The new creationist tactic?

They never rest, and you know the creationists are constantly probing, trying to find the next likely inroad into the schools. Sahotra Sarkar offers some concerns about what’s coming next in creationism—these seem like quite probable strategies to me.

As the physicist and astronomer Victor Stenger noted in the Skeptical Briefs newsletter last September, The Privileged Planet represents a new wedge in the creationists’ arsenal. Equally importantly, the Smithsonian episode shows how this new physics-based version of creationism is being propagated with unusual stealth. Biologists may now feel safe that the problem of combating creationism has moved out of their backyards to infest the haunts of the physicists. Some religious biologists have even endorsed the idea of a conscious creator of the universe, so long as it does not affect biological theory. For instance, the biochemist Ken Miller, who ably defends evolution against creationist charges in Finding Darwin’s God, goes on to claim that God created the universe with its laws and evolution is simply a result of these laws.

These moves are dangerous: once the creator enters the science classroom, even through the physicists’ backdoor, the room for mischief is enormous. Biologists would do well to remember that, ultimately, what has motivated creationists to action throughout history is the natural origin of the human species. Sooner or later creationists will return to the theory they fear and detest most: evolution by natural selection. Moreover, if religious dogma manages to breach the defenses of science, there is every reason to believe that it will proactively encroach on every other secular institution of society. The new stealth creationism is, in short, as dangerous as its older cousins, Intelligent Design and Young Earth creationism. It can and should be defeated in the same way they were.

We’ve seen this coming for a long time: the Discovery Institute has been pushing that fine-tuning argument for a while, and that line of argument makes an end run around one of our most successful debaters, Ken Miller, and also puts Francis Collins and many other theistic evolutionists on their side. We prickly, cranky, vociferous biologists, who’ve been fighting this nonsense for years and are ready to start roaring at the first attempt to smuggle a creationist onto a school board, are also going to be less effective—for instance, I don’t pay that much attention to the physics standards, and wouldn’t have any influence at all on physics teaching. We’d need more effort at the public school level in this discipline.

And, honestly, physics teachers are smart people, but they get even less training in coping with creationist arguments than biology teachers, and unfortunately, a lot of physics instructors and engineers and chemists have more sympathy for ID than do the biologists. Add to that problem the fact that a few notable evolutionists are perfectly willing to pass the headaches on to the physicists, conceding the Big Bang to a vague version of a god, and this could be a major worry.

Look out, Phoenix!

In a few weeks, on January 3-7, I’m going to be attending the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Phoenix. I’m going to be part of a panel in a Media Workshop, along with a few other names you might recognize:

Blogs are online “diaries” that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science bloggers P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula; http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/), Grrl Scientist (Living the Scientific Life; http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/), and John Lynch (Stranger Fruit; http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/) answer your questions about how blogging works, setting one up, finding things to write about, and using the medium for your classes, for research, or for educating the public.

Cool, hey? Even better, afterwards there will be a ten-round boxing match between me and John, with GrrlScientist doing the honors as the card girl (nah, not really…all three of us will probably just buy each other beers and get embarrassingly sloppy.)

The real coolness, though, is in the schedule: there are some great talks and posters going on at this meeting, and once I get the panel out of the way, I am going to thoroughly enjoy myself, learning new stuff. And yes, of course, I will be blogging the SICB meeting.

Gross “art”

What I really want to know is what Shelley was looking for when she stumbled across this: an art project to collect 1000 liters of human sperm and display it in a transparent cube. The Sperm Cube does not look like it was well thought out, I’m afraid.

One problem is the collection method. They just want donors to ejaculate into a vial, and mail it, unrefrigerated, to them. Would you like the job of opening tubes of rancid semen and dumping it into the cube?

Another is the health risk. Human fluids need to be treated as a biohazard—they can be ripe with nasty pathogens (HIV? syphilis?), and they do seem to be rather indiscriminate in who they’re accepting donations from.

