Bill Dembski gave a talk at Baylor recently, and we have a rather thorough account of his lecture. Basically, it’s the usual creationist rope-a-dope: ask for the impossible (give me every single step in the evolution of a process) and garbled distortion of useful concepts (in this case, of information), then declare that evolution has failed.
The horrible Expelled is now available on DVD. I have no plans to view it. However, you can get it from a site called redbox, which has a bizarre synopsis.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Who better to interview fanatics than the hilariously deadpan Ben Stein? Here, the former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” (and, it should mentioned, trusted Nixon advisor) hosts a documentary in which he sets out to ask the hard questions about the Intelligent Design theory to its most fervent believers.
I don’t know what they were thinking when they wrote that.
This video contains a nice breakdown of exactly who the wackaloons on the Texas Board of Education are, and will help you figure out who to vote for in the upcoming elections.
I always find it astonishing that Don McLeroy and Terri Leo actually have positions of responsibility in the Texas educational system. The system is really messed up down there, have you noticed?
Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It’s an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of “authorities”, where they make much of their pedigrees (don’t blame me, the “Dr. X, Ph.D.” is the redundant formula they use on the site.)
The photos show these people and others gushing over this lump of rock, with testimonials like:
After all that, you’d expect to find some remarkable degree of similarity, wouldn’t you? It convinced a neuroanatomist, after all, and surely all those people with their fancy degrees couldn’t be fooled. But then they show us a close-up photo of this “brain”.
They’ve got to be kidding. That’s a lumpy rock. It’s no brain; I’ve seen a lot of brains in my time, from fish to frogs to lizards to birds to all kinds of mammals, and that looks nothing like any of them. Here, in case you haven’t seen one, is a photo of a human brain:
This is the Ed Conrad effect. Hand some ignorant people a random lump of rock, tell them it’s a fossil, and their imaginations will do the rest. There is no excuse for these “experts”, though — the author of the page claims that “It has been examined and determined to be a petrified human brain by many people with high degrees in several different fields of study and occupation.” That just goes to show that even the most qualified people in creation ‘science’ have to be flaming idiots.
Northern Kentucky University is going to have a mock trial on teh creation/evolution debate. They say the intent is to legitimately explore the issue.
“It is part of the mission of the Scripps Howard Center to conduct public forums,” said Mark Neikirk, the Center’s executive director. “I’ve heard President Votruba state many times that a college campus should be a safe place for difficult conversations.” Neikirk said that while the evolution/creation science debate is a difficult and polarizing topic, the mock trial format is designed to provide structure for a civil, informative exploration of the public policy questions raised by the debate.
I have to call bullshit on that. What this really is is an attempt to contrive a debate between science and superstition in which the superstition side gets to pretend they have equal status. And, of course, science issues are not settled in a courtroom, ever.
Worst of all, though, is the way they’re planning to resolve the issues.
The first 200 people in attendance will have an opportunity to serve as jurors, using small remote control clickers to register their opinions both before and after the trial. At the conclusion of the proceeding, they will decide the case.
Yeah, right…in Kentucky. The local churches will bus in a mob, retired godbots with nothing else to do will get in line early, and they’ll all have predetermined (and blessedly ignorant) views of the outcome before they get started. The theological lackwit they have babbling the case for the supernatural can come in half-drunk and still count on ‘victory’. This fight has been thrown before it even gets started.
Here’s something you can do. Write to the president of NKU, James Votruba, and let him know that this is a joke of an event that only brings embarrassment to his university.
That’s the only possible explanation for their curious anachronisms. The Institute for Creation Research has just claimed that Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin’s theory of pangenesis (which, by the way, was published in 1868). Furthermore, Mendel’s paper was initially rejected for publication by editors who were in thrall to the dogma of pangenesis, which, as was mentioned, wouldn’t be published for two years.
Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!
This is really weird. Dr Imad Hassan claims to have proven Darwinian theory from the Qur’an and the Bible. Only…his version of Darwinian theory is a bit eccentric.
Then we disclosed that the word ‘Adam’ is a simple Arabic term for ‘convertible’ or ‘adaptable’. It is a collective description by God in the scriptures for a species of lower creatures which became ‘adaptable’ for radical change after long evolutionary processes.
We followed the description of modifying the ‘Adams’ and arrived at the conclusion that there were many individuals, males and females, who were converted to intelligent ‘humans’ by direct detailed divine intervention. This is the missing link in Darwin ‘s theory!
The ‘Adams’ were then given an induction period in the divine custody, in a specific garden on the earth, a few miles away from the location of conversion which was the same location where the first ever living cell was created! In their induction period, the ‘Adams’ were allowed freedom except from approaching the forbidden tree, which is ‘Shajara’ in Arabic! As a result of their failure to keep the commands, some of the female ‘Adams’ got pregnant from ‘eating’ from the Shajara! The whole group was then expelled to take the role for which they were created as intelligent beings on the Earth.
You might think this is awfully unlikely, if you didn’t know that Darwin was inspired by Muslim philosophers, that he had access to a decrypted series of messages from the Qur’an, and in fact died a Muslim, something we noisy atheists don’t recognize.
