Get your own research, creationists!

One of those annoying habits creationists organizations have is the appropriation of legitimate scientific research to ‘support’ their claims. They almost never do, actually—the creationists have to misrepresent the science, and often they even offer interpretations flatly contradicted by the contents of the paper. For an excellent example, here’s the author of a paper on ERVs complaining that Reason To Believe’s use of her work was unjustified.

I eventually decided to reclaim my research from the people who have consistently tried to distort the science to support their own agenda. I checked a few months ago and found my paper in the RTB archives. I emailed the website’s creators, explained that they had misunderstood the meaning of my paper, that it actually provided evidence in support of evolution, and politely asked if they could please remove it from their site. I repeated my request a couple of times. I never received more than a bland message in reply saying that they would look into it.

She has also posted a summary of her work that shows she was testing evolutionary predictions, and that the evidence fit the predictions of evolutionary biology, not the ones Reason To Believe (an old-earth creationist group) wanted.

You know, I’ve seen a fair number of creationists misrepresenting scientist’s work to fit their conclusions, but I’ve never seen the reverse, where a scientist grabs some creationist’s hard-earned data and claims it supports evolution. I wonder why?

Oh … I forgot. It’s because the creationists don’t have any data! Silly me.

I ♥ Seattle

Ahh, Seattle.

Seattle is godless.

We are, rather famously, one of the least churched cities in North America. It seems that most of us have better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church. Seattleites would rather take a hike. Or nurse a hangover. Or fire up the bong.

It sounds like my kind of place…and it should, I grew up there.

So I’m taking a little vacation to the Pacific Northwest, and will be visiting family and taking in the sights the first week of July, from the 1st to the 8th. All you Seattleites can use this thread to tell me how wonderful the place is and what I ought to do in my brief visit there. Is the Science Fiction Museum worth seeing? Any fabulous seafood restaurants that have opened in the last 10 years? Good brew pubs? I think I’ll skip the churches.

And of course, if anyone wants to meet up somewhere, sometime, maybe we can arrange something here. It’s a brief visit, unfortunately, but I should have an evening or two free.

An octet of vignettes

Dang. Tagged. Can’t you people leave me alone?

All right, here are the rules.

  1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
  2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
  4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
  5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

I suppose I could list what I had for dinner over the last 8 days, you guys don’t know that, but then I’d have to confess about those lazy days when I ate microwaved leftovers over the sink, and there’d go my suave image as a debonair man of culture. So instead you get eight random recollections.

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Hitchens interview

Catch this Hitchens interview while it’s still available. He’s lovably irascible. My favorite part:

Interviewer: Do you think you would win more converts to atheism if you were less dismissive of religious…

Hitchens: I have no idea, but I can’t be other than dismissive. I hear someone like that sheep-faced loon from [garbled…a previous caller] I have to say it sounds like bleating to me, and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed. And yes, hearing these bleatings from the church of England does remind me of that and I don’t feel any need to make converts by not saying what I think. I leave it to them to make their hypocritical, unctuous, pseudo-friendly statements in the hope of keeping people inside the church.

Andy Schlafly’s “success” story

Another major paper has a story on Conservapædia. I’m sure Andy is proud of his accomplishment — the truly stupid would be proud of promoting stupidity.

Schlafly, 46, started small, urging his students to post brief — often one-sentence — entries on ancient history. He went live with the site in November. In the last six months, it’s grown explosively, offering what Schlafly describes as fair, scholarly articles. Many have a distinctly religious-right perspective.

There’s some complaining at the end—there’s a rival wiki, RationalWiki, that comments on Conservapædia silliness, and some of its members also edit Conservapædia, prompting much outrage at those liberals who want to “destroy” them. I don’t think we can blame liberal mockery for these entries, though:

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