I get email — arrogant insincerity edition

I try to be patient with all the email I get, I really do, and usually the greatest forebearance I can offer is to simply set a piece of email aside and go on. There simply is not enough time to answer everything, especially when my correspondent is better off going to the library, and most especially when the only reply I’m inspired to give is to snarl, “Go away, kid, you bother me.”

So let me introduce you to young Mr Rosenberg. He has written me twice, the first time with a fairly routine set of questions that I politely set aside because I get a few hundred of these every week, and because he was asking the wrong person, and the second time with a pushy rude letter that prompts me to now be impolite and actually answer him. Here’s his first letter, in which he introduces himself, and as is so common in these things, tells me how smart he is. Well, if you’re so clever, Mr Rosenberg, why are you asking me the questions?

Questions on the Universe

Hi Professor Myers,

My name is Andrew Rosenberg, I am 18 years old and I live in Racine Wisconsin. I have been raised in the Lutheran Church since I was born and view myself as a Christian. Recently I have been pondering the universe, especially the existence of God in general. I have the belief that if God exists, then Christianity makes the most sense for me to follow. But that brings up the question…does God exist? I am an intelligent individual, whose thoughts go beyond the typical 2010 senior’s tangents. I graduated valedictorian of my class, and so I thoughtI would like to contact another intelligent individual, such as yourself, who has conflicting viewpoints from me. After all, if you surround yourself with the same types of people all your life, then you will never learn anything or make your own decisions.

My first question for you is this: Christianity aside, what makes you an atheist? I know I could probably find the answer deep in your blog, but to me, atheism is just ignorant of the universe around us. Existence….just the simple existence of a hydrogen atom gives me the thought that something had to, and I hate to say this, create it. With something to create, how could the materials and fabrications that make up the universe–atoms, protons, neautrons, electrons–come to be? What cause the theories such as the big bang? Put the universe’s energy into action. As easy as it is to say that a God does not exist, its just as easy to say that one (multiples?) does.

On the topic of evolution, I have further questions– I fully believe in micro evolution, whether it be by mutation of natural selection…but how can the existence of the world’s first bacterium be? How can proteins and other chemicals come together to make an organism? For if you take that same organism apart and puts its pieces back into a jar of water, it will never come back to life or reassemble itself. So how did such a thing happen in the beggining of time?

The bottom line for me is, yes the existence of some supernatural being who has divine powers seems very far fetched. But the non-existence of such a being seems far less plausible to me. How can we be without a supernatural beggining at some point in the univeral timeline? Something, from nothing. Its a supernatural question in itself that puzzles me, but makes me view atheists as ignorant. No God, yet countless molecules and building blocks that just….appeared? No, it doesn’t make sense.

Please explain any view point or answer that you have to my questions. I am not afraid to be proven wrong.

Andrew Rosenberg

“atheism is just ignorant of the universe around us”…well, la-de-da, says the high school student who hasn’t bothered to look up anything in basic physics, and is demanding that a biologist explain it all to him in an email message.

First strike against him: I am a biologist. It says so right up there at the top left, under my picture. I am not a physicist. As a biologist, I’m even more narrowly specialized than that: ask me about the evolution of multicellular animals, ask me about development, ask me about various bits and pieces of molecular evolution in the last half billion years, and I can probably give you a decent answer, and I might even talk your socks off for an hour. Ask me about physics, the big bang, and cosmology and…I’m a well-informed layman, nothing more. A literate 18-year-old could be just as current on the topic, if not more so, by going down to the library or bookstore and picking up a few texts and, you know, reading them. This isn’t hard.

Go read a book by Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, or Sean Carroll; Scientific American has a primer on cosmology, even. If you can work your way through Steven Weinberg’s Cosmology, you’ll be much, much smarter than I am. But pestering random biologists with misspelled missives demanding that they explain particles to them? Dumb.

It’s often part of a cunning ploy, of course, not that I know that this is the case with Mr Rosenberg. I’ve noticed that, after many of my more detailed talks on biology, some clueless creationist will raise their hand and ask me to explain what existed before the Big Bang, completely ignoring the topic I’ve just explained to them. I’ve also compared notes with a few physicists; they’ll give talks on the origin of the universe, and afterwards be asked to explain the evolution of the eye. I think they know better than to ask a question in which they may get a deep and knowledgeable answer, because they don’t want an answer.

