Queensland is allowing fundamentalist Christians to teach religious instruction classes in the public schools — and, as we might have predicted, they are teaching nonsense.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.

Set Free Christian Church’s Tim McKenzie said when students questioned him why dinosaur fossils carbon dated as earlier than man, he replied that the great flood must have skewed the data.

A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA.

“The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve,” he said.

“My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that ‘wouldn’t they all be inbred’?

“But the teacher replied that DNA wasn’t invented then.”

Creationists are crackpots and liars — they simply don’t belong at all in positions of responsibility in the public schools, because they are going to intentionally miseducate. What do the education administrators in Queensland say? Why, that students can “opt out” of these classes. That isn’t the issue, of course — why are the schools investing scarce resources to give religious extremists and lunatics a platform in the public schools at all?

There is a zoo near Bristol called — you’ll see there are already problems right from the name — Noah’s Ark Zoo. It is unambguously proud of its status as a blatantly creationist institution.

After looking at the current explanations for origins and evolution; it is our view that the evidence available points to widespread evolution after an initial Creation by God. This is viewed as controversial by some and welcomed by others; but whether currently popular or not we believe the evidence supports a world-view somewhere between Darwinism and 6000BC Creationism and we encourage interested readers to look into the claims being made.

They are disavowing the strictly young earth creationist approach, so they reassure us that the world really is older than 6,000 years old. Ha ha, how silly — 6,000 years is far too short. Aren’t those dogmatic creationists absurd?

So, you might wonder, how old do they think the earth is? And they cagily hem and haw and refuse to answer, although they do suggest that 4.5 billion years is just way too old, ha ha, goofy evolutionists. They do reference a creationist site that invents a new geology, and which argues, for instance, that the Cretaceous was a period that was actually 4,000 years long.

Real geologists, the ones who actually understand the science, say the Cretaceous was 80 million years long. So they’re only off by about 4 orders of magnitude. I guess that means they think the earth is tens of millions of years old instead of a few billion, which makes them what? Adolescent Earth Creationists, instead of Young Earth Creationists? Maybe we can call them Tweenie Creationists. They’re still wrong, though.

Anyway, this joke of a zoo that miseducates children (but apparently cheerfully and with colorful and interactive exhibits and stories!) has won an award from the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom. It’s a peculiar gift — they’re basically rewarding them for good, effective teaching of lies.

You can read about the award here. Apparently, one of the qualifications is supposed to be about providing “accurate information”; shouldn’t this zoo have been instantly disqualified on that basis alone?

Jason Rosenhouse has a short, clear post in which which he briefly exams the polling data to see if New Atheists have harmed the cause of science education, an accusation frequently made. He shows that no, there is absolutely no evidence of such a thing; there may be a trend in the other way, in an increase in the number of science educators willing to say that there is no sign of intelligent guidance in evolution, but he’s also rightly cautious to say that there are a lot of variables at play here, so it would be premature to say there is a positive effect.

It does seem interesting, though, that while many people are wringing their hands over the supposedly pernicious effect of the New Atheists on evolution acceptance and education, the numbers show not the slightest evidence of a backlash. To the extent that the numbers are moving at all, they seem to be going in the right direction.

So Josh Rosenau, one of those people who accuses New Atheists of doing harm, makes a long and confused post in which he disputes Rosenhouse by looking at the same data and concluding…there is no evidence that the New Atheists have harmed the cause of science education. But he does manage to bury the conclusion in a flustered chaos of noise about…a lot of variables at play here. It was a struggle to even extract the point of that post; even Rosenau is reduced to vague splutterings at the end.

As I said before, it may be that careful work with the GSS would give enough demographic controls that you could pick some of this apart. Were there different trajectories in people’s views of evolution in areas with active creationist efforts? How do the many variables tracking religiosity interact with people’s views on evolution? How does that match against demographic trends in polls by Pew, Gallup, and Harris, all of whom have asked the same questions for several years.

I’d like to see someone do this work, and I’d welcome citations of papers which might serve as a basis for such an analysis. But the evidence at hand simply isn’t adequate for what Jason would like do with it. Noting those complications is not shifting goalposts, nor is it making excuses. It’s the way I would think about any challenge in hypothesis testing. If we want to promote science as a way of knowing, I think it behooves us to model good scientific practices, and that’s my agenda with this post and the post it follows from.

Jebus, but Josh can make writing look agonizing.

