New and digitally remastered with enhanced sound! Here’s the Bergman/Myers debate again, all in one single file for your convenience in being driven insane by the futility of arguing with that loon.
The Pew Foundation has surveyed evangelical Christians on a variety of topics, and here’s an interesting result: only 3% accept evolution. And it’s worse than that, since that 3% seems to be just in the bounds of noise and the frequency of individuals who essentially reject the basics of Christianity.
To put the 3% figure in perspective, it is the same as the percentage of evangelicals who answered that it is not “essential to follow the teachings of Christ in one’s personal and family life”: pretty much the defining feature of evangelical Christianity. Furthermore, the 3% figure for support of evolution by evangelicals was consistent across all geographic regions.
In further news, most of them regard secularism as their greatest threat, and also regard unbelievers as the most fertile field for evangelism. Isn’t that sweet?
Kent Hovind has been transferred to a new prison, Florence Admax.
The United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) is a supermax prison for men that is located in unincorporated Fremont County, Colorado, United States, south of Florence. It is unofficially known as ADX Florence, Florence ADMAX, Supermax, or The Alcatraz of the Rockies. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. ADX, a part of the Florence Federal Correctional Complex (FCC), houses the prisoners who are deemed the most dangerous and in need of the tightest control of all the prisoners within the United States Federal Prison System.
Whoa. Somebody doesn’t like him, or he’s been up to mischief.
By the way, another strange thing: Hovind used to get letters out that would be transcribed to a blog at the Creation Science Evangelism site. These were bizarre ravings in which he’d recount how God was telling him just last night how good and wonderful and important Kent was. Now those are all gone, and CSEblogs.com just redirects to Eric Hovind’s version of the site, and while Kent Hovind is still listed as an “author”, all of the missives from jail have been purged, and instead, there are only what look like excerpts from his past talks, presented as current.
I think there is a personal tragedy playing out here. We’re not seeing the full story, but there are hints that something has gone even more wrong in Hovind’s life.
Hang on, there’s more info on the prison.
The Administrative Maximum (ADX) facility in Florence, Colorado, houses offenders requiring the tightest controls. It is part of the Florence Federal Correctional Complex (FCC). The ADX supervises a minimum security satellite prison camp (outside the secure perimeter of the ADX) that houses male offenders.
Presumably, then, he’s in the minimum security camp rather than hanging out with the father-rapers in the big house.
That was quick. Here’s the video of that ancient debate. It’s in five parts because that was the way it was organized on the DVD.
Someone, not yet identified, paid $201,000 for that piece of crap. It wasn’t the Talk Origins Archive Foundation, either; they had nowhere near that sum to spend, nor would it have been worthwhile to cough up that much cash.
I’m hoping some creationist organization just got fleeced.
I’ve received a suggestion that one potential source of a lot of the recent nonsensical creationist literature-quoting has a plausible source: Jerry Bergman. That guy is completely nuts, as I learned in a debate a while back; he’s also pretentious while not knowing much, and he’s painfully prolific, publishing lots in fringey creationist pseudo-journals.
So now I have a technical question. I have a DVD copy of that wretched debate, and I’ve even gone so far as to rip it, and now have five MP4 files sitting on my computer (I also have a folder of the raw ripped files, a bunch of .bup, .ifo, .vob files). And that leads to a terribly naive question: how do I put them on youtube? I’ve had no trouble uploading short, simple things to youtube, but this is about two hours worth of video. I just want to click on something that will segment the files as necessary and neatly upload them without me having to fuss over them. Any experts willing to give me suggestions? I am only going to do this on a Mac, so don’t tell me about PC solutions.
Alternatively, if someone else would like to host them and put them online in their youtube account, I’d be happy to email them or put them on a server somewhere for downloading. Just let me know how.
I’ll look into some of the suggestions I’ve been given. For now, though, I’ve tossed up the files on a free hosting service — if anyone wants to download and do something with these, feel free, and if you put them on youtube or vimeo send me a link to let me know.
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c6ec/n/VTS_01_1.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1dacc/n/VTS_01_2.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c65b/n/VTS_01_3.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c68d/n/VTS_01_4.mp4
http://www.filefactory.com/file/cc1c67d/n/VTS_01_5.mp4
I tell other scientists all the time that their work is being appropriated by creationists who barely understand it, and that it is getting distorted to support bogus pseudoscience. Whenever you see a creationist quote a genuine science paper, you can pretty much trust that it is going to be mangled beyond recognition.
For instance, Jonathan MacLatchie raised a peculiar collection of questions to grill me with; here’s one of them.