I would just have to give a very general answer that we know that heavier atoms are assembled by processes in stellar evolution, that many complex molecules are constructed by natural processes (formaldehyde forms in space, for instance), and that fundamental particles arose in the Big Bang; that physicists I have talked to, like Lawrence Krauss, have pointed out that stuff spontaneously forms all the time, and that there is no such thing as empty space. Try this on for size.

I can say why I’m an atheist, though, and I’ve talked about it numerous times. Here’s a short, succinct image that explains it all.

i-4cc6bf86b6d68685f9e610ea0f60d4e8-burden-of-proof.jpeg

Mr Rosenberg has not explained why I should believe in his Christian deity at all, and his only explanation for why he believes in his peculiar god is a self-confessed complete lack of knowledge and imagination, which given that he’s the clueless fellow asking a biologist to explain physics to him in 200 words or less, is not at all impressive.

But now, today, I get another message from him. I get these all the time, too, demands from ignorant jerks who are so infused with a sense of entitlement that they think they can demand that I spoonfeed them. “Christian humility” is just an ironic phrase for arrogant insincerity.

A Few Questions for an Atheist.

Hello PZ Myers,

My name is Andrew Rosenberg. Last week I sent you an email talking about why I believe in a creator. You did not respond. I would really like to hear your opinion on what I sent you. I also have another concern about you. I have been following your blog and youtube videos for a little while. I think that it is extremely rude of you to constantly criticize religeous groups on your blog. You do it everyday. I don’t know if lashing out at people gives you confidence because your followers laugh at your witty, little remarks, but I certainly think its rude. Especially when you get in person and you are just a little man with a quiet voice. Yet on the internet you spew forth brash criticisms like a volcano.

But besides those opinions of mine, I would really like to hear your take on my question of existence itself that I sent you.

Andrew

Hey, Andy — GET STUFFED.

You’re a perfect example of why I am rude — I am really tired of pretentious twits who’ve barely got a high school education, which isn’t much to begin with, and who think they’re brilliant because they can answer everything with “goddidit.” Am I rude? You bet. It’s not going to change, either.

But then you exhibit typical inconsistency: I’m a “little man with a quiet voice.” Would I have more authority if I glopped on some pomade and bellowed at you? Do you even listen to what I say in those videos? It’s nothing different from what I write — it’s just that my presentation is different than the howling protestations you get from televangelists.

I will remember what you expect, Andrew Rosenberg of Racine, Wisconsin. If we ever meet, I’ll make a special effort to yell rudely at you and just you, and do my best to send your know-nothing pious butt away crying. And don’t bother writing to me again.

A creation museum of your very own!

The creation museum in Social Circle, Georgia, complete with all of its contents, is for sale. Like me, I’m sure all of you are going “squeeee!!” right now.

You know, Father’s Day is just around the corner, and rather than getting me a $5 tie, maybe the kids should chip in and get me this. It shouldn’t cost much more. And as a special bonus, Georgia benefits when the trucks come in and haul all this trash away. There should be a picnic and a parade.

Maybe I’m being unfair. It might be worth more: that “museum” looks wonderfully kitschy. Everything is in flashy gilt frames, and just the Robot Giant Pandas have got to be worth something.

More creationist misconceptions about the eye

Jonathan Sarfati, a particularly silly creationist, is quite thrilled — he’s crowing about how he has caught Richard Dawkins in a fundamental error. The eye did not evolve, says Sarfati, because it is perfectly designed for its function, and Dawkins’ suggestion that there might be something imperfect about it is wrong, wrong, wrong. He quotes Dawkins on the eye.

But I haven’t mentioned the most glaring example of imperfection in the optics. The retina is back to front.

Imagine a latter-day Helmholtz presented by an engineer with a digital camera, with its screen of tiny photocells, set up to capture images projected directly on to the surface of the screen. That makes good sense, and obviously each photocell has a wire connecting it to a computing device of some kind where images are collated. Makes sense again. Helmholtz wouldn’t send it back.