It’s an enlightening comparison of styles of discussion. One goes right to the point with clarity, the other wallows in obfuscatory noise. One points right to the key data that so far shows no deleterious effect, the other wishes there were damage to the cause of science education, and so goes on and on in the blogging equivalent of stammering “but…but…but…”.

I know which side I’m glad to be on.

Remember that horrible, stupid, no-good article about chickens and eggs, the one that used the identification of a protein important in egg shell formation to claim chickens had to have come before eggs, with no comparative data, no appreciation of the logic of evolutionary theory, and absolutely no respect for the evidence? Yeah, that one. The article that ought to have embarrassed both the journalist and the scientist involved.

Well, somebody liked it. They liked it a lot. Guess who?

Ken Ham.

He likes it because he thinks it means that chickens couldn’t have evolved, that their putative non-chicken ancestors wouldn’t have been able to lay eggs, so his god had to have abracadabraed them into existence. Then he makes this prediction:

I wouldn’t be surprised if atheist scientists will loudly complain that this study actually supports the creation account in Genesis and then try to attack the research.

No, we’re complaining about this study because its interpretation was mangled beyond belief by the reporter and scientist. It says nothing about the ancestors of chickens or their closest relatives, and so can’t really come to the conclusion that the protein examined appeared de novo in Gallus gallus. It can’t support Genesis. It can’t support anything, because it is bad science.

There have been some recent surveys of attitudes towards evolution and the state of science education in the US, and I’ve mainly used tables in presentations — so it’s nice to see some eye-catching graphical representations of the data. Use these!

One thing surprised me — usually, this datum is presented in a positive light, but it’s always bugged me. 28% of science teachers accept that evolution occurred, and god had nothing to do with it; 47% of science teachers accept evolution, but believe that god guided it. That 47% is typically presented as no problem, these are the teachers on our side. Not in this graph!

Those are teachers who believe in Intelligent Design.

Yes, they are. And complaining that they aren’t those Discovery Institute frauds because they believe it is their god that does the designing doesn’t get them off the hook, it just makes them plain old creationists.

The only difference is that usually the teachers in that 47% aren’t actively trying to undermine the science they present in the classroom, so the situation isn’t quite as dire as the chart implies — but they’re still afflicted with a superstition that is grossly unscientific and an obstacle to embracing the concepts of science. And it’s probably a factor in the graph on the page just above this image, which shows how little time is spent on classroom teaching of evolution: in all of high school, half of the students get less than an hour or two of exposure to the ideas of human evolution.

I can testify to that. Most of my freshman students are remarkably naive about evolution, and from personal experience…I’m one of the percentage of students that had absolutely no instruction in evolution in high school. It wasn’t even mentioned, and I was one of those kids who was largely self-taught in grade-school biology, and was looking for it.

Those slippery rascals at Answers in Genesis have been doing research, they say, and Jason Lisle claims to have discovered something radical.

I have been working for some time on solving the “distant starlight problem.” This is the issue of how starlight from the most distant galaxies is able to reach earth within the biblical timescale. Although light is incredibly fast, the most distant galaxies are incredibly far away. So, under normal circumstances we would be inclined to think that it should take billions of years for their starlight to reach us. Yet, the Bible teaches that the universe is only thousands of years old. Solutions have been proposed by creationists, but we haven’t had a definitive answer…until now.

It has taken a lot of time and effort, but I have found a solution to distant starlight which allows light to reach earth virtually instantaneously. Moreover, I have found both Scriptural and scientific support for this solution. This has led to the development of a new cosmological model which makes testable predictions. I have nearly finished writing a technical paper on this topic, which will shortly be sent to various experts for qualified peer-review. If it passes peer-review, we will publish the paper in the Answers Research Journal. This is our free, online journal. So be watching for it. If the paper gains the support of experts in the field, I may later write a non-technical article that summarizes the model.

Hang on there: virtually instantaneous travel from distant stars to the earth? This would constitute a rather substantial upheaval in our thinking about physics, I would think, and would be gigantic news. So why is he peddling it around to the tame friends of creationism for ‘peer review’? Why is he aiming to publish in a bottom-of-the-barrel fake journal, which is little more than a propaganda broadsheet?

If he’s really made this amazing breakthrough, he ought to be sending his technical paper to more prestigious journals, like Nature and Science and Physics Review Letters and Cosmopolitan. Publishing in Answers Research Journal is an admission of failure.

Oh, well, I’m willing to accept a diamond from a dungheap. Let’s see this paper!