Today, it’s Peter Hitchens’ turn to make a mealy-mouthed appeal for an unearned respect for Intelligent Design creationism. This one is another generic whine, begging that people be fair and give some version of equal time to an underdog heterodoxy…creationism. After all, the only possible reason scientists could accept the idea of evolution is because they’ve mysteriously and unfairly acquired a dominant position, and this brand of pundit doesn’t stop to consider why it’s so popular. I think it’s a kind of projection: they’ve acquired this unearned position of authority, so they can’t imagine that any other idea could have gotten to where it is on merit.

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Ouch, this is painful to watch. It starts with pictures of kittens and Bambi and bagpipers (bagpipers?), and then this 12 year old kid comes on to declare evolution invalid. He throws up a list of objections to evolution culled from some creationist website somewhere—among them, for instance, is that there is no inheritance of acquired characters—and then he spends most of his time babbling incoherently about how evolution is impossible.

Warning: it also ends with a bagpiper.

The 8 year old atheist sounded much more intelligent.

(via DoubleViking)

All-too-common-dissent finds another crazy creationist engineer. This one opens a molecular biology and genetics text, discovers that it doesn’t talk about “Darwinism” (not surprising), and concludes that biology doesn’t need evolution.

My hypothesis is that the field of molecular biology is simply not understood by the majority of biologists and thus pretty secure from rational debate by laymen. By claiming that this discipline (which they probably don’t understand either) proves Darwinism and that Darwinism is vital to understanding molecular biology, the Creationists can be silenced, humiliated and put in their place by simply invoking superior knowledge.

This is a rather extravagant claim coming from someone who knows no biology and who’s impression of the field is derived from one specialist text that I suspect he didn’t understand. I’d argue the other way: that there’s a trend towards emphasizing molecular biology at the expense of other aspects of biology in undergraduate education. However, even so, it’s extremely silly to claim that molecular biology isn’t being driven in substantial part by evolutionary ideas, or that molecular biology isn’t providing huge amounts of new information in support of evolution.

I don’t need to say more—Doppelganger piles on.

This story has been simmering for a while: Kenyan fundamentalists are trying to suppress the fossil evidence, so well represented in their country, of human evolution. On one side, we have Richard Leakey:

He told The Daily Telegraph (London): “The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya’s very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science.”

On another side, we have fundagelical goobers:

“The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” the bishop said.

But you know what? There’s also a third side.

“We have a responsibility to present all our artifacts in the best way that we can so that everyone who sees them can gain a full understanding of their significance,” said Ali Chege, public relations manager for the National Museums of Kenya. “But things can get tricky when you have religious beliefs on one side, and intellectuals, scientists, or researchers on the other, saying the opposite.”

We’ve recently had a bit of a shouting match about “appeasement”, and this is exactly what we’ve been complaining about. This is not a tricky situation at all. There is no rational reason we should respect “religious beliefs” as equals to the evidence and ideas of “intellectuals, scientists, or researchers”. This false equivalence, supported by the people who claim to be defending science, lies precisely at the root of the problem. Museums should never have to defer to myths and superstition—so why is this even a controversy?

Larry Moran wonders why people accommodate religious foolishness, whether because of a sincere belief in religion, a more cynical belief that it is a useful palliative, or out of fear of antagonizing dangerous mad people. I wonder what Chege’s answer would be?

But of course, he had to go somewhere else. That creationist who bailed out of his very own personal thread here turned up at the Calladus blog, only to get crushed there, too.

He’s a very silly man. We’re glad to be shed of him; anyone else want to invite him to visit your blog?

Well, hooray! I was going to jump onto this awesome example of flagrantly stupid creationist innumeracy, but I’d been putting it off (oh, my grading. My grading. It tears at me with talons like razors). This guy mangles recent measurements of human variation, making comments like this: “previous concepts that all humans were 99.9% alike were blown apart by the research conducted on 270 people of various races that confirmed that 2,900 genes could vary within people, making over a million combinations possible.” I mean, seriously, how ignorant do you have to be to think that the possibility of variation in many genes somehow means the nucleotide sequences can’t still be highly similar, or even sillier, to be impressed at the possibility of a million genetic variations in a human population of billions? Maybe in his day job this propagandists sets ransom demands for Dr. Evil.

Fortunately, untangling mathematical misconceptions is Mark Chu-Carroll’s destiny in life, and he polished this one off today. Go read that. I’m going to read a few more student essays.

They’re befuddled over there in the UK—I know that when I visited, I seemed to down a couple of pints of that potent stuff every day, so I’m assuming the natives must also be living in a constant state of alcohol saturation. Right? It’s the only explanation I can think of for the latest burst of creationist foolishness in the UK. They’ve got the former head of some school out there coming out in favor of the shoddy pseudoscience that this creationist group, Truth in Science, has been peddling.

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