I thought Google was trying not to be evil

Google Scholar is a really useful tool — it’s like vanilla Google in that it returns links to resources on the web, but it has additional filters to return genuine scholarly articles, enriched for the kind of stuff that gets peer-reviewed and formally published. Unfortunately, somebody or some algorithm is getting a bit sloppy, and it also returns articles for Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and Creation Ministries International. It’s somewhat understandable — all of those institutions know deep down in their sweet stupid little hearts that rank theology has no credibility, so they do their very best to ape real science in style, if not in content.

So, anyway, a few people are trying to ask Google nicely and politely to clean up their act. There is a petition to ask them to remove bad sources from Google Scholar — and I know, internet petitions don’t carry a lot of weight, but sign it anyway, just to add some recognition of widespread awareness of the problem to a decision they ought to make because it’s the right thing to do.

Gaskell confirms my opinion that he is a crank

Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who wasn’t hired at the University of Kentucky (my words were chosen carefully; that really is the only ‘crime’ against him), has won an out-of-court settlement in his discrimination suit, and has gone on to give an interview which confirms my opinion of him: Kentucky is better off not having this credulous guy on the staff. He now insists that he is a supporter of evolution, a fact not in evidence in his writings about the field, and also not evident in his answers to his dodgy replies to specific questions in the interview.

But the real problem is his complete lack of any kind of scientific filter in his evaluation of the literature. This is a man more likely to cite a religious source to answer a question about biology than to refer to any of the scientific evidence; he gets his biology from Hugh Ross, Josh MacDowell, and Philip Johnson. He expresses his gullibility well in this interview; this comment made my jaw drop, at least.

What are your thoughts on the paradox between public universities needing to teach scientific fact and the fact that they receive government funding and thus are likely not allowed to discriminate on the basis of religious beliefs, which may contradict scientific fact (e.g. believers in the young earth premise)? (And I mean this in the sense that this debate could come up for a biology faculty position, in which your beliefs might actually affect what you are teaching.)

Dr. Gaskell:
This HAS come up multiple times with biology positions. There is a good book covering this in great detail. It is called “Slaughter of the Dissidents” by Jerry Bergman. I’d highly recommend getting a copy to understand what goes on. The recurrent problem you’ll find if you look at the cases documented in the book is that Christian biologists get fired or demoted not because of what they actually teach or do in their research, but because of who they are.

See what I mean? He’s citing Jerry “Nine Degrees” Bergman, a liar and known nutcase. I’ve met Jerry Bergman; I’ve debated Jerry Bergman; I’ve read Slaughter of the Dissidents, which doesn’t document anything other than the paranoia and lunacy of its author.

You cannot take Bergman seriously. Bergman is the fellow who announced that there was a conspiracy among evolutionists to get the periodic table of the elements ripped down from classroom walls because it was a document that supported creationism; he claims to know a Christian chemistry teacher who was fired for daring to post Mendeleev’s work. This is the Jerry Bergman who also claimed that carbon is irreducibly complex, thereby proving that Intelligent Design creationism was true. So Gaskell actually recommends Bergman’s work? I wouldn’t hire him for that alone. That’s a kind of fundamental incompetence.

And Gaskell just digs his grave a little deeper.

This is a major problem in the life sciences. One recent major survey showed that 51% of scientists in the life sciences believe in some sort of “higher power” (which most of them identify as “God”). Half of all scientists also claim a religious affiliation. There is an enormous problem if one disqualifies one half of biologists because of religious
affiliation or beliefs!

But that makes no sense! If over half of all biologists are believers, doesn’t that fact right there say that biologists don’t get disqualified for their beliefs? I’ve been in this business for almost 30 years, and I’ve never once seen a committee meeting disrupted by bickering over differing religious beliefs — they are generally regarded as about as irrelevant on the job as what sports teams the faculty are rooting for. The only place where it could come up is if a faculty person started babbling irrational fairy stories that contradicted solid scientific thinking…and then they would be getting in trouble for bad science, not for what church they go to.

That’s what made Gaskell a poor candidate for the position at UK: that he was publicly promoting bad science.

Creationist kook defends his creationist crock

That loon Terry Hurlbut is irate that I mocked his “Creationist Hall of Fame” in a post the other day, so he rails against me today. It’s a typical collection of squirrely non-sequiturs, but I’ll address the funniest of them.

But what PZ Myers of the Pharyngula blog fails to understand is that the CSHF does not intend to limit its honors to contemporary creation-oriented scientists. He probably believes that because he is under a common misapprehension: that creation science is a new movement, one going no further back than Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb’s The Genesis Flood.

