creationism
tfk | April 12, 2012Todd Wood is a professor at Bryan College, in Dayton, TN. Dayton, you'll recall, was the home of the Scopes trial, and Bryan College was named after Scopes's prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, and was founded in part to carry on Bryan's anti-evolution crusade. Wood himself is a prominent young earth creationist, a leader in the creationist answer to phylogenetics (baraminology), and director of Bryan's Center for Origins Research. Which is to say, he's a creationist's creationist.
And he's against the Tennessee monkey bill.
Last month, he wrote to Governor Haslam, asking him to oppose the…
sa smith | April 2, 2012The Young Earth Creationist Intelligent Design Creationist 'Academic Freedom' bill 'authored' by infamous Young Earth Creationist Intelligent Design Creationist 'Academic Freedomist' Sally Kern (introduced this year by King Gus of the Playground) is dead.
The Education Committee didnt even talk about it.
Cant wait to see the exact same bill introduced by the exact same Usual Suspects next year.
**rolleyes**
pharyngula | April 2, 2012So this past weekend, we had the Midwest Science of Origins conference here in Morris, Minnesota. At precisely the same time, about 190 miles north-north-east of us, in Bemidji, Minnesota, a team of lying clowns from the Institute for Creation Research were repeating the same bullshit that provoked our students to organize our conference. I hope the Bemidji State biology faculty were paying attention, and that their students are right now planning some remedial education for the community; I'd be happy to help if they want to contact me.
It was a seminar titled "Rebuilding the Foundation:…
gregladen | March 29, 2012This just in:
Baton Rouge, LA -- (March 27, 2012) -- At Senator Santorum's March 23rd rally in Pineville Louisiana, student activist, Zack Kopplin, had the chance to question the Senator about creationism laws. Kopplin, who has led the effort to repeal Louisiana's creationism law, the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act, asked Santorum about the Louisiana Science Education Act and Santorum's proposed amendment to the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which served as a model for Louisiana's law.
Kopplin asked, "In Louisiana we have a creationism law that's based off a 2002…
pharyngula | March 29, 2012What do you do on airplanes? I usually devour a book or two, usually something popcorny and light, sometimes something I need to get read for work. On my trip home from Washington DC, I lucked out: I was handed a book the day I took off, and it turned out to be a damned good read.
Jason Rosenhouse is my co-blogger at Scienceblogs — he's a mathematician, but he's also neck-deep in the evolution/creationism wars. He was in town for the Reason Rally (wait: from the description, he left before my talk. Cancel the review, gotta pan him instead…nah, I guess I'll forgive him this one time), and he…
sa smith | March 29, 2012So a lot of you saw my recent 'debate' with Pastor Steve Kern.
People who do not live in this part of the US often say that religious radicals like Kern, and his infamous wife Sally Kern, dont really exist. When people like me address/confront people like the Kerns, people who dont live in this part of the US like to say that I am misrepresenting Christianity/Christians, a beautiful, elegant, intelligent, thoughtful religion, that Christians take very seriously, spiritually and academically.
But, as you can plainly see, spiritual and academic dullards like the Kerns not only exist, but they…
gregladen | March 26, 2012Tennessee is where the famous Scopes Trial of 1925 played out, and more recently two state level state bills (one house and one senate) are in play in a move by legislatures to further enhance Tennessee's reputation as a place where people don't value education and would not know of valid scientific theory if it bit them on the ear.
You'all knew that if you've been following the news from there. Yesterday, an editorial was printed by four scientists who are rather fed up with Tennessee's playing fast and loose with reality, and it is worth a look.
... Even the religious mainstream has…
tfk | March 21, 2012The Florida Atlantic University newspaper reports:
Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: âHow does evolution kill black people?â she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesnât kill anyone.
And then, Carr became violent.
Another member of the class taped the outburst, though it's hard to follow much of what's going on.
A student told the paper that Kajiura "was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question⦠She asked it four…
tfk | March 21, 2012If you wonder why I haven't been blogging lately, it's because I've been trying to keep science safe in the Volunteer State; for instance, here's a great piece Huffington Post science editor Cara Santa Maria put together, including an interview with yours truly.