Now look at the design. They’ve got a 1 meter cube full of a viscous fluid on top of their cooling element. Does that look efficient to you? There’s going to be a damp, runny slurry on the top and sides of that, and nothing will increase the visual appeal of a giant lump of frozen sperm than thriving multi-colored colonies of bacteria and fungi growing on it…unless, maybe, it’s nice squirming masses of maggots tunneling through the semi-congealed mass.

Do they have a disposal plan? This is not practical as a permanent display, and at some point they’re going to have to turn off the freezer and do something with the gunk.

I suspect this is a case where an artist really should consult with a biologist and an engineer before charging off into an insane project.

Reason #5 to vote for Pharyngula

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Look at this…Phil is sneaking around my back, recruiting people at the JREF to vote for him, as if he is the only skeptic in the running. He’s also tried to win people over on talk.origins. I’ll have you know I’ve been fighting for the forces of rationality for years now. I’ve debunked astrology, I’ve jumped down Deepak Chopra’s throat, I’ve skewered creationist cranks, and yes, I’ve even done movie reviews. There is also much more sex on a biology blog than you’ll ever find on a mere astronomy blog.

Although, I do have to grudgingly confess, Phil’s recent post about religious goons violating the lighting laws near Palomar Observatory was darned good stuff, too. So he gets it right now and then…it’s still not a good enough reason to vote for a sneaky squid-hater.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you’re a woo-woo or a eunuch.

P.S. You might also vote for GeekyMom. Geeky moms are the finest kind.

Neal Adams: pseudoscientific kook and artistic hack

Can you stand one more Gene-Ray-level internet crackpot? A reader sent me a link to this guy, Neal Adams, who has this insane “Growing Earth” idea. Forget all the physics and geology you think you knew—this animator and comic book publisher has invented his own solution, and it involves reworking particle physics (there are no electrons!) and making bizarre calculations, all ‘demonstrated’ with computer animation.

That last link give you another reason to despise this kook: he’s responsible for that awful annoying commercial with the big-eyed bee hawking allergy medicine. I hated that stupid bee—it was the work of someone who’d never even looked at an insect, and why did it have that dumb French accent?

Reason #4 to vote for Pharyngula

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Phil is still playing the speciesist card, and now he wants to invoke the so-called superiority of bony internal skeletons. There’s nothing wrong with a good hydrostatic skeleton, you know, it’s one of those useful innovations that allows a soft tissue to extend and become rigid. I’m sure Phil’s lovers have all wished he had one. (Perhaps that’s the source of the telescope fixation over there, a little rigid tube envy).

And look at how far he’s willing to go:

That is why I am promoting the “Defense of Vertebrates Act”. This legislation, which I will submit to the National Academy of Higher Mammals, states that affection, care, and declarations of ” Awwwww, isn’t that cute!” can only be given to animals with bones (and to whatever animal goes into making McNuggets).

If he’s going to do that, we’re going to have to restrict all declarations of “Thou art AWESOME!” to organisms other than the bone-bags he’s raving about. He can have the trivial “cute” adjective for all of gangly, clumsy concatenations of stick-like sprues he favors, and we’ll reserve “terrifying”, “slimy”, “spiny”, “oozing”, “gelatinous”, “tremendous”, and other such inspiring adjectives for the non-vertebrate biota—the majority, as we all know.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you like flaccidity.

Blame the pope…for everything!

A reader sent me a link to this very strange site, and I’ve been trying to determine whether it’s a satire or not. It seems the answer is…not. There’s a huge amount of kook screed here.

We get to learn that we Americans are actually living in Cabotia, named after the one true discoverer of North America, John Cabot (oh, and since North and South America are all one connected land mass, he gets to claim both continents.) Pope Pius IX had something to do with Lincoln’s assassination, and Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a conspiracy by Nelson Rockefeller.

The author is not a fan of Catholicism: the pope is the anti-christ.