As in all things, Terry Hurlbut is mistaken and ignorant. No, I do not fail to understand that; in fact, I expect that. It’s one of creationism’s most common strategems, the adoption of any scientist who lived before Darwin into the ranks of anti-Darwinists. I’m sure Isaac Newton will be inducted into the Creationist Hall of Fame, despite the fact that, brilliant as he was, he was not a biologist, did not consider the problems of biological origins at all deeply, did no work in the field, and didn’t even have an evolutionary theory to argue against.

Creationism is a belief born of ignorance. It depends on a lack of awareness of biological realities and knowledge of the experiments and observations in the discipline (or, alternatively, awareness of this work coupled to a malignant denial). Terry Hurlbut can go ahead and mine the human population a thousand generations back and find plenty of smart and accomplished human beings, and draft them posthumously to be part of his “creationist movement”, but it doesn’t change the fact that the chief criterion for membership in that movement is simply ignorance. Isaac Newton was ignorant of the facts of evolutionary biology, and so was Aristotle, and so was Thog, son of Thag, caveman. Go ahead, sign them all up, they’re as much an intellectual contributor to creationism as they are spiritual members of the Mormon church…but that won’t stop the Mormons from baptizing them anyway.

Still incapable of reading for comprehension, Hurlbut horks up another error.

One final word is in order: the Creation Science Hall of Fame makes no representation that it will have as many inductees as the so-called “Science Hall of Fame” of which PZ Myers is so fond. In harping on the apparent scarcity of CSHF honorees thus far (and forgetting that the CSHF is under construction in cyberspace as well as under development in brick and mortar), Myers commits a classic logical fallacy: argumentum a numeris (argument from numbers), or argumentum a multitudine (argument from the crowd). Instead, the CSHF will compete on quality, not quantity.

Heh. Right. If he read a little more closely, he might have noticed that what I thought worth noting was that the Science Hall of Fame uses an objective measurement of the recognition granted to the scientists in the literature. When those same measurements are made of their creationist heroes, they fail. The Creationist Hall of Fame is going to be populated by clowns who are selected for their adherence to the crazy notion that the Earth is 6000 years old, leavened by a small set of famous scientists who lived before the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. That isn’t quality. That’s lunacy.

By the way, I’m sure Hurlbut will rant some more, but I won’t be replying. He gets paid for traffic to his Examiner site, and he probably simply sees this as an easy way to milk the cash cow, and I won’t be helping him further.

Oh, look what will be happening in my backyard

A representative from Answers in Genesis will be speaking here in Morris, Minnesota! And none of the scheduled talks conflict with any of my classes! Not that I’ll go to them all — I do have limits on how much BS I can be served before gakking up chunks — but I’ll go to some, and will live-tweet the foolishness and blog up the events afterwards. My introductory biology students will also get some extra credit for attending.

Sunday, February 27, 2011 to Monday, February 28, 2011
Dr. Terry Mortenson

Schedule

Note: Any overlapping times indicate multiple, simultaneous sessions

Sunday, February 27, 2011
9 a.m. All Sunday Sessions will be held at Morris Area Elementary School
9 a.m. Music Worship
10 a.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Creation vs Evolution: Why It Matters
6 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Dinosaurs: Have You Been Brainwashed?
7:30 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Noah’s Flood: Washing Away Millions of Years
Monday, February 28, 2011
11 a.m. All Monday sessions will be held at Hosanna Worship Center
11 a.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson The Seven C’s of History
(Grades K-6)
12:45 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Why and How to Think About Origins
(Grades 7-12)
6 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Origin of Species: Was Darwin Right?
7:30 p.m. Dr. Terry Mortenson Ape-men: the Grand Illusion

More Information

Contact Information

Bart Graves
320-589-2808
bart@mefc.net

Notes

Location for Sunday sessions:
Morris Area Elentary School Concert Hall

151 S. Columbia Ave.
Morris, MN

Location for Monday sessions:
Hosanna Worship Center

46303 State Hwy 28
Morris, MN

This event is a combined ministry of
The Morris Evangelical Free Church
Hosanna Worship Center
Morris Community Church

It’s nice to see the centers of indoctrination into religious stupidity — the Morris Evangelical Free Church, the Hosanna Worship Center, and the Morris Community Church — boldly standing up to admit their participation in crimes against reason. And now you know the kind of folly we face here in rural Minnesota.