But now, suppose I tell you that the eye’s ‘photocells’ are pointing backwards, away from the scene being looked at. The ‘wires’ connecting the photocells to the brain run over all the surface of the retina, so the light rays have to pass through a carpet of massed wires before they hit the photocells. That doesn’t make sense…

What Dawkins wrote is quite correct, and nowhere in his refutation does Sarfati show that he is wrong. Instead, Sarfati bumbles about to argue against an argument that no biologist makes, that the eye is a poor instrument for detecting patterns of light. The argument is never that eyes do their job poorly; it’s that they do their job well, by a peculiar pattern of kludgy patches to increase functionality that bear all the hallmarks of a long accumulation of refinements. Sarfati is actually supporting the evolutionary story by summarizing a long collection of compromises and odd fixes to improve the functionality of the eye.

There’s a fundamental question here: why does the vertebrate eye have its receptors facing backwards in the first place? It is not the best arrangement optically; Sarfati is stretching the facts to claim that God designed it that way because it was superior. It ain’t. The reason lies in the way our eye is formed, as an outpocketing of the cortex of the brain. It retains the layered structure of the cortex, even; it’s the way it is because of how it was assembled, not because its origins are rooted in optical optimality. You might argue that it’s based on a developmental optimum, that this was the easiest, simplest way to turn a light-sensitive patch into a cup-shaped retina.

Evolution has subsequently shaped this patch of tissue for better acuity and sensitivity in certain lineages. That, as I said, is a product of compromises, not pre-planned design. Sarfati brings up a series of odd tweaks that make my case for me.

  1. The vertebrate photoreceptors are nourished and protected by an opaque layer called the retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE). Obviously, you couldn’t put the RPE in front of the visual receptors, so the retina had to be reversed to allow it to work. This is a beautiful example of compromise: physiology is improved at the expense of optical clarity. This is exactly what the biologists have been saying! Vertebrates have made a trade-off of better nutrient supplies to the retina for a slight loss of optical clarity.

  2. Sarfati makes the completely nonsensical claim that the presence of blood vessels, cells, etc. in the light path do not compromise vision at all because resolution is limited by diffraction at the pupil, so “improvements of the retina would make no difference to the eye’s performance”. This is clearly not true. The fovea of the vertebrate eye represents an optimization of a small spot on the retina for better optical properties vs. poorer circulation: blood vessels are excluded from the fovea, which also has a greater density of photoreceptors. Obviously, improvements to the retina do make a difference.

    It’s also not a condition that is universal in all vertebrates. Most birds, for instance, do not have a vascularized retina — there is no snaky pattern of blood vessels wending their way across the photoreceptors. Birds do have greater acuity than we do, as well. What birds have instead is a strange structure inside their eye called the pecten oculi, which looks kind of like an old steam radiator dangling into the vitreous humor, which seems to be a metabolic specialization to secrete oxygen and nutrients into the vitreous to supply by diffusion the retina.

  3. Sarfati also plays rhetorical games. This is a subtly dishonest argument:

    In fact, cephalopods don’t see as well as humans, e.g. no colour vision, and the octopus eye structure is totally different and much simpler. It’s more like ‘a compound eye with a single lens’.

    First, there’s a stereotype he’s playing to: he’s trying to set up a hierarchy of superior vision, and he wants our god-designed eyes at the top, so he tells us that most cephalopods have poorer vision than we do. He doesn’t bother to mention that humans don’t have particularly good vision ourselves; birds have better eyes. So, is God avian?

    That business about the cephalopod being like a compound eye is BS; if it’s got a single lens, it isn’t a compound eye, now is it? It’s also again pandering to a bias that our eyes must be better than mere compound eyes, since bugs and other lowly vermin have those. Cephalopods have rhabdomeric eyes, meaning that their photoreceptors have a particular structure and use a particular set of biomolecules in signal transduction, but that does not in any way imply that they are inferior. In fact, they have some superior properties: the cephalopod retina is tightly organized and patterned, with individual rhabdomeres ganged together into units called rhabdomes that work together to process light. Their ordered structure means that cephalopods can detect the polarity of light, something we can’t do at all. This is a different kind of complexity, not a lesser one. They can’t see color, which is true, but we can’t sense the plane of polarity of light in our environment.

