A promising new organization: COPUS

Look into this one, everyone: the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), another attempt to coordinate efforts to improve public outreach and science education. They have some worthy goals:

  • Building the COPUS network – Underpinning the COPUS effort is a growing network of organizations and individuals who share a common goal: engaging sectors of the public in science and increasing their appreciation and understanding of the scientific enterprise. Find out more about participating in the COPUS Network.
  • Developing state-level benchmark science-indicator reports on the importance of science to the U.S. economy and standard-of-living
  • Supporting a national effort to promote the public understanding of science in a year-long celebration: Year of Science 2009 (also available: Year of Science 2009 fact sheet [PDF])

  • Integrating efforts with the Understanding Science website project currently under development at the University of California, Berkeley

If you’re involved with any kind of scientific outreach organization, register with them — they’ve got a long list of science groups. I particularly like the fact that they’re herding together a grassroots effort to celebrate a Year of Science in 2009, the Darwin bicentennial year, since there doesn’t seem to be any national leadership on the issue otherwise.

More dribblings from the producer of Expelled

Oh, gosh … this Expelled movie is going to be ghastly. Check out this interview with Walt Ruloff, the executive producer. Ruloff’s credentials on this issue are that — get ready for it — he was a software engineer. We get a good feel for the tack the movie is going to take: biologists don’t ask interesting and productive questions, they are defined by the Darwinist orthodoxy, and they actively suppress any questioning. It is, of course, a lie from word one.

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Denyse O’Leary: paranoid projectionist

I knew the creationists were obtuse, but this is going a little far. Denyse O’Leary is twittering about all these paranoid suspicions that Richard Dawkins or I are planning to sue to block the release of that silly creationist movie, Expelled, in a post titled Darwinist threat to sue pro-ID filmmakers? Friend of the studio thinks they have no case. It’s a bit bizarre. Neither of us have even made any faint noises to that effect. In my post on the subject, I wondered who funded it, why it was being favored by the DI since it was endorsing the religious nature of ID, and why they had to be dishonest in asking for the interview — and concluded by saying I was looking forward to seeing it and shredding its arguments. How is that to be interpreted as a threat to sue to prevent the release of the movie?

Furthermore, I made a rather unambiguous clarification in the comments:

Let me clarify something. I’m not going to sue. I have no interest in suing.

Is there a way to say that more plainly? Because it’s obviously too convoluted and difficult for a creationist to comprehend.

So let me reiterate once again for the stupid, the deluded, the conspiracy nuts, and the illiterate hacks (i.e., Denyse): not even in my private conversations with Dawkins and Eugenie Scott about this movie has anyone even brought up the possibility of suing or somehow interfering with the release. It’s not the way our brains work, perhaps sometimes to our detriment. My interest is in seeing the movie so I can give the transparently bad ideas behind it an enthusiastic ripping.

Now though, here’s the really ironic part. First comment on O’Leary’s bogus accusations:

They can’t help it. It is part of the natural authoritarian bent of athiests. They can’t win the battle of ideas so their only hope is to silence opposing ideas by legal action.

Not only is the argument patently false, but you have to notice that O’Leary also gloated over the Pivar lawsuit, in which she’s pleased that her pal Stuart is suing me to compel my silence.

These kooks are all about the projection, aren’t they?

Is this for real?

It probably is: it has just the right amount of ingrown festering obsessiveness. We’ve all heard of old earth creationism (creationists who agree the Earth is billions of years old, and make arguments about the “days” of the bible representing long ages) and young earth creationism (the bible is strictly and literally true, and the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in precisely 6 24-hour days). Here’s a new one called Biblical Reality:

This "Old Earth" brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate “six 12-hr days of revelation” given to Moses (Genesis 1:2 – 2:3). The pseudo discrepancy between the “sixth day” in Genesis chapter one and in chapter two is explained as chapter two being the beginning of modern mankind (Adam & Eve), and chapter one as being an earlier species of prehistoric mankind in an earlier restoration period, more than 60 million years ago.

Got that? There are two creation accounts in the bible, so he’s going to reconcile them by saying there were two literal creation events, each about a week long, separated by a 60 million year gap. So it’s a kind of hybrid YEC/OEC contrivance.