Dueling Halls of Fame

This is an awesome coincidence. The availablity of all those quantifiable metrics extracted by Google Books has fueled the establishment of a Science Hall of Fame, which lists scientists by an objective measure of their fame, the frequency with which they are cited in books. It was announced in Science, where they also introduced a new unit of measure, the milli-Darwin.

To be able to compare scientists to one another, it is helpful to have a standard unit of fame. I proposed one that would make this kind of fame easy to comprehend: the Darwin. It is defined as the average annual frequency that “Charles Darwin” appears in English-language books from the year when he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000. Because it is such a big unit of fame, it has proved more convenient to use one-thousandth of that frequency: the milli-Darwin, abbreviated as mD.

Here’s the list of over 4,000 famous scientists. Some of them aren’t famous for science — Lewis Carroll, for instance — but all are notable people.

So where’s the coincidence? It turns out that on the same day the Science Hall of Fame was announced, a small gang of loons announced the Creation Science Hall of Fame, “Honoring those who honored God’s Word as literally written in Genesis.” There are a few differences between the two halls. The creation science group, unsurprisingly, is begging for money: they want $4 million in donations. Why? They want to build a physical monument somewhere in the neighborhood of the Creation “Museum,” which sounds like a horrible idea to me. It would create a black hole of concentrated stupidity in the heart of Kentucky that might destroy the world!

Another difference is that they aren’t using any kind of objective metric to identify famous creationists — apparently, they just look around and pick someone from the godly pantheon. So far, they’ve got two: Henry Morris and Duane Gish. Two against the 4,000+ in the Science Hall of Fame. Sounds about right, although zero would be a better number.

Also, opening up the door to scrutiny like that just means the scientists will use the Google microscope to examine the creationist nominees. It doesn’t look good. Creationists like to compare Gish to TH Huxley — “Gish has been called ‘creationism’s T.H. Huxley,” says Wikipedia — but now we can actually compare Gish and Huxley. Huxley gets 102mD. Gish gets 5.

No contest. It was very nice of the creationists to step into the arena and get such a drubbing, though.

Ken Ham still doesn’t get it

Ken Ham is complaining bitterly about the newspaper article that showed his attendance estimates for the Ark Park are unlikely. He’s reduced to nonsensical whines about persecution, and acts as if he’s baffled about the criticisms.

The article raises a question: why is the Courier-Journal even concerned with possible attendance at the Ark? If the attraction does not meet its projected figures, the state government and its citizens are not impacted—except positively, in that the attraction will still produce state sales tax to benefit Kentucky and its citizens regardless of the attendance. So why the paper’s concern? Where is the story? Ultimately, what is the article’s author, an “investigative” reporter, supposedly investigating here? If backers of a tourist attraction like an amusement park with thrill rides would also want to locate in Kentucky and its feasibility study showed 1.6 million guests the first year, would the paper also “investigate”?

Poor dumb Ken. I’ll try to explain.

Even without considering the finances, people are right to be concerned about the construction of another exhibit dedicated to ignorance in the state. It harms their reputation, it is bad for education, and it can have long-term consequences for the economy that are not good. Do you really want to be known as the state with the really stupid workforce?

This is not an automatic win situation for the state, no matter how Ham tries to spin it. The state will be investing resources in this project, and while Ken Ham seems unconcerned if the actual attendance is much less than the estimate, the state should be: that affects the economic viability of the project. Granting millions of dollars in incentives to a big theme park that flops is not good for the state.

If Answers in Genesis were not looking for state money and expecting the state to expand the highways and other infrastructure projects, and was the sole contributor to the expenses, there wouldn’t be as much concern about the funny numbers in their feasibility study…but they aren’t alone. They’re looking to drag down other investors with a scheme built on unreliable numbers.

And yes, if a non-religious group showed up in the state and asked for a $50 million handout to build their theme park, I’m sure the paper would investigate. Dodgy schemes with a poor record of success are always ripe for investigative reporting.

Ham ought to read this opinion piece. It lays out the facts very clearly.

In the latest shoe to drop, Courier-Journal reporter Andrew Wolfson wrote in Sunday’s editions that a half-dozen theme-park experts find that the developers’ estimates of 1.6 million annual visitors to the Ark park are wildly optimistic.

They note that Kentucky Kingdom, which is now closed but hopes to reopen in 2012, and Holiday World in Southern Indiana have never attracted that many people, despite being long-standing institutions and offering a broader appeal. Ark Encounter would actually be less of an amusement park than an outdoor museum to a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the belief that the world was created in six days as recently as 6,000 years ago and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.

