I cannot stand the Huffington Post, that bastion of Newage folly. I really despise the Intelligent Design creationists. So when Huffpo gives space to creationist cretins, I’m done with them. Even worse, it’s an idiot creationist parroting the same old story, that Hitler was Darwin’s fault. I’ll mention just one paragraph of this dishonest bunk.

Hitler’s ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, “came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin.” A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology “weren’t reading the Gospels.”

Here you go, a link to Mein Kampf on Project Gutenberg. Go to town. Search for Darwin — nothing. Or evolution — that is there, but only used in the sense of “higher” and “lower” organisms, and some bizarre notion that nature abhors crossbreeding. God is all over the book, as is Christianity, even if we do grant that Hitler is pushing an idiosyncratic version of that cult.

If you really want to find the roots of Nazism, look to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the “gospel of the Nazi movement”, who hated Darwinism. No honest account will omit Chamberlain…but then, the Discovery Institute writes no honest account.

This is appalling. This video of a supposedly secular high school biology classroom will show you what we’re up against.

These students are simply expressing uninformed incredulity — they can’t imagine how anything could have evolved. And the incompetent apologist of a teacher, who is sympathetic to creationism himself, isn’t doing his job, which is to explain to them exactly how biology explains these phenomena. Instead, he makes excuses: “How could I say to a student, ‘your ideas are trash’?”

It’s not hard. One student at the end says this:

How can like an African-American person evolve from a white person? We’re different skin.

Hey, student! Your ideas are trash!

So’s your teacher if he can’t address these trivial questions. You must be able to tell your students when they are wrong if you’re going to teach at all.

This is a scanned page from a Christian science textbook published by Bob Jones University. I think they’ve been listening to too much Insane Clown Posse.

We’re all just mindless zombies here at scienceblogs, but somehow, BJU is even more brainless. I swear, a creationist could walk by right now and I wouldn’t even drool. But even in my decaying state, and as a biologist, not a physicist, I can answer this one.

Electricity is not a mystery on the level this book is discussing. There is a lot we don’t know about fundamental particles, but we understand the principles of electromagnetism so well that we can use it to build hair dryers and Large Hadron Colliders; to make the argument that we are mystified by it is lying to the kids.

The common creationist argument that we can only know what we directly perceive with our unaided senses is also nonsense. One could argue that we don’t really see people, what we do is gather photons that have been perturbed, we think, by a body, and infer the existence of a person…but that’s sophistry. It is no less ‘seeing electricity’ to say that I can hook up a current meter to a couple of wires and see a needle move in response to the flow of electrons.

That second paragraph is a horror of gobbledygook. Apparently, they think electricity is something like oil, a substance lying in large deposits that must be harvested and poured into your hairdryer to make it work. A current, as mentioned above, is produced by the movement of charged particles, nothing more or less. The sun produces moving charged particles, so it is a source of electricity, and the movement of the earth generates an electromagnetic field, but I can also do the zombie shuffle across the carpet to build up an excess of charged particles and touch the cat to allow them to flow, creating electricity myself, like unto a God. I do not have to create particles to make electricity, I just have to make them move.

Also, if that little girl did not use electricity, she would be dead. All of the cells in your body create charge imbalances by pumping charged ions across their membranes, and using the flow of ions back across those membranes to create chemical energy — they are machines that convert chemical energy into electricity that is used to power little dynamos that create stored chemical energy. We also use the gated movements of charged ions to generate electrical currents in our nerves and muscles, which is how we think and move.

Isn’t it nice how clearly religion is shown to be a science-stopper? Just take common questions, declare them a mystery and that no one has an answer, and presto, religion becomes an authority. An authority stuck at a dead end.

(via @jbrownridge)

Hold onto your hats, don’t be too shocked, but a creationist has lied about science. I’m constantly getting email from fundagelical groups insisting that I must obey and join their One True Faith, and I got one from the Worldwide Church of God aka Radio Church of God aka Grace Communion International aka whatever the heck they’re calling themselves this week. They’re kind of a quirky, long-separated splinter group of the Seventh Day Adventists with their own idiosyncratic theology, but one thing they definitely are: stark raving mad young earth creationists. I was sent this bizarre article, “Cavemen are people, too!”, that grossly misrepresents the science of the recent neandertal genome sequencing. Here’s their summary of the work:

What did the scientists find? Simply put: Neanderthals are human. There was virtually no difference between the two codes. The few differences they did find were so slight that researchers say that they are functionally irrelevant–and that if more Neanderthal genomes could be compared there might be no differences at all!

But that is not all the scientists found. The data suggests Neanderthals are as closely related to humans as Chinese are to Germans, or French to Javanese. Furthermore, the genetic material analyzed indicated that Neanderthals and humans interbred and produced offspring that interbred–and regularly.

Uh, no. Did they even read the paper?

The work by Pääbo’s team found that Neandertal’s were distinct and different from modern humans in a small but significant number of ways; they were our close cousins, but they were also a separate and unique population. The differences were small — 78 genes were identified that were fixed to a different form in modern human populations — but they definitely weren’t irrelevant: everyone is rather excited about the genes associated with the development and function of the brain that differ between the two. The stuff about being related to Chinese, Germans, etc. is totally garbled. What the researchers found is that there was some transmission of Neandertal genes into human populations that were ancestral to Europeans and Asians, but not to Africans. They did not find evidence of regular interbreeding — they found that Neandertals made a small contribution to European and Asian DNA, on the order of 1-4%. And most of this was a result of a few early interbreeding events in the small but rapidly expanding population of modern humans expanding out of Africa.

