Who the heck is ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith?

I’ve never heard of her before—I guess you have to be familiar with the routine quackery of the health food store to know of her—but she certainly sounds like a real piece of work. The Guardian has an entertaining exposé of her claims and her tactics. She’s one of those people who makes extravagant claims for dietary supplements that she sells, backing them up with loads of pretentious and utterly bogus pseudoscientific gobbledygook.

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Trained parrot awarded Ph.D.

This is a sad story of compartmentalization carried to an extreme: a Ph.D. student in the geosciences who is also young earth creationist. This is a tricky subject: religion is not a litmus test for awarding a degree, but supposedly depth and breadth of knowledge is. I say that you cannot legitimately earn an advanced degree in geology and at the same time hold a belief contrary to all the evidence, and that the only way you can accomplish it is by basically lying to yourself and your committee throughout the process—and look at this…the student agrees.

Asked whether it was intellectually honest to write a dissertation so at odds with his religious views, he said: “I was working within a particular paradigm of earth history. I accepted that philosophy of science for the purpose of working with the people” at Rhode Island.

And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.”

In other words, he was going through the motions. He was doing “research” on the distribution of mosasaurs 65 million years ago, but what he was actually doing was echoing ideas he disagreed with to fit the expectations of his advisors—he was a complete fraud.

I have a hard time imagining spending 4+ years working hard at something I believed was a complete lie, but this guy did it, and thinks he accomplished something. His motive clearly was not a love of science, but to acquire credentials under false pretenses that he could then use to endorse his ideology. What a waste of his time; I wouldn’t hire such a phony, and I don’t know anyone who would. Where could he end up working? But of course…

Today he teaches earth science at Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell where, Dr. Ross said, he uses a conventional scientific text.

“We also discuss the intersection of those sorts of ideas with Christianity,” he said. “I don’t require my students to say or write their assent to one idea or another any more than I was required.”

If his training was a lie, I guess he doesn’t have any scruples about lying a little more: I’ve seen the job ads from Liberty University, and a “young earth philosophy” is a prerequisite for teaching there. He teaches something called CRST 290, which is in a “religious studies” category, taught as part of their required instruction in “creation studies”.

CRST 290: History of Life

An interdisciplinary study of the origin and history of
life in the universe. Faculty of the Center for Creation
Studies will draw from science, religion, history, and
philosophy in presenting the evidence and arguments for
creation and evolution.

I think the University of Rhode Island might want to review their doctoral programs a bit. It looks like someone can slip through with only the most superficial knowledge of their field, and can admit to faking it throughout their entire training. This kind of slack in the standards diminishes the luster of degrees from RI.

It also says something even worse of Liberty University. They’ll hire any old hack to teach their courses.

‘Tube atheists

Lots of people have been emailing me about this: YouTube is getting weird about censoring accounts by atheists. This one fellow, Nick Gisburne, with a long history on the service had his account abruptly deleted due to its “inappropriate nature”—he’d read some excerpts of violent passages from the Koran, with no commentary at all. It’s bizarre—it’s apparently not that he was espousing atheism, which YouTube does not seem to object to, but that he read quotes that put Islam in a bad light.

This is a remix of the ungodly CNN panel, with refutations and arguments imbedded in response to the harpies’ wicked denunciations. Good stuff!And remember, we’re guessing Dawkins and Hitchens will be on CNN tomorrow at 8ET. Unless Paris Hilton steps on a poodle or something.

(via Freethought Weekly)

Sound!

Here’s a site full of interesting noises: freesound. You can search for anything, and it will return Creative Commons licensed sound samples; if you want the sound of a phone ringing, or wind chimes, or throatsinging, or thunderstorms, or someone being tortured, or a good laser death ray, there it is. I started looking for more organic things, like whale songs, crickets chirping, frogs croaking, bird songs, etc., and it’s amazing—all kinds of stuff turns up.

One creepy thing, though, if you have squeaky mattress. You’ll also discover that people are recording what their neighbors are doing late at night.

It’s very addictive. Now I have to get back to work on composing that genetics exam…

(via jill/txt)

“Shark after shark descends on the rotting flesh”

That’s a line in this video describing the scene when the South African police tow a beached whale carcass offshore—you can guess what it all looks like, if you’d rather not watch.