To attract 1.6 million visitors, the park — again, absent significant tourist facilities — would have to attract four times as many visitors as the nearby Creation Museum.

The record elsewhere is not encouraging. Bible Park USA, whose two proposals to build biblical-story parks in Tennessee were rejected, is exploring Southern Kentucky sites, also with state tax incentives. Holy Land USA, which opened in Virginia in 1972, closed in 2009. Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Fla., struggled with declining attendance and rising costs and debt until it was sold to the nation’s largest religious broadcaster. It gets a little over 200,000 visitors a year.

Indeed, the saturated theme-park market and the depressed economy make times tough for any new park. The most recent large amusement park, the Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach, S.C., closed five months after opening in 2008 and failed again the following year under new management, leaving investors, contractors and vendors in the lurch.

That’s reality. It says that the extravagant expectations of the feasibility study Ken Ham’s pal scribbled up (and which they are still keeping secret) are unlikely to be met, and yet another theme park with a very narrow focus is a poor investment. I know he’s not used to dealing with facts, but other people are.

Of course, I don’t care much about the economics. I’m more concerned that this is yet another effort to put together a giant exercise in miseducation for the state, where a small group of ignorant people are the recipients of large amounts of money that they use to lie to the public. The Ark story is nonsense, it never happened and couldn’t happened, and building expensive monuments to fairy tales sends a cracked and damaging message to the citizenry.

It’s so easy to make him mad!

Ken “The Squealing Piglet” Ham is irate again. The Louisville Courier-Journal ran an article today (a print-only exclusive, so I haven’t been able to read it) in which they had independent experts review Ham’s claims about prospective attendance at his silly theme park. The headline is “Ark park attendance claims exaggerated, theme-park experts say”, so I can guess at the gist of the analysis.

Ham is complaining about how the newspapers dare to question his estimates.

Mark Looy, our CCO, has sent me a report on how the two state newspapers have been misrepresenting the project and are determined, apparently, to move it out of the state and take millions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs with it. How is that for responsible journalism when they not only horribly misrepresent the Ark Encounter, but do so in a time with a shaky economy and so many people unemployed?

And then he accuses the newspapers of being on a vendetta.

Today a terrible anti-Ark Encounter article (actually, a “non-story”) has appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, Kentucky’s largest-circulation paper. They just don’t let up in their anti-Christian agenda driven vendetta against this phenomenal project. We are preparing a response that will be our lead article on the www.AnswersInGenesis.org website. As we are composing the rebuttal now, we’ll take my blog item from Saturday and update and adapt it as our response to a newspaper that seems to want to have the Ark be built in another state — and apparently doesn’t care about the thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars that would end up elsewhere. Not very pro-Kentucky, is it, for a Kentucky paper?

He keeps insisting that the people who oppose his theme park are doing it because they’re anti-Kentucky. They aren’t. The writers at the Courier-Journal are pro-Kentucky. I’m pro-Kentucky. I’ll even agree that Ken “The Squealing Piglet” Ham is probably pro-Kentucky. Where we differ is that we think ideas about economic improvement for the state ought to be based on sound, objective financial estimates rather than surveys of dubious value authored by a close friend of the benificiary and relying entirely on conflating pro-religion values with the likelihood of attending his folly, and that maybe a putative educational and entertainment attraction build around the disproven premise that the earth was destroyed by a god 4,000 years ago isn’t the best use of state money, even if it were profitable.

If anyone has read that newspaper today, a brief summary in the comments would be appreciated!

Finally!

If you’ve been following Richard Hoppe’s coverage of the John Freshwater trial on the Panda’s Thumb, you know this event has been dragging along like the OJ trial, only with less media pandemonium and now, at last, a less unsatisfying outcome. Freshwater, you may recall, is the bible-thumping public school science teacher who was more interested in promoting Christianity than science in the classroom, and whose most egregious error was using a gadget to burn crosses into students’ arms.

He’ll be getting his sadistic Christian jollies at the expense of students no more: John Freshwater has been officially terminated from employment by the Mount Vernon school district.

It’s a win-win situation. Now the students will (we hope) get decent science educations and no longer be afflicted with an evangelical freak, and Freshwater can now move on to his lucrative new career as martyr.

