Those creationists sure do love their hypocrisy: on one day, they whine about their version of “academic freedom”, which means demanding that creationism be given equal time with legitimate science in the classroom, and the next they throw a hissy fit because someone they disagree with is speaking, such as Barbara Forrest or Richard Dawkins. After failing to block Dawkins from speaking at OU, the Oklahoma legislature is looking for excuses to retroactively punish the university for spending money on his visit. They seem to have this idea that academics they dislike should always work for free, while the ones they like ought to be unquestioningly showered with honoraria.

That’s not the way the system works. Everyone in academia knows that student groups get small allotments of cash to use as they see fit to promote their organization and ideas; this usually works in the conservatives’ favor, because if you look at any university’s roster of student organizations, there’ll be a dozen or more Christian clubs at the trough and maybe one or two, if you’re lucky, freethought clubs. If they want to play that game, bring it on — let’s make Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ squeal when we apply the restrictions uniformly and cut them off. Or perhaps the Oklahoma legislators are intending to apply a religious bias to their disbursement of funds?

Likewise, academic departments have small pots of money for bringing in speakers. Is Oklahoma going to meddle directly in the decisions of every unit on a campus? Is their version of “academic freedom” just a fancy justification for micromanagement?

It’s all moot anyway in this case. Dawkins waived his speaking fee for the Oklahoma event. Meanwhile, recently Ben Stein billed OSU $60,000 to speak — where’s the investigation there?

Todd Wood teaches a creationism course at a bible college, and he has a creationism blog. He has one of the most promising introductions to his way of thinking ever.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I break down creationist biology into four main components: design, natural evil, systematics, speciation, and biogeography.

That sentence alone is just a marvel.

Read the whole thing, though, and you’ll laugh and laugh. He tries to justify all those “well-designed” predators like venomous snakes, and all he’s got is the usual creationist answer to all those nasty critters. The Fall. The Curse. God had to do an amazing redesign act after Eve bit that apple.

I may have to check into that blog now and then for the comic relief.

Thomsen is the Republican representative in Oklahoma who proposed several resolutions that would censure the OU zoology department and Richard Dawkins for not being nice to creationism. You really must see his justification for condemning views he finds religiously disagreeable.

I am trying to promote free thinking. I strongly oppose the Department of Zoology for their unwillingness to lead our state in this discussion and not have opposing views in this matter.

I do not believe Todd Thomsen even knows what free thinking is. The zoology department is not leading the state in the discussion of creationism because the members of the zoology department, as is true for biologists everywhere, have examined the claims of creationists and discovered that even under the most superficial scrutiny, they are transparently nothing but collections of incoherent, fragmentary superstitions clumsily tied together with a glue of lies, spit, and bile. As I’ve said before, you could ask biologists to speak out more about creation “theory”, but the results would not bring much joy to your local churches.

But do go read that article in the OU Daily, and in particular note the laudable comment from Michael J. Davis. Davis obligingly includes Todd Thomsen’s email, and I think that since Representative Thomsen places such importance on the communication of diverse views, everyone ought to take a moment and let him know exactly what his standing in the wider universe might be.

And remember, next election cycle, Mr Thomsen deserves to be unemployed.

It’s the obligatory annual newspaper article on creationists confronted with evidence. In this case, young ignoramuses from Liberty University are filed through the Smithsonian Institution to practice closing their minds, while a newspaper reporter echoes their rationalizations. I hate these exercises in bad journalism: there is absolutely no critical thinking going on here, either among the creationists or the reporter writing it up. An example:

“I love it here,” said Ross, who has a doctorate in geosciences from the University of Rhode Island. “There’s something romantic about seeing the real thing.”

Modern creationists don’t deny the existence of dinosaurs but believe that God made them, and all animals, on the same sixth day that he created man. In fact, Ross’s only real beef in the fossil hall is with the 30-foot lighted column that is a timeline marking 630 million years of geology. As a young-Earth creationist, he asserts that the vast majority of the rocks and fossils were formed during Noah’s flood about 4,000 years ago. Most paleontologists date the T-Rex to 65 million years ago.

You know, it is possible to be a Christian and still have a rational respect for the evidence. Take, for example, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, an opponent of evolution in the 19th century, but also someone who worked out details of the geological column and determined that the idea that there was a single, defining world-wide flood was untenable. Or Charles Lyell, who struggled with the idea of evolution because it conflicted with his religious beliefs, but who was a major force in bringing about the understanding of geology as a product of continually acting forces. Or the Reverend William Buckland, who believed in a global flood, but regarded it as insufficient to account for the wealth of geological complexity — he would not have looked at the timeline and tried to compress it into the product of a single biblical event.

These were people working almost 200 years ago. The question of flood geology has long been settled — it’s wrong. And the evidence has only gotten stronger since for an old earth and a complex history. Marcus Ross is a man standing among a collection of some of the best and strongest and most thoroughly vetted and cross-checked evidence that directly contradicts what he claims, and he is spluttering out ignorant uncomprehending gibberish. He has a doctorate in the geosciences, we are always told, but he learned nothing. That ought to be the story here, about the peculiar psychology of these purblind creationists, but the journalist just let’s it slide by.

How bad is the ‘education’ these poor students receive at Liberty University? This anecdote tells the tale.

