the Web site – the Atlanta-area Fair Education Foundation.

Mr. Chisum said he hadn’t looked at the Web site and didn’t realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn’t vet the material more carefully.

He said he believes creation and evolution should both be taught in schools, and he separated himself from what he called "goofy stuff" on the Web site.

There was "non-goofy stuff" at Fixed Earth? He can’t simultaneously separate himself from the "goofy stuff" and be advocating goofy creationism.

It adds another interesting data point to those at Dover and Kansas: the people on the political side who are pushing the various flavors of creationism on schools rarely seem to have actually read the material they say is so important for school kids to know.

Wells and Haeckel’s Embryos

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(This is a rather long response to a chapter in Jonathan Wells’ dreadful and most unscholarly book, Icons of Evolution)

The story of Haeckel’s embryos is different in an important way from that of the other chapters in Jonathan Wells’ book. As the other authors show, Wells has distorted ideas that are fundamentally true in order to make his point: all his rhetoric to the contrary, Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil, peppered moths and Darwin’s finches do tell us significant things about evolution, four-winged flies do tell us significant things about developmental pathways, and so forth. In those parts of the book, Wells has to try and cover up a truth by misconstruing and misrepresenting it.

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