I knew this was coming. There was an interesting taxonomic consolidation recently: Torosaurus is accused of being simply an older Triceratops, so those two taxa are being lumped into one, Triceratops. Jack Horner is suggesting that Nanotyrannus was simply a juvenile T. rex. These kinds of adjustments of the taxonomy happen all the time, both as more data becomes available, and as lumpers make more noise than splitters (a process that can be reversed, of course). It is not a big deal.

Except to creationists, who are overjoyed that combining two species into one means that “the Ark cargo was even lighter than previously thought”. There’s also some crowing about those arrogant scientists being wrong wrong wrongity-wrong wrong ding-dong! Gloating over an occasional error would be much more impressive if they also ever acknowledged the many times scientists have been right, and the creationists wrong.

Like this time: a little taxonomical shuffling does not salvage the story of God and the big boat. Triceratops/Torosaurus are still 70 million years old, and the fact that dinosaurs underwent morphological changes as they matured deep in the Cretaceous does not suddenly make the idea that they were living in the Middle East 6000 years ago and taking a year long cruise any more plausible.

Maybe they’re just hoping that if the paleontologists keep consolidating taxa they’ll eventually get to the point where all the dinosaurs are lumped into one species called Behemoth. That’s not going to happen either.

Via Sandwalk, here is Stephen Meyer explaining the central concepts of his theory: it’s all about the origin of information.

It’s a ridiculous argument. He constantly repeats this mantra of “digital information”: I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. He also likes to claim that he’s using an accepted scientific argument, of using only known, extant processes and extrapolating to the past; which is fine, except that he pretends ignorance of the fact that we know of natural processes that increase the amount of information in the genome without intervention by any intelligent agent.

He has this silly syllogism that he trumpets in his book, Signature in the Cell:

1. Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

2. Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

3. Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for information in the cell.

Point #1 is false, except for the trivial loophole of “specified” information, a term he never defines. Point #2 is true. However, Point #3 fails because he hasn’t shown that his first premise is true.

This is all the Discovery Institute has got: blindly repeating the same lies over and over again.

I was sent a link to an excerpt from a brand new creationist book, and I expected yet another twisty bit of dishonest weirdness of the sort that the Discovery Institute has conditioned me to see. But then I saw the title, The Death of Evolution, and felt a twinge of deja vu — as Glenn Morton says, the imminent demise of evolution is the longest running lie in creationism. And then there was the blurb: “A growing number of respected scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp purely on scientific grounds.” Wow, that’s gotta be like the second oldest lie by creationists. I haven’t even opened the cover, and it’s already boring me!

Open it, and you discover it begins with a series of quotes — again, an old game the creationists have been playing for years, trotting out a series of authorities, some of them quote-mined, some of them from creationist nobodies, some of them from the turn of the last century.

And then you get to the first chapter. It opens with the bombardier beetle! And then it declares that evolution is in violation of the second law of thermodynamics! Both claims are ridiculous. The bombardier beetle is an animal that farts caustic substances, all of which have evolutionary precursors, but creationists are fond of claiming it couldn’t have evolved, because it would have exploded during the intermediate steps. The second law of thermodynamics gets trotted out because they don’t understand it and claim that it means everything has to be getting worse and running downhill. I hadn’t even gotten to page 10 and I could tell this was antiquated, useless crap.

These are arguments that were made by creationists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It’s a book full of recycled stupid. It’s a sign that creationism, not evolution, is dying when they have to resort to dredging up old dead arguments that were unconvincing targets of derision when Duane Gish was on the creationist talk circuit.

But then I look in the acknowledgments: the author, some right-wing kook named Jim Nelson Black, thanks West, Dembski, Meyer, Richards, and Bohlin of the Discovery Institute. Isn’t that sweet? I think I know what they must be doing in their ‘research’ arm of the Biologic Institute: they are trying to reanimate the moldy corpse of George McCready Price in order to get some fresh ideas.

What do you know…I am reminded that this weekend was the anniversary of the #creozerg, our invasion by 300 rabid secularists of the Creation Museum. Phil Ferguson offers a retrospective, if you want to relive the fun.

I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal. Too often it’s an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn’t help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone.

Before you start protesting (aw, who am I kidding? Some will be howling in protest anyway) I know that there are good homeschool programs, and I have students who were homeschooled and were better prepared than kids coming out of the public school system. You may be one of them. But I don’t think sending everyone to be taught by your mom and dad is a good solution, and I think we’re better off investing in good public education.