His science is also wacky. He’s an anti-vaccination nut. Albert Einstein was a “lazy dog” whose wife actually wrote his books, and he was a creature cobbled up to hide the most important discovery of all time: the earth doesn’t move. The sun orbits the earth once every 24 hours, while the moon orbits us once every 24 hours and 50 minutes. Geosynchronous satellites are truly stationary, because “at exactly 22.300 miles above the equator, the force of gravity is cancelled by the centrifugal force of the rotating universe.” Please don’t ask me to explain that.

As you might expect, he doesn’t care much for Darwin, either, but there’s a twist: he dislikes three Darwins. Erasmus Darwin, well, he was just crazy. Charles, he stole his theory from the Egyptians, and lied about the Patagonian giants (What? Get used to it; this is a mind unhinged at work). But perhaps the really wicked Darwin was George.

You don’t usually hear much about George Darwin. He was Charles’ son, and he grew up to be an astronomer and mathematician. And, it seems, he published a book about the tides—which is entirely cockamamie if you know the earth doesn’t rotate. I guess astronomers would tend to be anathematics as far as geocentrists are concerned, and an astronomer named Darwin…? In the mind of a conspiracy theorist? Heady stuff.

Before you decide the author of these web pages is totally nuts, though, he’s quick to reassure us that he doesn’t believe the earth is flat. Flat-earthers are insane, unlike geocentrists who know the pope is out to rule the world.

If there were a god, he’d make Deepak Chopra shut up

This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra’s endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I’m sure, though, that he’ll find other things to babble about.

In this one, he claims he’s going to deal with objections that people have brought up to his previous inanity; he doesn’t, really, and the few things he does choose to highlight expose the fact that he hasn’t been listening to the criticisms. He only makes four rather incoherent points.

  1. Chopra has claimed that Dawkins believes in a purely random universe, which is complete nonsense, of course, and certainly Dawkins claims nothing of the kind. Chopra’s response is to say that “Dawkins stoutly maintains that genetic mutations are random”, which is a true, but incomplete statement, and further, Chopra seem to think that suggesting that “atoms and molecules know what they are doing” is a rebuttal, rather than evidence that he is koo-koo for cocoa puffs.

  2. Chopra thinks that when someone says God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that means they are condemning “art, music, truth, beauty, etc.” This is just stupid stereotyping on his part, in which he wrongly assumes that godlessness entails a denial of human values.

  3. His third point will leave you gawping in astonishment. He’s trying to argue that the brain is not the source of the mind, and he makes a banana argument. “I want to eat a banana, and once I do, my brain carries out the necessary action”…he’s simply asserting that the “I” precedes the biological process of the brain that generates an action, rather than considering the possibility that the “I” is also a consequence of the activity of the brain. He’s surprised at this idea: “How in the world do our thoughts manage to move the molecules in our brain?” It’s a classic example of being stumped entirely because you’ve phrased the question in an invalid way.

  4. His final point is the same old excuse of theistic apologists everywhere: that Dawkins is dealing with a crude and stupid version of religion, not the sophisticated, clever, wonderfully enlightened kind of religion he practices. Someday, someone is going to have to tell me about this brilliant version of religion, because I’ve never found it (I’ve looked), and if Chopra’s is the kind of mind that emerges from his faith, I don’t think I want any part of it.

He also asserts that materialistic science is “a model that is quickly crumbling”. He might be right in that, but only because his kind are fostering stupidity and ignorance, two properties that are antithetical to science. He seems to be proud of that, though.

Borat funny and enlightening … … … … … … NOT!

I finally saw Borat last night, and I’m afraid I was unimpressed. There were a few funny moments, there were a few horrifying moments where he raised a mirror to our culture to make us squirm (the cheerfully eliminationist cowboy at the rodeo, for instance, or those appallingly stupid frat boys), but mostly it was incoherent, weird, and rude for rude’s sake. There was a scene with two naked men wrestling in a hotel that was nothing but vulgar slapstick, and while I’ve got nothing against a little slapstick now and then, it just didn’t advance the film anywhere.

I think Sacha Baron Cohen is capable of flashes of brilliant satire, but he lacks the chops to assemble them into a coherent movie.