I don’t think we should worry about it too much. It probably has a following of one.

Let’s give a little creationist a thrill

Here, everyone, go have fun with this brand new creationist blog that has a grand total of one post so far … but that post is ripe with hilarious promise. This one is an atheist science denialist (someone was wondering if there were any atheist ID proponents a while back, so here’s one). He’s got the air of an affronted conspiracy theorist — scientists are all shallow-minded Darwinists — and he also dislikes the taint of religion behind all the arguments of the Intelligent Design creationists.

Nobody is going to like him. Boo hoo.

Now why would someone who doesn’t believe in god(s) like the idea of ID? He’s got a different kind of evidence.

I’m talking about the evidence for extraterrestrial design in our planet. Like the pyramids, Stonehenge, Nazca lines. We have been visited, and designed by aliens. Of course people like Myers suppress this evidence in favor of their own puny experiments in order to get funding for their “research” that never finds anything new…other than evidence against evolution, which they conceal very quickly.

Bwahahahahaha! He’s a Dänikenite! This could be fun.

Give labor its due

Classes start this week at UMM and next week at our branch campuses in the Twin Cities, and it looks like we might get to deal with a clerical workers’ strike. AFSCME Local 3800 is taking to the picket lines to protest the inadequate pay raises offered to them. We’re all tightening our belts in our underfunded universities — we’ve had salary and hiring freezes in the few years I’ve been here, and we’re seeing cuts to library services and teaching lab support; you could argue, I suppose, as university president Bruininks does, that we’re all in this together and that everyone should compromise and accept these yearly parings-away together.

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Hank Fox WANTS!

Coral Ridge Ministries is pushing hard to promote their pet causes, and Hank Fox suggests that they give him a few goodies from their list of crazy literature and DVDs. They say they’ll send it out in return for a voluntary donation, but so far, it looks like the “donation” is less than voluntary.

I recall taking a stab at this a year or so ago with another Christian organization that was trying to sell creationist books while calling it a giveaway, with a completely independent and entirely optional opportunity to donate a few dollars to a worthy religious cause. I never got my books.

Nope, no aquatic apes found in Morris

How come you people never come visit? I’m only an hour from the freeway by way of a two-lane county road, roughly equidistant from Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Minneapolis, yet somehow no one ever happens to be passing through this remote rural town … until today. Jim Moore took a little detour from his road trip from Victoria, BC to Oklahoma to pop by lovely Morris, Minnesota and say hello. Now we expect the rest of you to come on by.

In case you don’t know who Jim Moor is, he maintains this web page, a critique of the Aquatic Ape “Theory”. This “theory” (really, it doesn’t deserve the promotion) is often taken as quite reasonable at first glance — hey, whales have reduced body hair and are aquatic, humans have reduced body hair so maybe they also went through an aquatic stage in their evolution — but once you dig just a tiny bit deeper, the inconsistencies within the hypothesis and the contradictions with reality loom larger and larger, and you really should realize that it’s utter nonsense. But weirdly, there are a number of people who have gotten quite obsessed with the idea and who have written reams of papers to rationalize the baloney. Back in the 20th century wrangles over the Aquatic Ape nonsense would spontaneously emerge on usenet all the time (here’s one example) because its proponents had to be completely refractory to contradicting evidence. Good times.

One interesting twist to it all is that it’s an odd variant of denialism. These people aren’t rejecting an established scientific conclusion, such as that HIV causes AIDS or that human activities contribute to global warming — they are pushing beyond reason for a conclusion that science denies. I suppose you could say they’re denying the evidence that shoots down their favored beliefs, but at least they actually have a positive (but bogus!) hypothesis that they aren’t afraid to recite at you, which puts them several notches above the Intelligent Design creationists.

Anyway, Moore has a tremendous amount of useful information rebutting the Aquatic Ape Speculation — it’s well worth a browse, and also amusing to read some of the crackpot defenses (one of my favorites is the claim that Neandertals had large noses that they used as snorkels). And I’m not just saying that because he was nice enough to stop by Morris!