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!

(Click for larger image)

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!