In his new delusional short-sighted religion, Richard Dawkins has adopted the work of Charles Darwin as the prophetic message on which the new dogma – ‘There is no God’ – is based. Despite the apparent respect and appreciation of his work, no one could harm Darwin as much as those who unlawfully associate his name with their atheism. The idea of Charles Darwin of the ‘Evolution and the law of natural selection’ was an ‘evolution’ of ancient Islamic theories, not innovation! In his Creation and/ Or Evolution, T O Shanavas provided enough evidence that: attributing the concept of evolution to Darwin alone is a ‘gigantic rip off’! Over 800 years ago, Ibn Arabi proposed the idea that the monkey was the last animal and first human in the evolution ladder. It was Darwin ‘s grandfather who studied these ancient Islamic theories that inspired Chares to find the proof for that. Charles Darwin was so honest that he described only what he could proof, leaving the missing link very prominent in his incomplete evolutionary work. That missing link, to the dismay of Dawkins who misused the work of Darwin , is now confidently and astonishingly proved by the very God that Dawkins struggled to deny. The process of evolution is described in a series of coded messages in the Qur’an, the divine book that somebody like Dawkins would be too reluctant to challenge, as he can only challenge the man-made, outdated misconceptions attributed to God in the translated Bibles.
It’s crazy time all the time on that site…and I haven’t even gotten to the extraterrestrial origin of cows. But I can’t go on. It’s just too much.
If you’re concerned about the escalating creationist activity in the Texas Board of Education, then SIGN THIS PETITION. Now. Let’s send a message.
The Texas Board of Education has named the six people who will be on a committee to review science curriculum standards. Texas, you’ve got trouble. The people are:
David Hillis, professor of integrative biology and director of the Center of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Texas at Austin;
Ronald K. Wetherington, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence;
Gerald Skoog, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Education at Texas Tech and co-director of the Center for Integration of Science Education and Research;
Stephen Meyer, vice-frakkin’-president of the odious Discovery Institute in Washington state;
Ralph Seelke, a pro-ID creationist and biologist from Wisconsin;
Charles Garner, a chemist from Baylor who is also a pro-ID creationist.
Note that Meyer and Seelke are co-authors of that ghastly new ID textbook, Explore Evolution, and would no doubt love to tweak the curriculum to make their book marketable in Texas. Conflict of interest? Nah.
So, three good guys and three ignorant ideologues, with the overall head of the board of education being Don McLeroy, the creationist dentist. It’s going to get ugly.
My colleague at the Twin Cities branch campus of the University of Minnesota, Randy Moore, has won an award from the Discovery Institute: The Award for Most Dogmatic Indoctrinator in an Evolutionary Biology Course. Congratulations to Randy! He won it for this paragraph:
The evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming and comes from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ethology, and biochemistry. There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs, nor are there science-based alternative theories. Evolution is a unifying theme in biology; teaching it as such is the best way to show students what biology is about and how they can use evolution as a tool to understand our world. [Evolution] is as important an idea as there is in science – it is a great gift to give to students.
The Discovery Institute claims there are at least four mistakes in that paragraph. Their summary of the “errors” is hilarious, and shows how delusional those guys are.
The evidence isn’t overwhelming, because their books, Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, say so. Those two books are propaganda pieces put out by the Discovery Institute itself, and they are awful: poor scholarship, sloppy reasoning, and and an abysmal ignorance of the science characterize both. If you want some good popular books on the subject, try The Making of the Fittest(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), Your Inner Fish(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), Why Evolution is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and The Ancestor’s Tale(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), all much better and more informative, and actually representing the evidence accurately.
There is too controversy because they have a list of crackpots dissenters from evolution. Any field will have kooks and crackpots on the fringe; compiling a short list of loons is a relatively trivial and entirely meaningless exercise. Even at that, the DI’s list is very short on people who are actually biologists…and the whole petition is misleadingly worded.
Evolution is a theory in trouble because some scientists discussed alternative modes of evolution at the Altenberg conference this summer. Science is not fixed, but adapts to the evidence, so it is perfectly normal to have conferences that discuss new ideas. The Altenberg meeting did not challenge the fact of evolution or try to displace known evolutionary mechanisms; it discussed some new findings that might add to the theory. It’s absurd that people are still going on and on about how a small meeting of scientists working on extending some parts evolutionary theory is a strike against evolution. To the contrary, it’s what we expect of good science.
There are too science-based alternative theories: Intelligent Design, endosymbiosis, and self-organization. Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory was a natural explanation for eukaryote evolution — it is not an alternative, but a part of evolutionary theory. Similarly, self-organization (as, for example, described by Kauffman) does not oppose evolution at all, but suggests that physical and chemical properties of the universe could facilitate evolution. Like I said above, these are part of the normal process of science, that people propose new explanations and try to back them up with evidence, and they become incorporated into our body of knowledge. Intelligent Design creationism does not qualify. IDists don’t do science, don’t propose testable theories, and don’t have any evidence to back up their claims.
So I hope Randy Moore doesn’t get too cocky here — the award was given by a gang of incompetent judges who don’t know what they are talking about.