They didn’t understand the paper at all, and got most of the conclusions completely wrong. You can guess what they conclude, though.

Did you get that? All those supposed pre-man, caveman bones are actually just plain old human skeletons.

It is a startling admission for evolutionists because it throws a monkey wrench into conventional evolutionary theory.

And then they’re off and running. All those prehuman fossils? Either man or monkey, nothing in between. Transitional fossils? If there aren’t any differences between man and ape-man, than there can’t be any. It’s all just “DNA passed down from generation to generation” (Yeah? So?).

The heart of their argument is that one class of ancient hominids had so few genetic differences from us that their differences are negligible, and therefore evolutionary theory is all wrong. It’s bizarre; don’t they realize that we expect that the genetic differences between sibling species recently separated will be much smaller than those between species separated by long periods of time? The discoveries in the Neandertal genome are what we expected, and fit just fine into evolutionary theory.

The author of this little piece instead decides that “science proves the Bible correct”, and that the Neandertals were actually the pre-Flood Nephilim, part of the mob of evil, warring bad guys who motivated God to kill everyone except Noah and his family. Same ol’, same ol’.

Paul was at a Christian homeschooling conference, and was asked outright how old he thought the earth was. He refused to answer.

Silly man. These were Christian homeschoolers in Kentucky. Everyone knows that on that planet, the correct answer is “6000 years”.

Libertarians, you aren’t really going to vote for this kook, are you?

It’s the return of Andrew Rosenberg!

[Read more…]

A few years ago, the Discovery Institute set up laboratory to do research, the Biologic Institute, which is in principle a good thing — they do claim to want to take a scientific approach to understanding the origin of life, after all. So far, it’s been less than spectacular. They published one paper on software that models encoding Chinese characters as an analogy to protein folding. It’s mildly interesting, but its connection to intelligent design is tenuous and abstract, and it’s not at all clear how they can use it to expose problems in evolution…and even if they do find a problem in their model, it’s not a given that it will apply to real biology. One has to wonder what the Intelligent Design creationists are actually doing in their lab. Others have wondered and tried to peek into the goings-on, but have been turned away.

Those madcap jokers at antievolution.org have found another way to peek in. The Biologic Institute is a tax-exempt organization, which means they had to file a form with all kinds of interesting information in it — follow the money! You can look at their Form 990, too, just search for “biologic institute” and you’ll get a nice pdf back.

Their income for 2008 was $300,000. That’s a tidy sum of money — compared to what I need to run a small lab at a teaching university, it’s a spectacular sum of money, and is actually about 10 times more than the yearly supply and maintenance budget for our entire biology department (not counting salaries, of course; the Biologic Institute does pay salaries out of that $300K). Oh, what we could do with that much support…

On the other hand, it’s not very much money at all for an outfit with the grand goal “to conduct basic scientific research on topics relating to the origin, organization and operation of living things and their parts, and to the nature of ecosystems and environments conducived to life”. The DI is getting some cheap PR out of this, but nowhere near the amount is being invested that would be needed to address their grandiose goal. By comparison, the National Center for Science Education (you can get their Form 990, too!) had a budget of about $1.3 million in the same period. Here are their goals:

Science Education. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a membership organization providing information and resources for schools, parents and concerned citizens working to keep evolution in public school science education. NCSE educates the press and public about the scientific, educational, and legal aspects of the creation and evolution controversy, and supply needed information and advice to promote and defend good science education at local, state, and national levels.

The NCSE is specific, focused and actually has a good-sized staff that does a lot of work that is visible to the public. We’re getting a bargain there. The Biologic Institute is vague, and while they’re operating on a quarter of the budget, doesn’t seem to do much.

It is a good racket, though. The director, Douglas Axe, receives a salary of $92,000, which is a heck of a lot more than I get paid (not that that means much: college professors in general aren’t exactly rich). Man, if I were in this business for the money, I should have gone into creationism. By comparison, though, you might wonder how much Eugenie Scott gets paid: $77,000. I was surprised — sure, she’s also making more than I am, but she’s a national figure with far more experience than I have. There is also a collection of well-known people like Barbara Forrest and Kevin Padian who serve on the board of the NCSE and get paid nothing. Again, don’t go into science with the expectation of riches.

Forget salaries. They’re the biggest part of most organizations budgets, but the news that people are working there isn’t news — we want to know what kind of nifty science gadgets are whirring away there. That’ll tell us what they’re up to. PCR machines? Sequencers? Lasers? Giant saltwater aquaria and bags and bags of squid chow? Here are there reported assets. Don’t get too excited.

I guess that’s reasonable for an outfit that’s coding up software, and not much else. It’s kind of a let-down if you’re expecting the Biologic Institute were doing biology. (I know, they aren’t; they’re doing biologic, whatever that is).

But let’s not be quick to judge. Maybe they’ve achieved amazing things with a small lab and limited resources. Here’s what they proudly announce as their accomplishments for 2008.

Hang on there…Doug Axe is getting paid $92,000 for getting 4,000 visitors a month to his website? I get more visitors than that in an hour! I’ve got to do some quick calculations here…if I were getting paid an equivalent amount per visit, based on last month’s traffic, I should be getting $67,677,045.43 for a year of Pharyngula! Where’s my money?

Now, unfortunately, I can’t link to the Biologic Institute web site, because if I did, I’d probably increase their productivity 100 fold.