9) If, as is often claimed by Darwinists, the pharyngeal pouches and ridges are indeed accurately thought of as vestigial gill slits (thus demonstrating our shared ancestry with fish), then why is it that the ‘gill-slit’ region in humans does not contain even partly developing slits or gills, and has no respiratory function? In fish, these structures are, quite literally, slits that form openings to allow water in and out of the internal gills that remove oxygen from the water. In human embryos, however, the pharyngeal pouches do not appear to be ‘old structures’ which have been reworked into ‘new structures’ (they do not develop into homologous structures such as lungs). Instead, the developmental fate of these locations includes a wide variety of structures which become part of the face, bones associated with the ear, facial expression muscles, the thymus, thyroid, and parathyroid glands (e.g. Manley and Capecchi, 1998).
You might be wondering about what that paper actually says, and you should. Never trust a creationist! And here’s where I get to pull Marshall McLuhan into the frame from offscreen.
Nancy Manley of the University of Georgia wrote to me today.
As a fan of both your website and of the pharyngula stages of development, I was intrigued to see the questions posed to you by ID followers before your recent talk. And kind of surprised, and bit taken aback, when one of my postdoctoral papers was cited in one of the questions – I am the Manley of Manley et al.
Since the ID questioners used a reference to one of my papers in the question, and this is actually an issue I am personally interested in from a scientific point of view, I feel compelled to answer also. In a way, it is ironic that they used this paper to illustrate their question, since it was our analysis of the pharyngeal pouch phenotype of the Hoxa3 null mice that led to our own interest in why terrestrial animals don’t have gills, and how the thymus and parathyroids may have evolved. We hypothesized that the evolution of morphology in the pharyngeal region (i.e. loss of gills and gain of pouch-derived organs like the thymus and parathyroids) was due to changes in the expression and/or function of the Hoxa3 gene. This hypothesis was proposed in a book chapter that I co-authored (Manley, NR and CC Blackburn. Thymus and Parathyroids. In Handbook of Stem Cells, Vol. 2: Embryonic Stem Cells, R. Lanza (Ed). Academic Press, 2004 v. 1:pp 391-406). I even obtained an NSF grant (now defunct) to test this hypothesis, and recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about it (Chen, et al., 2010, PNAS 107(23):10555-10560). We haven’t solved the problem yet, but the data so far indicate that changes in both the expression and function of Hoxa3 may have been involved in the evolution of pharyngeal region derivatives during vertebrate evolution, including loss of gills and development of pharyngeal pouch-derived organs.
I wish I could magically pull scientists out of a hat every time some po-faced creationist stooge raises a hand at one of my talks and starts lecturing me on their memorized quotes from the scientific literature. They always get them wrong.
By the way, I’ve been playing a game with MacLatchie. Every time I look into one of his citations, I go to google and type in both the author’s name and that of Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist. It’s amazing — every time, I get a couple of quotes from one of his books, and they’re almost exactly the same as MacLatchie’s comments.
For example,
Harun Yahya also cites Manley. Compare this with what MacLatchie wrote, above.
Those human emryonic “gill slits” are just another Darwinian myth. These pharyngeal pouches do not develop into homologous structures such as lungs or gill-like structures. The developmental fate of these pouches include a wide variety of structures that become parts of the face, ear cavities, bones of the middle ear, muscles of masticulation and facial expression, the lower jaw, certain neck parts, and the thymus, thyroid, and parathyroid glands. (Manley, N.R. and Capecchi, M.R., Developmental Biology, 195 (1):1-15, 1998)
Isn’t this just weird? Now Yahya is a notorious plagiarist who rips off everything he’s written from the Christian creationist literature, and I don’t think MacLatchie is getting it from him. On the other hand, MacLatchie is a nobody, so I don’t think Yahya stole it from him. I think there’s another creationist source book somewhere, which both are borrowing from to make their claims, and I’m itching to know what it is.
The one thing I know for sure is that neither MacLatchie nor Yahya are at all original or creative, and that both are just trained parrots echoing some other source. If anyone recognizes where these claims are coming from, let me know — I’d like to go straight to the original compendium of nonsense and prune it at the root.
Yeah, that’s me. Ken Ham has noticed a certain article I wrote, and describes it for his blinkered followers.
Apparently, in this instance with Emma, a well known atheist wrote (very typical for him) an anti-Christian blog attacking me/AiG. Apparently some of his followers decided to send this on etc. I don’t read these vile blogs, but it is typical of these extremely intolerant people who in the anger, shake their fist at God.