    I must also note that the functions of acting as a light guide (more below) and using pigment to shield photoreceptors are also present in the cephalopod eye…only by shifting pigments in supporting cells that surround the rhabdome, rather than in a solid RPE. Same functions, different solutions, the cephalopod has merely stumbled across a solution that does not simultaneously impede the passage of light.

    Color vision, by the way, is a red herring here. Color is another compromise that has nothing to do with the optical properties of the arrangement of the retina, but is instead a consequence of biochemical properties of the photoreceptors and deeper processing in the brain. If anything, color vision reduces resolution (because individual photoreceptors are tuned to different wavelengths) and always reduces sensitivity (you don’t use color receptors at night, you may have noticed, relying instead on rods that are far less specific about wavelength). But if he insists, many teleosts have a greater diversity of photopigments and can see colors we can’t even imagine…so humans are once again also-rans in the color vision department.

  4. Sarfati is much taken with the discovery that some of the glial cells of the eye, the Müller cells, act as light guides to help pipe light through the tangle of retinal processing cells direct to the photoreceptors. This is a wonderful innovation, and it is entirely true that in principle this could improve the sensitivity of the photoreceptors. But again, this would not perturb any biologist at all — this is what we expect from evolution, the addition of new features to overcome shortcomings of original organization. If we had a camera that clumsily had the non-optical parts interposed between the lens and the light sensor, we might be impressed with the blind, clumsy intricacy of a solution that involved using an array of fiber optics to shunt light around the opaque junk, but it wouldn’t suggest that the original design was particularly good. It would indicate short-term, problem-by-problem debugging rather than clean long-term planning.

  5. Sarfati cannot comprehend why the blind spot would be a sign of poor design, either. He repeats himself: why, it’s because the eye needs a blood supply. Yes, it does, and the solution implemented in our eyes is one that compromises resolution. I will again point out that the cephalopod retina also needs a blood supply, and they have a much more elegant solution; the avian eye also needs a blood supply, but is not invested with blood vessels. He gets very circular here. The argument is not that the vertebrate eye lacks a solution to this problem, but that there are many different ways to solve the problem of organizing the retina with its multiple demands, and that the vertebrate eye was clearly not made by assembling the very best solutions.

Sarfati really needs to crawl out of his little sealed box of creationist dogma and discover what scientists actually say about these matters, and not impose his bizarre creationist interpretations on the words of people like Dawkins and Miller. What any comparative biologist can see by looking at eyes across multiple taxa is that they all work well enough for their particular functions, but they all also have clear signs of assembly by a historical process, like evolution and quite unlike creation, and that there is also evidence of shortcomings that have acquired workarounds, some of which are wonderfully and surprisingly useful. What we don’t see are signs that the best solutions from each clade have been extracted and placed together in one creature at the pinnacle of creation. And in particular — and this has to be particularly grating to the Genesis-worshipping creationists of Sarfati’s ilk, since he studiously avoids the issue — Homo sapiens is not standing alone at that pinnacle of visual excellence. We’re kinda straggling partway down the peak, trying to compensate for some relics of our ancestry, like the fact that we’re descended from nocturnal mammals that let the refinement of their vision slide for a hundred million years or thereabouts, while the birds kept on optimizing for daylight acuity and sensitivity.

Scientists making creationists cry

The Discovery Institute is getting so politely eviscerated by a couple of people right now — you ought to savor the destruction.

Richard Sternberg, the wanna-be martyr of the Smithsonian Institution, made a stupid mathematical mistake in explaining alternatively splicing, and then, after it was explained to him, did it a second time, revealing that it wasn’t just an unfortunate slip, but a complete failure to grasp the basic concept. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, except that Sternberg has been yammering away about how alternative splicing represents a serious problem for evolution.

Steve Matheson continues his deconstruction of the DI’s poor performance in a recent debate. The creationists are constantly cheesed off about the whole idea of junk DNA, that there are great stretches of sequence that have no specific functional role, and seize upon every little example of non-coding DNA shown to have an effect on the phenotype to claim that all of it does. They don’t understand junk DNA. Again, it’s embarrassing that they even strain at this topic when they are so clueless.