There is one loser, though: the taxpayers of Mount Vernon, Ohio. They get to pay the $900,000 bill. That’s a message that every school district should take to heart—if you’ve got a teacher who uses the public school classroom to proselytize, to peddle religion or creationism, you’ve got a major liability on your hands.

Dave, Andy, and Georgia and their unbelievable, ridiculous fable

David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom, three creationists working at the Creation “Museum”, have written an outraged op-ed correcting some misconceptions about them. I read this far before I had to stop:

For one, the guest columnist, Roger Guffey, claimed there were no “serious” scientists who are creationists. We are full-time Ph.D. researchers with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, and we will be helping to design the full-scale Noah’s Ark and other attractions to be built north of Lexington.

There are thousands of serious scientists who doubt evolution. At the Creation Museum, we have full-time staff with earned doctorates (one from an Ivy League school) in astrophysics, geology, cell biology, genetics, medicine and the history of geology, plus several adjunct speakers and researchers who hold doctorate degrees.

Our intrepid three claim to be scientists, part of a body of real, genuine, credentialed scientists who support the claims of Answers in Genesis. Let’s stop right there. There’s something you have to understand about the staff of the Creation “Museum”: they all have to sign a testimonial that asserts, among other things, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. These are self-proclaimed scientists who flout the evidence to argue for an absurd conclusion. I’m not talking about “interpreting the same facts” differently, as they like to claim, but ignoring and denying the evidence that refutes their dogma.

That’s all you need to know. David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom are all absolutely certain that the creation of the earth is an event that occurred somewhere near the end of human prehistory, which was itself a very late, geologically recent event in the history of the universe. How absurd is that claim?

The city of Jericho — it’s in the Bible, look it up — is 11,000 years old. Isn’t it remarkable that a city with a population of zero sprang up on a planet that didn’t exist at the time? The chthonic dingleberries of Answers in Genesis would apparently have you believe one of our oldest urban centers must have been floating in the primordial chaos, waiting for Jehovah to conjure up the Jordan river and the West Bank and the Middle East and the Mediterranean and the firmament and the sun and stars.

Six thousand years ago, the Plano culture was hunting bison on the Great Plains. The predynastic Egyptians of the Naqada period were colonzing the Nile. The precursors to the Indus River civilization were making copper tools and growing barley. The Mesopotamians were building city states. The people of the Hongshan culture were carving jade dragons in northeastern China; the Yangshao were producing silk along the Yangtze river; the Majiabang people were cultivating rice and pigs. The ancient Britons were building tombs and erecting wooden posts on Salisbury plain, precursors to Stonehenge. The Funnelbeaker people were trading pottery across northern Europe, while the Chasséen people were living in a village near the site of modern Paris. All this at a time when the human population of planet Earth, according to this risible trio, was two. What did Adam and Eve do? Commute a lot?

People were manipulating the precursors to modern wheat, rice, barley, taro, and soy at least 9000 years ago; Sumerians had invented irrigation 7000 years ago; and Mesoamericans began to tweak teosinte by artificial selection about 6000 years ago. The crops we grow are the product of millennia of selection and cultivation, and show the marks of our ancient biotechnology. The bread that God casually commanded Adam to sweat over and eat for all the days of his life after the Fall was already the product of thousands of years of development.

A middle-aged woman in northern Israel died and was buried with her puppy dog…twelve thousand years ago. We know the first dogs with skeletal indications of domestication appeared over 30,000 years ago. What kind of crazy cosmology do the loons of AiG have when they have to account for a world they claim is 24,000 years younger than Fido and Rover?

There is a colonial colony of shrubs in Tasmania called King’s Lomatia that is probably over 40,000 years old. They can’t produce sexually, so they’ve just been propagating vegatively, clone after clone after clone, right through the whole creation of the world, according to a certain small dismal clan of meretricians. In fact, those plants were well into late middle age when the god of the Hebrews purportedly decided to create real estate.

According to these “scientists,” all of modern geology, from the Himalayas to the ocean trenches, was formed in one immense cataclysmic event that occurred over the course of a single year, four thousand years ago; an event that essentially sterilized all multicellular life on Earth except for one small family and their livestock who weathered the catastrophe in a wooden boat. That was some disaster, and that must have been some boat.

Now the people who believe this unscientific nonsense claim to be “serious scientists.” I don’t think so. They haven’t demonstrated that their superstitions are serious science at all; all they’ve shown is that some few people who are totally nuts can graduate with doctorates. Which is not a surprise, and is actually a far more parsimonious conclusion than their bizarre idea that all of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology are completely wrong.