OK, but now on to the email. Here’s a sincere and worthy request from a homeschooling mom in Arizona.

Next summer, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis is coming to Phoenix to speak at the local homeschool convention. As a secular homeschooler in Phoenix, I am appalled. I feel like I must respond in some way, stand up and say, “This guy does not represent me or others like me!”

I am interested in creating some kind of large, public response, but not sure where to begin. I thought that one of you might have some ideas.

See what I mean? This is one of the big problems of homeschooling: for every good, science-oriented parent, there are dozens or hundreds who buy into the awful, horrible, no-good nonsense peddled by Ken Ham and other creationists.

So I recuse myself as an opponent of homeschooling, but I appreciate that as long as we are going to have homeschoolers, something needs to be done about this ridiculous association between homeschooling and bad education. I turn it over to the readers here: what should be done? What can be done in the short term to protest damning choices like bringing Ham in to speak to a convention, and what can be done in the long run to get better quality science into homeschool programs? That last one will be a real challenge, given that my impression of the majority of homeschoolers is that they’re doing it specifically to indoctrinate their kids in a specific conservative Christian ideology.

Virginia Heffernan did us all a favor: it’s easy now to tell who the ignoramuses are by looking for favorable reactions to her ill-informed screed. And of course, if you want to find a real ignoramus, we wouldn’t even need that much: we could just look to Rod Dreher, apologist and apparatchik of the Templeton Foundation. He thinks Heffernan is onto something, by which I think he means she reiterates his same clueless biases.

Heffernan is onto something here, and not just with ScienceBlogs. A few years ago, I was in an editorial board meeting with some pro-science academics and others, who had come in to speak to us about some issue, I forget precisely what, having to do with science education in Texas. We entered that meeting entirely on their side, but by the time it was over, we were, as I recall, still on their side on the merits of the argument, but we had a distinctly nasty taste in our mouth. The advocates were simply dripping with contempt for their opponents, and carried themselves with an aristocratic hauteur, as if they considered it beneath them to be questioned by others about this stuff. I never quite got a handle on why they acted that way, but reading Heffernan, it’s more clear: I thought these people had come to argue about science and science education, but whether they realized it or not, they were class warriors. They acted the same way you would expect 19th century colonial English vicars to behave if asked to give a serious thought to the protestations of the dark and inscrutable Hindoos of the Raj.

What is it with science-oriented advocates who consider contempt a virtue? Who, exactly, do they think they are going to persuade? (You could say the same thing about sneering political bloggers, sneering religious bloggers, and, well, sneerers in all forms of public discourse, inasmuch as sneering seems to be a popular pose these days.) Most of us are tempted to sneer every now and then (I certainly am guilty of this), but some of these people adopt sneering as a basic intellectual stance to the world. It works for drag queens and comedians, who have it down to an art, but for the rest of us, it’s just ugly and, ultimately, boring. In the case I mention, the self-righteousness the pro-science folks could barely contain actually undermined their authority and effectiveness before a sympathetic audience. Nobody likes jerks, except other jerks.

He forgets precisely what, but it had something to do with science education in Texas. Hmm. What could have pro-science educators and academics “dripping with contempt” on that subject? Has he considered the possibility that just maybe the agents provocateur of the creationist side in the culture war in Texas deserve some contempt? It’s hard not to look at someone like Don McLeroy, professional science-denier and flaming creationist asshole, and not feel considerable disgust that that man was in charge of destroying the public school curriculum in the state.

But I forget: Dreher is part of an organization whose goal is to make those poisoners of the minds of children comfortable.

Does Mr Dreher think he’s going to persuade a Don McLeroy, for example, to somehow stop trying to inject lies about the age of the earth or the inadequacy of evolutionary theory into textbooks? I’d like to know how. I’d especially like to see it done. I might just have to back off on my ‘sneering’ at the liars for Jesus if one of these namby-pamby wimps for theistic evolution managed to convince a few of these stark raving mad creationist opponents of science to change their tunes; if they were actually successful in persuading leading creationists, I’d have to admit they have a good strategy.

But of course they don’t. They only work to hush the critics of creationists. I, for one, admit that I have no hope in hell of ever persuading the likes of McLeroy or Ham or Hovind or Comfort of ever recognizing good science, and I don’t think anyone else can, either. So I content myself with being intellectually honest and not pretending that they’re part of a community of reason, and will continue to point and laugh and encourage everyone else to treat these clowns appropriately.