My objection to Meyer’s references to introns and “junk DNA” is more than just a quibble about the molecular biology of introns. I’ve explained before why I find the whole “junk DNA” mantra to be utterly duplicitous, and I referenced my previous writing in the critique of Meyer. The basic story told by DI propagandists and other creationists is that non-coding DNA was ignored for decades, during which it was thought to be completely functionless (due to “Darwinist” ideas), only to be dramatically revealed as centrally important to life. That story is false. The real story is more interesting and complex (of course) and has been explained in detail several times.

Really, T. Ryan Gregory’s short and sweet post on the history of the concept is essential reading. If only the ID creationists would read it…

And finally, Matheson has a far too charitable letter to Stephen Meyer. He assumes that Meyer is a smart guy, honestly interested in science, who has gotten sucked into the inbred and self-deluding folly of creationism, urging him to get out and talk to actual scientists, where he’d learn what they really think, rather than these fallacious myths creationists tell themselves. It’s a nice idea, but I think the premise is incorrect. Meyer is a creationist first, who has been trying to learn little bits of science that he can use to rationalize his preconceptions.

It’s still a very nice letter, though, and a scathing denunciation of the Discovery Institute. They’ll ignore it, I’m sure, except to move Matheson a few notches higher on their list of enemies.

The Discovery Institute is desperately patching Meyer’s mind-numbing magnum opus

As you’ve probably heard, Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute published a book last year calle Signature in the Cell. It stunk, it got virtually no reviews from the scientific community, although it was avidly sucked up by the fans of Intelligent Design creationism. One curious thing about the book is that it has sunk out of sight already, which is a bit peculiar and a bit disappointing for an explanation that was promised to revitalize ID.

Remember Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box? I’ll give Behe credit, that one was well-marketed and got the brief attention of many scientists, who read it bogglingly, recognizing quickly that it was poor fare written by someone with no idea of what was going on in evolutionary biology and genetics. But at least it was quick and punchy, and had some great PR slogans that still get thrown around — ‘irreducible complexity’, anyone?

Meyer’s book had none of that. It’s a bloated paperweight, full of self-indulgent preening by Meyer, and without a single novel idea in it — it’s simply the most unmemorable, uninteresting pile of schlock the DI has turned out yet.

And I think the DI knew it. As mentioned before, the marketing was awful — they worked hard to keep it out of the hands of scientists who might review it ahead of time, which was an awful mistake. Even if we were pretty much guaranteed to trash it, it would be publicity — look again at Darwin’s Black Box. If there was even a hint of controversy in the text, the best move would have been to fan it. But no…it is the most boringly tedious mess, and the only stories they got were scientists rolling their eyes in boredom.

Recently, reviews have trickled in…all negative. So what does the Discovery Institute do? Would you believe they have published a whole book titled Signature Of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell? It’s only 105 pages long, so it’s a more digestible read than Meyer’s book, and it’s also a free download.

It’s impressive. It’s a bad idea to spend too much time responding to criticisms, but the staff at the DI have been so peevish that they’ve written an entire book in an angry tone (hah! Tone!) in ineffectual reply. Here’s an example of their cranky wit, from an introduction in which they classify their critics as either “distinguished scientists who haven’t read the book” or “pygmies who populate the furious, often obscene Darwinist blogs”.

For example, Jerry Coyne is a University of Chicago biologist who lately seems to spend most of his time blogging. Yet he clearly belongs among the ranks of the more distinguished writers who bashed Meyer’s book without reading it or reading about it. On the other hand, such an individual as blogger Jeffrey Shallit, mathematician at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada–not to be confused with the University of Wallamaloo of Monty Python fame–may object to being classed as a pygmy. Oh well. Sorry.

That’s fairly typical of how they handle their critics: if they’re a big name in the field, claim that they’ve never read the book; if they’re less well known, point out that they aren’t associated with the big name universities like the University of Chicago or Harvard. I even get this treatment in their brief section on me, who gets both barrels of their dual strategy:

All the people who hate Meyer’s book appear not to have read it. So too we have the complaint of Darwinian-atheist agitator P. Z. Myers, a popular blogger and biologist. Myers explains that he was unable to read the book, which he slimes as a “stinker” and as “drivel,” due to his not having received a promised free review copy! But rest assured. The check is in the mail: “I suppose I’ll have to read that 600 page pile of slop sometime… maybe in January.”

