We’ve finally got the piece of evidence they’ve all been asking for: a cat giving birth to a dog.
It’s only a matter of time until my attempts to hatch a bird out of my fish eggs succeed.
Casey Luskin is still flailing at Carl Zimmer, and Carl has updated his rebuttal appropriately. It’s good entertainment if you find attack mice amusing.
One of the characters who frequents the ID blog Uncommon Descent is the smarm-meister Sal Cordova, an utterly clueless little git with a talent for being simultaneously oleaginous and snide. He has just posted an astonishingly foolish commentary on the apparent impossibility of evolving regeneration, and I promise, you’ll enjoy reading Mark Chu-Carroll’s reply. Cordova gets everything wrong.
This week’s issue of Nature contains a bizarre letter from a Polish creationist, forester, and member of the Polish parliament. His credentials notwithstanding, it is a very silly diatribe that makes a series of false claims—claims that are trivial to dismiss, but in that fine tradition of the Gish gallop and Hovind’s rambling free-association eructations, he makes a lot of them. A whole lot of them; all just plain naked assertions with no evidence to back them up, because the evidence, if he’d bothered to discuss it, contradicts him. Even the title reveals his ignorance of how science works.
Rather than trying to dismantle it piece by piece, I’ve just added links to his letter that lead to short, simple refutations of his claims.
Creationism, evolution: nothing has been proved
In your News story “Polish scientists fight creationism” (Nature 443, 890–891; 2006 doi:10.1038/443890c), you incorrectly state that I have called for the “inclusion of creationism in Polish biology curricula”. As well as being a member of the European Parliament, I am a scientist — a population geneticist with a degree from Oxford University and a PhD from the University of Toronto — and I am critical of the theory of evolution as a scientist, with no religious connotation. It is the media that prefer to consider my comments as religiously inspired, rather than to report my stated position accurately.
I believe that, as a result of media bias, there seems to be total ignorance of new scientific evidence against the theory of evolution. Such evidence includes race formation (microevolution), which is not a small step in macroevolution because it is a step towards a reduction of genetic information and not towards its increase. It also includes formation of geological strata sideways rather than vertically, archaeological and palaeontological evidence that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, a major worldwide catastrophe in historical times, and so on.
We know that information exists in biology, and is transferred over generations through the DNA/RNA/protein system. We do not know its origin, but we know it exists, can be spoiled by mutations, but never improves itself spontaneously. No positive mutations have ever been demonstrated — adaptations to antibiotics or herbicides are equivalent to immunological adaptation to diseases, and not a creation of a new function.
We keep on searching for natural explanations of everything in nature. If we have no explanations we should say so, and not claim that an unproven theory is a fact.
I’d love to know how this piece of ignorant dreck managed to get published. Is Nature concerned that they’re always publishing stuff from smart people, so they’ve committed to a policy of affirmative action for idiots, just to give them a chance?
Remember that fundie history teacher who was caught on tape? One of the recordings is now online. I haven’t listened to the whole thing—the quality is terrible, and it’s a typical high school classroom that is in a noisy uproar—but you do hear him nattering on about Satan and the Bible and sin and so forth; apparently, the “Scriptures aren’t religion, they are the foundation of all of the world’s major religions”, and he claims evolution isn’t science.
I’m not sure what he’s teaching.
John G. West of the Discovery Institute wants all you conservatives to know that the Debate Over Evolution Not Going Away, and that you need to join up with his side and question “Darwinism”, because of all those intolerant nasty dogmatists who want to suppress the truth. You know, people like me.
Biology professor P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has demanded “the public firing and humiliation of some teachers” who express their doubts about Darwin. He further says, “It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots.”
Uh, guys? You know that trip to Ken Ham’s creation science “museum”? I think he got wind of our plans.
He’s training guard dogs now.
Cody visited the creation science “museum” near Glenrose, Texas, and came back with a photo of the mural portraying Adam and Eve. Adam looks…familiar.
I knew he was old, but that old?
I’m not sure who Eve resembles. Anita Bryant? Skeletor?
This fairly typical scrap of creationist email made me smirk. Please, if you’re going to be sarcastic and tell me how stupid I am, don’t make the first word of your diatribe grammatically incorrect.
your soo smart… I wish I was as smart as you
Oh you are soo much smarter than everyone else. That’s odd being that your ancestors were monkeys. Too bad you are going to drown soon when mankind melts the polar ice caps. I guess you would have done just as well if we would have used your embryo for research and the rest of us would be much better off too. What a stupid arrogant know-it-all loser you are.
I do think it’s absolutely brilliant that in one short paragraph he managed to express his dull, uncomprehending irritation with four hot-button issues: evolution, global warming, abortion, and fetal research. If only six sentences hadn’t exceeded his attention span, maybe he could have worked in something about gay sex and the Iraq war, too.
It’s a sign of the lowly state to which the DI is descending that their assaults on evolutionary ideas have lately been led by the pathetic Casey Luskin. Luskin is a guy who doesn’t understand biology, and whose usual line of attack is to whine about credentials—it isn’t a good combination. After all, isn’t it a bit sad to have a particularly ignorant lawyer and ideologue complaining about scientists’ (or science journalists’) understanding of science?
Anyway, while taking a break from the futilely but furiously spinning exercise wheel at the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin is now squeaking frantically at Carl Zimmer. Carl, of course, calmly and perhaps even bemusedly flicks him away. It’s great fun.
