The Atheist Experience has Kent Hovind’s phone calls from jail online. Hovind is such a pretentious fraud; he compares himself to George Washington and the IRS to the Mafia and Hitler’s minions, and insists through it all that he’s completely innocent. He also makes the claim that the people persecuting him will get their comeuppance on Judgement Day—that belief must be such a consolation to many petty crooks.

I did feel a little sympathy for his wife, who does express some worry and remorse…and good ol’ Kent just barrels over her concerns and tries to tell her what the law is. That tactic worked on his wife, but it doesn’t seem to have impressed the lawyers or judge.

Sad to say, I’m discovering that some people got the wrong message from my talk last night. Something went awry, I’m not sure what, because they took home exactly the opposite idea from what I intended. I’ll try summarize what I meant to say here.

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What’s the matter with New Scientist? Check out Ian Musgrave’s smackdown of Douglas Axe and the Biologic Institute is good stuff.

If Douglas Axe and his co-signers are so badly misinformed about something as basic and well known as the relations between engineers, computer designers and biologists, can we trust their judgment on any research that comes out of this Institute?

The DI claims to be supporting real research…so why is what little emerges from them so bad?

This is a sad story of compartmentalization carried to an extreme: a Ph.D. student in the geosciences who is also young earth creationist. This is a tricky subject: religion is not a litmus test for awarding a degree, but supposedly depth and breadth of knowledge is. I say that you cannot legitimately earn an advanced degree in geology and at the same time hold a belief contrary to all the evidence, and that the only way you can accomplish it is by basically lying to yourself and your committee throughout the process—and look at this…the student agrees.

Asked whether it was intellectually honest to write a dissertation so at odds with his religious views, he said: “I was working within a particular paradigm of earth history. I accepted that philosophy of science for the purpose of working with the people” at Rhode Island.

And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.”

In other words, he was going through the motions. He was doing “research” on the distribution of mosasaurs 65 million years ago, but what he was actually doing was echoing ideas he disagreed with to fit the expectations of his advisors—he was a complete fraud.

I have a hard time imagining spending 4+ years working hard at something I believed was a complete lie, but this guy did it, and thinks he accomplished something. His motive clearly was not a love of science, but to acquire credentials under false pretenses that he could then use to endorse his ideology. What a waste of his time; I wouldn’t hire such a phony, and I don’t know anyone who would. Where could he end up working? But of course…

Today he teaches earth science at Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell where, Dr. Ross said, he uses a conventional scientific text.

“We also discuss the intersection of those sorts of ideas with Christianity,” he said. “I don’t require my students to say or write their assent to one idea or another any more than I was required.”

If his training was a lie, I guess he doesn’t have any scruples about lying a little more: I’ve seen the job ads from Liberty University, and a “young earth philosophy” is a prerequisite for teaching there. He teaches something called CRST 290, which is in a “religious studies” category, taught as part of their required instruction in “creation studies”.

CRST 290: History of Life

An interdisciplinary study of the origin and history of
life in the universe. Faculty of the Center for Creation
Studies will draw from science, religion, history, and
philosophy in presenting the evidence and arguments for
creation and evolution.

I think the University of Rhode Island might want to review their doctoral programs a bit. It looks like someone can slip through with only the most superficial knowledge of their field, and can admit to faking it throughout their entire training. This kind of slack in the standards diminishes the luster of degrees from RI.

It also says something even worse of Liberty University. They’ll hire any old hack to teach their courses.

In the comments, Art Hunt passes along a short analysis from Patrick Frank of the instances of Haeckel’s work in a number of biology texts from 1923 to 1997. Even the oldest was critical of Haeckelian recapitulation, and only a minority used Haeckel’s figure at all.

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The DI certainly is obsessed. They recorded Olson at a screening of Flock of Dodos, and are now claiming that he backtracked on Haeckel’s use in textbooks. It’s only backtracking if you accept the DI’s false premise that he claimed in the movie that there was absolutely no sign of Haeckel’s diagram in biology text—a claim I’ve already shot down.

If they want to claim he backtracked, they should just quote the movie—you know, the part where he says the diagrams aren’t found in the textbooks “other than a mention that once upon a time Haeckel came up with this idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny”. Does qualifying a comment in the same sentence count as “backtracking”? To the DI, perhaps.

The Discovery Institute is stepping up their smear campaign against Randy Olson and Flock of Dodos, and the biggest issue they can find is their continued revivification of Haeckel’s biogenetic law. They’ve put up a bogus complaint that Olson was lying in the movie, a complaint that does not hold up, as I’ll show you.

First, though, let’s simplify the debate. The Discovery Institute position is that any text that shows Ernst Haeckel’s ancient diagram of various embryos is guilty of fraudulently distorting the evidence for evolution. They have accused scientists of a conspiracy of lies, of using this known false diagram to buttress evolutionary theory.

If this were the case, then the worst case of mass market fraud around would have to be Wells’ own Icons of Evolution: it contains 4 versions of the Haeckelian diagram, including the original, and talks about it for 28 pages. Obviously, this is a criminal conspiracy to promote phony evidence for evolution.

Wait, wait, you protest: Wells’ book was explaining that Haeckelian recapitulation was wrong, and that there were both errors and intentional misrepresentations of embryos in that old work. That should be acceptable.

I would agree, except that the textbooks Wells is damning in Icons often do exactly the same thing! Those that do mention Haeckel and his biogenetic law do so as an example of a historically significant error. Some go on to explain what was correct and what was wrong in his ideas, but basically all are merely pointing out that here was an interesting but failed explanation from the late 19th century, that nonetheless exposes an interesting phenomenon that needs to be understood.

I would add that progress in evolutionary biology has led to better explanations of the phenomenon that vertebrate embryos go through a period of similarity: it lies in conserved genetic circuitry that lays down the body plan. Intelligent Design creationism has contributed absolutely nothing to either refuting Haeckelian ideas, which was the product of working biologists at the end of the 19th century, nor has it generated any better, testable explanations for the conservation of embryonic body plans.

Now what about the Discovery Institute’s claim that Olson was lying about Haeckel’s representation in modern texts?

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This is absolutely brilliant. MnCSE has taken advantage of Google’s ability to set up custom search filters to create special purpose search engines.

• MnCSE Real Science Search Engine: This one explicitly excludes over 300 creationist sites from its results—if you want to search for a general topic of evolutionary interest while cutting out the worst of the crap, this is the one for you.

• MnCSE Snow White Search Engine: Quite a bit narrower in scope, this one only returns .edu and .gov sites.

• MnCSE "Eat the Apple Dearie" Search Engine: Want a laugh? Searches here return only stuff from the 300+ sites excluded in the first search.

Those are two subjects that leave me queasily nauseated, so this time I’ll let John Lynch have the honor of poking about in the puke.