Dr. Myers teaches at the Morris, Minnesota, satellite campus of the University of Minnesota, a college well known as the Harvard of Morris, Minnesota. So you know when he evaluates a book and calls it “slop,” a book on which he has not laid on eye, that’s a view that carries weight.

In all seriousness, what is this with people having any opinion at all of a book that, allow me to repeat, they haven’t read and of which, as with Jerry Coyne, they admit they haven’t so much as read a review?

It’s true that I hadn’t read the book when I wrote that, and it’s also true that they had pre-empted many of their potential critics by promising a review copy and never delivering. They still haven’t sent the promised copy, but I did buy one — used, for cheap — and actually did read it last January. I’d also seen the reviews and found the absence of any substantive content in the descriptions telling. Since reading it, which was a genuinely agonizing experience since Meyer is such a pretentious writer who goes on and on at painful length about nothing at all, I have to tell you that my summary was spot-on.

I haven’t posted a review because, honestly, it’s a book guaranteed to inspire nothing but ennui. There isn’t one solid nugget of substance or even sharply defined ideas, no matter how wrong, in the entire pile of sludge. I can, however, pull up a summary from near the end of the book, in Meyer’s own words. This is the logical edifice on which his story is based. See if you can spot the flaws.

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

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

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

You’ll notice the key phrase in there is “specified information”. I looked through the whole book for a definition. There is none. Well, that’s not quite true: I did find this sentence:

The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content.

Whoa. One vague tautology is all he’s got to back that up. Notice how revealing that is about his first point above: his entire book peddles this idea that no one has demonstrated a natural mechanism for producing specified information. But of course, any one with any competence in this subject can tell you all kinds of ways a genome can produce increases in information, the kind that has a few mathematical definitions and is measurable, so Meyer tosses in that magic modifier, specified, to throw away a big chunk of the literature that troublingly contradicts him.

If it helps to grasp the rhetorical game he’s playing, just substitute the word “magic” for “specified”. It’s perfectly equivalent.

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

  • Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of magic information.

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

Better?

In those terms, his first point is correct but uninteresting. Material causes do not produce magic information, but so what? They do produce mundane information, and that’s all we need to describe a cell. Meyer also fails to demonstrate that cells contain any magic information in the first place.

Now, though, it also ruins his second point. I would cheerfully concede that intelligent processes can change the information content in a cell, and would have agreed with him on one third of his syllogism…but, unfortunately, I know of no way to produce magic information, since Meyer hasn’t bothered to define it.

And his final point is both nonsense and dishonest. Note that he has left the specified magic qualifier off the word information this time; it’s a cheap sleight of hand. Even so, though, to accept his conclusion requires accepting a false premise, that natural process have not been demonstrated to produce new information, and therefore we have to accept his claim that ID is the best explanation around.

Really, that’s all there is, that’s the core of that 600 page behemoth of noise. It is most unpersuasive. Perhaps that’s why they’ve had to produce a lengthy, carping criticism of their critics.

But don’t let me give you the wrong impression: they only mentioned me in a few paragraphs, and you’ve just seen everything they had to say about me. The bulk of the book is dedicated to a few people who have made some telling criticisms: Francisco Ayala, Darrel Falk, Jeffrey Shallit, and Steve Matheson (I must also mention AG Hunt, who also has some great critiques…but got ignored by the DI). In particular, I recommend Shallit as someone who actually knows information theory well and does a fine job describing how Meyer butchers it; I also have to recommend Matheson’s amazingly thorough chapter-by-chapter dissection of the book. If anything should be published, it’s those blog entries, which neatly expose the dishonesty and ignorance that permeates every page of Meyer’s hackwork. I don’t know how he did it, because Signature in the Cell was exasperatingly boring to me, and after reading it twice I never want anything more to do with it ever again. Maybe Matheson has discovered one virtue to religion (he’s a Calvinist biologist, by the way): it teaches one how to pore over meaningless, badly written texts without lapsing into a coma.

What is wrong with you, Queensland?

Look at this: they’ve explicitly added creationism to the public school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. That’s just nuts.

They’re even doing it in an entirely bogus way — they’re teaching it as a controversy in history classes.

In Queensland schools, creationism will be offered for discussion in the subject of ancient history, under the topic of “controversies”.

