Just what we needed…

Hey, Minnesotans—anyone want to tune in to KKMS Christian radio right now? I’m about to be tied up in class stuff for a while, so I’ll say more later—it seems we have a new creationist group mobilizing in the state.

I caught a few bits of the radio show (that hurt—it’s a fundagelical radio station), and I’ve also heard from a few readers. There is apparently a billboard in a very prominent place at 12th and Washington along 35W, the freeway that cuts through the center of Minneapolis. This, apparently, is the whole raison d’etre for the organization, to throw up billboards. The founder of the group, Julie Haberle, says God talked to her and told her she needs to do billboards to refute evolution. These billboards just direct people to her website, which she explains she built by taking snippets from Ken Ham and others and putting them together—it shows. There’s nothing there but the tired old creationist nonsense we’ve seen so often.

There is quote mining, lots and lots of quote mining. There are also flatly wrong assertions from “five time Nobel nominee” Henry “Fritz” Schaeffer, Behe, Phillip Johnson, and other DI figureheads. The creationist crap is straight from the bunghole of Answers in Genesis, and it’s all garbage.

One other curious thing about the website is that every page has a nautilus shell logo on it…which reminded me of a certain other site. I suspect there is some aping of the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education going on, although of course they are doing so poorly.

The question I have about all this is where the money is coming from—billboards aren’t cheap, especially in such prime locations. She didn’t say. She said they were an official non-profit, they received donations, and that the billboard companies had given them a very good deal, and she specifically mentioned Clear Channel as being very helpful, and that their media exposure is completely free. She also said she hopes to build this little anti-evolution organization up, and then pass it on to someone like D. James Kennedy or James Dobson.

Most of her radio conversation was rampant idiocy. Would you believe Answers in Genesis is very technical, so she had to dumb down their material for the website? That there are no “transitory fossils”? That because we haven’t grown wings, evolution didn’t happen? Hey, if that doesn’t persuade you, why are fish still trying to get out of the water? And why are there still monkeys?

Really. She said that. I had no idea fish were trying to get out of the water.

One reader wrote in to tell me that this woman is “scary stupid”. I have to agree.

One measure of the dishonest depths to which creationists will sink is their willingness to put words in the mouths of dead men. Haberle claimed that Carl Sagan knew the “mathematical statistics” were against life appearing on earth and that’s why he was looking for life on other planets—because he was sure that’s where we had to come from, since it was impossible for us to have evolved.

She lied.

Why don’t we ask Carl to tell us what he thinks? It’ll help wash away the unsavory taste of those freakish cretins, too.

Another day, another ignorant pundit

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.

[Read more…]

A disturbing 12 year old…with brain rot

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)

A creationist engineer cracks a biology textbook! And doesn’t understand it!

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.

A scientific contribution from Intelligent Design

I take my criticisms back. It seems Intelligent Design creationism has made a profound contribution to computer science.

Introduction

Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design.

Algorithm Description

The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it’s in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it’s clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it’s safe to assume that it’s already optimally Sorted in some way that transcends our naïve mortal understanding of “ascending order”. Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted.

Analysis

This algorithm is constant in time, and sorts the list in-place, requiring no additional memory at all. In fact, it doesn’t even require any of that suspicious technological computer stuff. Praise the Sorter!

Kenya’s conflict over human origins

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?

Comical innumeracy alert!

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.

Those wacky Kansans!

The Onion reports on the latest anti-evolution tactic.

In response to a Nov. 7 referendum, Kansas lawmakers passed emergency legislation outlawing evolution, the highly controversial process responsible for the development and diversity of species and the continued survival of all life.

“From now on, the streets, forests, plains, and rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless practice of evolution, and species will be able to procreate without deviating from God’s intended design,” said Bob Bethell, a member of the state House of Representatives. “This is about protecting the integrity of all creation.”

The new law prohibits all living beings within state borders from any willful adaptation to changing environmental conditions. In addition, it strictly limits any activity that may result in enhanced health or survival beyond the current average lifespan of their particular species.

My first thought was this will have the good effect of ending that pesky antibiotic resistance problem, but this law is going to have sweeping effects.

Human beings may be the species most deeply affected by the new legislation. Those whose cytochrome-c molecules vary less than 2 percent from those of chimpanzees will be in direct violation of the law.

There is no hint of what the penalties might be, but I think everyone better stop procreating, just to be on the safe side.