Near the end of the “Evolution Trail,” the class showed no signs of being swayed by the polished, enthusiastic presentation of Darwin’s theory. They were surprised, though, by the bronze statue of man’s earliest mammalian ancestor.

“A rat?” exclaimed Amanda Runions, a 21-year-old biochemistry major, when she saw the model of a morganucodon, a rodent-like ancient mammal that curators have dubbed Grandma Morgie. “All this hype for a rat? You’re expecting, like, at least an ape.”

Morganucodon is a genus of early mammals that lived over 200 million years ago. 200 million years ago. We’re talking about the Upper Triassic, in the early part of the Mesozoic. She is expecting apes? She thinks the only animals worth getting excited about must be primates? She is surprised by the fact that paleontology reveals a succession of forms, with the only mammals in the early Mesozoic being small rat-like forms? Oh, dear, don’t introduce her to the Paleozoic, she’ll be shocked at the mere fish that represent our ancestors of the time.

The real story here, the one that the staff writer for the Washington Post ignored, is that Liberty University is victimizing young people like that woman and making them believe that they are biochemistry majors when they’re actually being intellectually abused by an anti-scientific propaganda mill. There was a time when investigative journalism was actually practiced, and this would be an opportunity to expose a disgraceful pseudo-academic fraud.

Schools in Hampshire, England are receiving information on how to incorporate creationism into the classroom. It’s hard to judge whether this is good or bad without seeing the actual materials, but I’m inclined to say it’s probably a bad idea, since it’s supported by people claiming the point is to “analyse different views in a balanced way.” That is the wrong way to teach this stuff.

I incorporate creationism into my introductory biology course, too, but I don’t think I do it quite the way creationists want. What they want is that we be respectful of their views, explain it as an alternative, and nod sagely in the direction of Charles Darwin and Philip Johnson. We got a picture of what they want in Dover, Pennsylvania, when the school board mandated a vague statement about critical thinking that did not actually exercise any critical thought, and that waved a hand in the direction of some fifth-rate books that students ought to examine. No, that’s not how you teach a subject in science.

For instance, I’m teaching a course in transmission genetics right now. If I taught it the creationist way, I would have said something like this:

Uh, this is a course in the theory of genetics. There are some other theories out there, maybe you can find some books on them somewhere, but, ummm, keep an open mind. We teach something about genes getting passed down from generation to generation. That’s enough. There are some other details, I suppose, but right now we should spend some time on preformation and acquired characters, which I suppose are equivalent theories.

And then I could be done and sit down for the rest of the term. It sure would be easier. That’s the thing about creationist “ideas” — they’re so danged fuzzy and unteachable, either falsified already or so incoherent that they’re untestable.

The way I actually teach genetics is essentially a temporal series of criticisms. I start with Darwin’s pangenesis for a little historical background, and tell them this is wrong, and here’s why, criticizing it on the basis of it’s ad hoc nature and its failure to fit experimental observations. Then I introduce Mendel, and we see his view of particulate, quantifiable inheritance, and how it superseded Darwin, and then I show how parts of it are wrong, with experiments that show how it fails, which leads into linkage. And then I show how some of our initial concepts of chromosomal inheritance are wrong, with work done on extrachromosomal factors. Step by step, we build a case for a complex and detailed understanding of the rules of heredity by experiment…where even the experiments that go “wrong” (that is, don’t show us the results we expected from existing theory) help us acquire a deeper understanding of the process.

In a way, it’s a pretty ruthless business. Weak handwaving, of the sort that Darwin was doing in his theory of inheritance, doesn’t cut it and gets chopped apart savagely with the bloody cleaver of experiment. Creationism is far, far weaker than Darwin’s 19th century proposal, so you can guess how it fares.

When the proponents of creationism ask that their nonsense be taught in school, there is an implicit expectation that the scientists will put away their implements of destruction and suspend the savagery while their delicate little flower of unsupportable fluff is discussed reverentially. That is not going to happen. If it did, it wouldn’t be a science class.

A lesson plan that includes creationism should plainly show that experiment and observation have irrefutably demonstrated that it is now a splintered pile of cack-minded gobshite, wrecked by a century and a half of discovery, and that its supporters now are reduced to pathetically feeble rationalizations that rely almost entirely on people’s emotional dependence on the legitimacy of their religious beliefs. A science class isn’t the place to rip into airy-fairy religiosity — we have other venues for that — but it should uncompromisingly demolish every attempt to link natural, material events to pious metaphysics. If a student comes out of such a class believing that maybe there is still something to the Genesis explanation of the origins of life, then the instructor has not done her job. Her job was to explain with science how the world works, and if anyone wants to smuggle in the seven days and the magic fruit tree and the talking snake, it should be so the teacher can show the students that that is not how it works.

I’m willing to grant creationism an hour or two in the classroom, as long as its role is to be an easy victim, to demonstrate how science can be used to eviscerate bad ideas (I also know from experience that most students find that extremely entertaining, as well as informative). From what I’ve seen of most of the creationist curricula advanced by these quacks, that isn’t what they want. To which we have to say, then it isn’t science.

If you fit that description, please report to Greg Laden. The NCSE has a little job for you.

I was wondering why I was getting the sudden upsurge in hate mail, and one kind messenger was generous enough to tell me his source. In an ironic way, with naughty words. You might not want to look below the fold if you’re 3 years old or younger.

[Read more…]