…

Queensland History Teachers’ Association head Kay Bishop said the curriculum asked students to develop their historical skills in an “investigation of a controversial issue” such as “human origins (eg, Darwin’s theory of evolution and its critics”).

This is confusing. It sounds like they’re going to be babbling about whether the earth is 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion years old, but that isn’t history — that’s just lunacy. There is some relevant history that could be taught, such as that from Ron Numbers’ book, The Creationists, which explains how ideas about creationism changed over the years, talks about the major figures in the creationist movement, and describes how creationism itself has changed historically…but I doubt that the people who are backing this want the subject addressed seriously as a series of events in the last 100 years.

It’s clear that they’re just trampling on history as a back door to get pseudoscience into the curriculum. I keep telling people, these creationists are cunning — the science side of the debate has gotten hardened by repeated attacks, and is usually better prepared to resist the foolishness, so they switch targets and catch history or philosophy off guard. Every academic discipline is subject to this corruption.

Give it a few years, and if they’re beaten back by the history professionals, just wait until they try to sneak in by claiming creationism is math, or health, or physical education (oh, wait, they’ve already gotten in there — in lots of schools, it’s the Christian athletes who are often the center of creationist activity).

The little man in the television set

Jeffrey Shallit has an excellent post on the conceptual failure of creationists to grasp even the possibility of an absence of intent. You probably know the feeling — you are trying to explain some process in biology or chemistry, and your student is struggling to fit the story into his mental picture of molecules or cells with purpose and plan, and he can’t move on to the next stage of understanding until he sheds the preconception of intelligent guidance to the reaction or interaction. Shallit compares it to a poor confused tourist to a computer lab who can’t quite figure out where the people doing the drawings on the graphic screens are.

And then he discusses an Intelligent Design blog, which makes the tourist look like a genius.

Northern Ireland culture is apparently cuckoo

The Culture Minister for Northern Ireland is a born-again Christian kook who has decided that the Ulster Museum is insufficiently respectful of the notion that a magic man in the sky poofed the universe into existence in 4004 BC — the farmers on the plains of Mehrgarh and the potters of Mesopotamia were probably greatly surprised to be conjured out of chaos so abruptly, their shock only exceeded by the later confused state of Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty, which was simultaneously exterminated by a great flood from that psychopath, Jehovah, and also continued unbroken with no notice of their extinction for another 150 years. Resilient folk, those Egyptians.

Anyway, the nutcase in question, Nelson McCausland, has demanded more attention be paid to his clueless creation myth. No, not the interesting myth with Fomorians and Fir Bolg and the Tuatha de Danaan, not even the one with frost giants and cows licking people into being, but some weird Hebrew fairy tale.

Nelson McCausland, who believes that Ulster Protestants are one of the lost tribes of Israel, has written to the museum’s board of trustees urging them to reflect creationist and intelligent design theories of the universe’s origins.

The Democratic Unionist minister said the inclusion of anti-Darwinian theories in the museum was “a human rights issue”.

McCausland defended a letter he wrote to the trustees calling for anti-evolution exhibitions at the museum. He claimed that around one third of Northern Ireland’s population believed either in intelligent design or the creationist view that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago.

Weird. I had no idea the Protestants of Northern Ireland and our Native Americans all belonged to the same peripatetic tribe. Or that preaching ignorance and lies was a human right that must be supported by the government.

At least the appeal to a majority ruling on science was familiar creationist nonsense. When will these loons learn that museums and schools should only teach the stories that are sensible, rational, and right and not simply every random every eruption of lunacy that some deluded clique finds compatible with their dogma?

You will not be surprised to learn that McCausland is a member of DUP, and is a Paisleyite, another crazy creationist Bible-walloper. He also uses the same justification of appeal to the mob to defend his views on homosexuality.

I would not be a supporter of Gay Pride, and I think that in spite of attempts to portray it as an event that’s going to boost the country and increase the number of major events in the city, I think the majority of people in Northern Ireland would have great reservations and in many cases strong opposition to it.

I believe it is the will of God that relationships should be heterosexual. I believe that’s what God intended and planned. But I would not treat anyone unfairly.

It’s fascinating how often bigotry and ignorance go together. One might almost speculate that there’s a causal relationship there.

(via Pagan Prattle)