I am amused at the characterization of the article in question. Emma’s mother is quite irate, too:
I had to tell you that my friend wrote on Ken’s Facebook page that she knows Emma and some guy… sent my friend a PRIVATE message blasting Ken and Emma (how sweet). I didn’t see the message because I didn’t want to…
Well, Emma’s mother is willfully blind, while Ken Ham knows full well what was written, and has chosen both to lie about it and to run away from providing a link to it. Now his followers are claiming that atheists are making “cowardly attacks”, that we “must be really scared of all the Emmas in the world to attack a 9 yr old like that”, and that atheists are “cowards at heart.” — but we know who the real coward is here, and it is the dishonest fool who is afraid to expose his lies by linking to me.
Liars for Jesus who have to cower and hide before the truth…it is so typical.
I was sent the perfect illustration for this post:
As I’ve already mentioned, the makers of the Expelled movie have gone bankrupt, and the movie itself is on the auction block…and a few people on the side of goodness, light, and knowledge are making a bid to buy it. There’s some reasonable interest there: the Expelled crew did a lot of interviews, and only a small portion of them actually made it to the screen. Personally, I can tell you that they spent about three hours with me one afternoon, and maybe a minute of that total made it to the movie. I was actually surprised that that one bit was all that made the cut, and even it was absurdly innocuous — it made me suspect I’d been doing my teddy bear imitation that afternoon again.
Anyway, it’s a reasonable interest to get all the other stuff that was left on the cutting room floor, as the Panda’s Thumb bidders have already explained:
The auction promises that besides all available rights and interests in the finished film itself (there is an existing distribution contract), the winner will get all the production materials and rights to them. Want to know what was in the rest of the interviews with Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers? I know I would like to have that material archived and made available to the public, among other things that Premise Media found inconvenient to include in their film.
Alas, one of the writers for the movie, Kevin Miller, is having a hissy fit over this right now. It’s pathetically amusing. He’s now comparing his dishonest failure of a movie to The God Delusion, which he claims was also a forgotten flop, just like Expelled.
That said, it does strike me as rather odd to see all of you obsessing over gaining access to this film. If Expelled truly is an inconsequential piece of horseshit, I fail to see why it’s so important to gain access to the archives. I can’t imagine how pathetically you would view Christians who set about to do the same if they had the chance to get their hands on the original drafts, notes, etc. behind Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” for instance. The book was a full frontal attack on religion. But it’s arguments were so easily defeated that its relevance (and perceived threat to theism) quickly faded from view. I defy you to find a group of theists hunkered down in a shady corner of the internet talking about it right now. And I can hardly conceive of a group of Christians gleefully plotting to gain control of the rights so they could publish their own annotated version of the book. And if they did, I can hear you people mocking them mercilessly. And it would be well deserved, b/c it would be a pathetic form of behavior fear-based behavior. It would also be extremely telling in terms of the perceived threat “The God Delusion” represented. The fact that you’re still hunkered down over here chortling about “Expelled” three years later, full of vitriol and immediately defensive at the slightest criticism of your behavior is the most telling of all. Just an observation.
A full set of drafts and notes for The God Delusion would be a fascinating bit of scholarly minutia! It’s fairly common for well-known scholars to leave their notes and works to a library, because many people will be interested in how the ideas formed. And I think a collection of unused footage of Dawkins would have some interest; he’s also made public unused footage from his documentary “Root of All Evil?” in the past, to good reception. He’s not afraid to reveal the full content of his interviews.
It’s extremely silly to claim that The God Delusion has lost its relevance and faded from view. It’s sold over two million copies, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year. I’ll note, too, that Richard Dawkins isn’t the one gone bankrupt and left with a dud property on his hands that he’s trying to sell off to appease his creditors. And yes, Christians obsessed and are still obsessing over it. Look up “Dawkins’ fleas”: he practically sparked a whole industry of Christian apologists writing desperate rebuttals of the book. The Dawkins Delusion, Beyond the God Delusion, The Dawkins Letters, The God Delusion Revisited, Deluded by Dawkins, The God Solution, A Catholic Replies to Professor Dawkins, Darwin’s Angel, The Argument Against Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, The New Atheist Crusaders, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion, God is no Delusion, Challenging Richard Dawkins, Mysterious Reality: God, the World and Ourselves in the Light of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, God and the New Atheism…you get the idea. I guarantee you, there are theists hunkered down right now kvetching about it.
We’re chortling over Expelled now, but for a different reason. It was a flop. It’s backers lost money and their reputation over it. It’s writer was exposed as an incompetent hack. The content of the movie was revealed to be a dishonest hash of mangled interviews. Their PR was a disaster from day one. And now my side is considering seizing it as a trophy. We’re chortling because it was a triumph for our side. I can understand why poor Kevin Miller might feel disgruntled about evolutionists cheering over the tattered corpse of his beloved baby…just as I can understand how Napoleon might have been a bit disgruntled about Waterloo, and found the British revelry entirely unsettling and annoying.
Too bad, Kevin. You lost.