It just gets better, though. After the great white sharks have gorged themselves and are lolling about, the announcer declares that they have spotted the “tell-tale aspect of a large sexually aroused male”…

(via Byzantium’s Shores)

Evolution Sunday?

Today is Evolution Sunday. It’s that day when participating ministers will say a few supportive words about evolution from their pulpits, or as I prefer to think of it, when a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid beliefs and expand their pretense to intellectual authority by co-opting a few slogans.

As you might guess, I’m not exactly against the event, but I definitely do not support it. I’m sure a few readers are going to complain that I should be praising these efforts to get people to take baby steps in the right direction, but I just can’t do it.

I’m sorry, but when I see people in chains shuffle a few steps at the behest of their jailer, my heart isn’t in to shouting, “Hooray! You’re free!” You have a choice. You can go to church today, and among the hymns and prayers and magic rituals and chants to nonexistent beings, you can hear a few words in support of science; or you can refuse to support the whole rotten edifice of religion and stay home and read a good book. Which alternative do you think I would support?

Instead, I’m going to encourage you all to participate in my Enlightenment Sunday project. Skip church every week. Ignore the pleas of your priests. Donate money and time to charities of your choice directly, rather than through the intermediary of the church bureaucracy. Improve your brain with books and videos and conversations about science. Think skeptically. I’m sure the participants in Evolution Sunday mean well and are sincere in their wish to reconcile faith with science, but we’ll do far more to promote reason in this country if we withdraw from all participation in the church and let religion wither away from disuse, than we will by encouraging these modern day witch-doctors to spread their delusions.

Backtracking?

The DI certainly is obsessed. They recorded Olson at a screening of Flock of Dodos, and are now claiming that he backtracked on Haeckel’s use in textbooks. It’s only backtracking if you accept the DI’s false premise that he claimed in the movie that there was absolutely no sign of Haeckel’s diagram in biology text—a claim I’ve already shot down.

If they want to claim he backtracked, they should just quote the movie—you know, the part where he says the diagrams aren’t found in the textbooks “other than a mention that once upon a time Haeckel came up with this idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny”. Does qualifying a comment in the same sentence count as “backtracking”? To the DI, perhaps.

Wells’ false accusation against Randy Olson

The Discovery Institute is stepping up their smear campaign against Randy Olson and Flock of Dodos, and the biggest issue they can find is their continued revivification of Haeckel’s biogenetic law. They’ve put up a bogus complaint that Olson was lying in the movie, a complaint that does not hold up, as I’ll show you.

First, though, let’s simplify the debate. The Discovery Institute position is that any text that shows Ernst Haeckel’s ancient diagram of various embryos is guilty of fraudulently distorting the evidence for evolution. They have accused scientists of a conspiracy of lies, of using this known false diagram to buttress evolutionary theory.

If this were the case, then the worst case of mass market fraud around would have to be Wells’ own Icons of Evolution: it contains 4 versions of the Haeckelian diagram, including the original, and talks about it for 28 pages. Obviously, this is a criminal conspiracy to promote phony evidence for evolution.

Wait, wait, you protest: Wells’ book was explaining that Haeckelian recapitulation was wrong, and that there were both errors and intentional misrepresentations of embryos in that old work. That should be acceptable.

I would agree, except that the textbooks Wells is damning in Icons often do exactly the same thing! Those that do mention Haeckel and his biogenetic law do so as an example of a historically significant error. Some go on to explain what was correct and what was wrong in his ideas, but basically all are merely pointing out that here was an interesting but failed explanation from the late 19th century, that nonetheless exposes an interesting phenomenon that needs to be understood.

I would add that progress in evolutionary biology has led to better explanations of the phenomenon that vertebrate embryos go through a period of similarity: it lies in conserved genetic circuitry that lays down the body plan. Intelligent Design creationism has contributed absolutely nothing to either refuting Haeckelian ideas, which was the product of working biologists at the end of the 19th century, nor has it generated any better, testable explanations for the conservation of embryonic body plans.

Now what about the Discovery Institute’s claim that Olson was lying about Haeckel’s representation in modern texts?

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