Impending Major Developments in Pseudoscience!

Bill Dembski has posted a list of three pathetic predictions for Intelligent Design: that there will be two books published by the usual suspects (Behe, and Wells and Dembski) and that there will be a ‘research center’ at some unspecified university. Whoop-de-doo. For a major, groundbreaking, revolutionary new scientific paradigm, as they like to think of it, that’s nothing—when they crow about their triumphs, all they can do is mention a few PR efforts, and they’re so paltry that you could count them on the fingers of one partially maimed hand? John Lynch mocks their feeble vision, and offers a few suggestions for trivial additions which we know they will not produce.

After you’re done laughing at that silliness, here’s some more: Howard Smith is looking for the ethical imperative in cosmology and the kabbalah…it’s another respectable scientist suspending his credulity to build a pseudo-scientific link between reality and the fantasies of medieval mystics. It’s going to be very interesting when the Christian IDists like Dembski finally rout the entire mainstream scientific community with a couple of books and a church-sponsored room at a bible college, and then they have to turn and deal with the non-Christian heretics.

Science and the National Park Service: a festering problem

The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase’s reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don’t know what I mean, here’s a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service of dumbing down the interpretive material and turning it into a purely aesthetic experience.

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How normal is Kearny?

Maybe it’s a bad, bad idea for a community to have an open-access electronic bulletin board, because it sure is a great tool for exposing the ugly underbelly of the group. Kearny, NJ has had its moment of fame, with the story of the history teacher babbling nonsense to his class, and
Jim Lippard has found some troubling stuff on the Kearny bulletin board. Paul LaClair, the father of the young man who recorded his teacher’s rambling BS, posted a
review and complaint about the community’s failure to support good teaching, and what’s bothersome are the replies. A few are supportive, but some are still defending the history teacher’s poor instruction, and worse, there are some comments that verge on being death threats.

It’s depressing to read if you have any optimism about people at all: the stupidity on display is shocking. Maybe we just have to hope that Kearny, NJ is some kind of magic dumb-magnet that sucks in mobs of the mindless, leaving the rest of the country much smarter. I fear, though, that it might actually be representative.

It’s not enough to be just an anti-creationist

I am not going to praise John Derbyshire; some people seem to be impressed because he has penned a dismissal of the ID creationists, but jebus, that ought to be the absolute rock bottom minimum we should expect from rationalists. That he can clear a hurdle set one inch above the ground does not impress me in the slightest.

Furthermore, he couldn’t spit it out without saying something stupid.

As it turned out, Judge Jones is a conservative in the right way, the best way: he respects the law, and the plain rules of evidence.

Think about that. Respect for law and evidence is not a property exclusive or intrinsic to conservatives. Does he think liberals believe in violating the law and ignoring the evidence (don’t bother to answer; he probably does.) I’m not dazzled by a wingnut who manages to see the obvious but is still burdened with the usual far right nonsense.

(via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

Irony Alert! Kirk Cameron explains his new board game

It’s hard to believe, but there is more information on the absurd board game designed by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.

Cameron said, “We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation evolution argument, and in doing so, shows that the contemporary theory of evolution is perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times.”

Uh, sure they’re going to show “both sides”: you can get an idea of what they think is the evolution side by the illustrations. There is a frog with bull horns (a bullfrog! Get it? Ha ha.), and a couple of other chimeras whipped up in Photoshop, and unless they’re using them to illustrate what evolution does not predict and what would constitute evidence against evolution—which I doubt—these are examples of utterly bogus creationist arguments, and do not bode well for the intellectual content of the game. Which promised to be pretty much nonexistent, given the identities of the authors.

I wonder if there’s a banana in the game?

The Grand Canyon is how old?

At this point, it’s safe to say the National Park Service is stonewalling. There is a book called The Grand Canyon: A Different View, written from a young earth creationist perspective, which the NPS has approved for sale in its bookstores. It is a truly appalling piece of crap; I wrote about in in July of 2004, and you can read excerpts from it online. One might argue that the appearance of the book is simply due to a lack of discrimination by the Park Service, which just shovels the gimcracks and gewgaws into their stores to make money, but apparently they try to exercise some due consideration in product placement.

Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.

The book is clearly in violation of the standards the Park Service sets for itself; this excellent letter from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility cites the explicit directive from the director of the agency that lays out the criteria.

Historical and Scientific Research. Superintendents, historians, scientists,
and interpretive staff are responsible for ensuring that park interpretive and
educational programs and media are accurate and reflect current
scholarship…Questions often arise round the presentation of geological,
biological, and evolutionary processes. The interpretive and educational treatment
used to explain the natural processes and history of the Earth must be based on
the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have
stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism.

This is a no-brainer. The book should not have been approved in the first place. It should be removed from their catalog immediately. The Park Service should approve and implement training for their staff (which should hardly be necessary; they shouldn’t hire idiots in the first place) to make sure that they are presenting accurate geological information to the public.

“No comment” is not good enough. This disgraceful controversy has been stewing long enough that the continued inaction of the Park Service administration constitutes an implied endorsement of anti-scientific nonsense.

Now this is a promising development Never mind

Crap. Lippard misread the report: it was a 6 month form. There has been no net decline in revenues to that creationist junk organization, and I was wrong. There have been no promising developments in a decline in grassroots support for creationism.

I’ve always had a low regard for settling creationism by court cases, since they don’t do a thing to address popular support. Here is far better news, though, and unless there’s some remarkable explanation for it, it’s the most promising sign of real progress I’ve seen yet: revenues for Answers in Genesis dropped from $10 million in 2004 to $5 million in 2005. That’s still a big chunk of change, but this is at the same time that they’ve been getting massive amounts of free PR for their creation “science” museum project, and it suggests that maybe people are getting leery of throwing their money into a futile endeavor. At least, we can hope it signifies a massive erosion of public support.

If I see Ken Ham with a cardboard sign begging for handouts someday, I might toss him a nickel.

Here, everyone: homework!

Hey, everyone, you’re being asked for some help. A certain someone is going to be giving a talk to Hugh Ross’s group, Reasons to Believe, and he wants a list of common creations fallacies and good rebuttals. Remember, RtB is an old earth creationist group, so stuff about a 6000 year old earth is inappropriate.

Please consider taking the time to post a thread on your blog asking readers to submit their nominations for most common/most egregious fallacies or misunderstandings along with suggestions on how to combat them. You can mention me or not, as you think it would be appropriate/helpful. I am sure if you challenge your readership, their feedback would be tremendously helpful to me, and that could make a difference in the sort of impact my presentation has.

My number one gripe is probably general innumeracy. Anyone who treats the likelihood of the evolution of a protein as (1/20)# of amino acids doesn’t understand probabilities or the nature of the problem. It’s not short, but I’d point them at Ian Musgrave’s explication of probability and statistics.

Innocence lost!

I was just asked to confirm something. A reader, TheFallibleFiend, noticed that DaveScot at Uncommon Descent had claimed that he had heard the “Tree of Life Exploding” because an examination of an ultraconserved genetic element in humans had found that “the closest match was to DNA from the coelacanth”. The reader then checked the Nature article, and discovered that it didn’t seem to say anything of the kind. He tried to point this discrepancy out in a comment, but it never showed up (oooh, surprise!).

Our bewildered reader wonders if he could be misinterpreting the article—he’s not a biologist—but you know, the abstract seems to plainly contradict DaveScot. How could this be?

Alas, I have to destroy his touching faith in human nature. DaveScot completely failed to comprehend the article. He misrepresented its meaning in his description. He’s ruthless about expunging any criticism, so he almost certainly intentionally deleted any comments that might mention his incompetence. The string of commenters at UD who all thought this was wonderful evidence against evolution further exemplify the willful inanity of the Bill Dembski fan club. FallibleFiend, your understanding of the abstract and paper seems to be quite accurate; theirs is incredibly off-base.

You will be pleased to know that Carl Zimmer has discussed this same Nature article in PLoS Computational Biology, and he backs you up.

Everyone should know by now that if the Dembskiites say it, it is almost certainly wrong; they trade in ignorance and dishonesty, and now we can add disillusionment to their wares.