If you watch the NCSE front page (and you should), you'll see that it's almost all-Tennessee, all the time. Tennessee is getting ready to repeat an unfortunate part of its state's history, the Butler Act and Scopes trial of the 1920s.
Of course, creationism evolves, so the 21st century version won't take the same tack. In 1925,…
sa smith | March 18, 2012
Keep this one in your bookmarks for when someone tells you "AWWWWWW! UR JUST MAKING A CARICATURE OF CHRISTIANS! NO ONE ACTUALLY ACTS LIKE THAT!"
Yeah, that guy was for real.
The debate actually makes more sense if you watch it with the nonsensical closed captions turned on.
He is a real Evangelical Christian who, with his intellectual-equal wife, hold political sway in this state.
It. Is. Disgusting.
So why do something like this? Why give this jackass another forum? Why give the appearance of 'debate'?
1-- It was fun.
2-- Young one after young one who came up to me afterwords, SO…
sa smith | March 15, 2012Just a reminder for those of you in the OKC area that I will be debating Steve Kern (infamous husband of infamous Sally Kern) on the topic of Intelligent Design tonight!
Some of Kerns homies advertised for the event too:
Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee
* THURSDAY EVENING - OKC AREA - Dr. Steve Kern, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in OKC, will be debating an OU graduate student this Thursday evening, 7:00 p.m. on the question, "Should Intelligent Design be taught to our children in public schools? The debate will be held in the College Union on the campus of Oklahoma…
pharyngula | March 11, 2012Good news! The gorilla genome sequence was published in Nature last week, and adds to our body of knowledge about primate evolution. Here's the abstract:
Gorillas are humans' closest living relatives after chimpanzees, and are of comparable importance for the study of human origins and evolution. Here we present the assembly and analysis of a genome sequence for the western lowland gorilla, and compare the whole genomes of all extant great ape genera. We propose a synthesis of genetic and fossil evidence consistent with placing the human-chimpanzee and human-chimpanzee-gorilla speciation…
pharyngula | March 8, 2012That's the title of an academic science book. It sure sounds sciencey, doesn't it? It got accepted by Springer-Verlag for publication. And then inside it claims that one of their conclusions is that "conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life". Oooh, more of that fancy science talk. It must be taken seriously!
Only, it turns out that this book was being peddled as a contribution to the category of "Engineering and Applied Science" rather than biology, because if it were proposed to Springer-Verlag as a biology…
pharyngula | March 7, 2012It has the potential to be fun or a fizzle. The Discovery Institute is leaping to the defense of David Coppedge, a computer technician (don't be fooled, the DI is desperately straining to enhance his credentials) who was demoted and then fired at the JPL. Coppedge claims to be the victim of discrimination against his views on Intelligent Design creationism; the JPL has argued that he was out of line to be harassing scientists with nonsense, passing out DVDs of ID BS, pushing his silly creationist website, and basically wasting his time and not doing his job. They warned him, he persisted.…
pharyngula | March 7, 2012Those Australians…they recently ran a segment on their Dateline program featuring their fellow Australian Ken Ham and the Creation "Museum", which includes portions of an interview with me. Actually, I seem to be the only critic to get any airtime in the show, which is flattering, but I could have used a little more support!
Anyway, the show was recently aired, my name is played up as an atheist opponent of creationist nonsense, and now I'm suddenly receiving lots of email from Australian creationists because they want to persuade me to their foolish cause. And some of them are just weird. I'…
tfk | March 1, 2012From The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, Book Three of The Baroque Cycle. The Duchess of Oyonnax, in the court of Louis XIV, explains why good people do bad things:
In this world there are few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly. There used to be, at court, many practitioners of the Black Mass. Do you really think that all these people woke up one morning and said, "Today I shall worship and offer sacrifices to the Prince of Evil?" Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, desperate to find a husband, so that she would…
tfk | February 29, 2012David Klinghoffer is surprised that his Disco. 'tute colleagues managed to get an article published at the Huffington Post. Klinghoffer's colleague must've known this was coming, and HuffPo isn't notorious for refusing essays, so I can't fathom why it was any sort of surprise. Nor is "pleasant" the word that came to mind on reading the essay, or anything coming from Disco. Anyway, Klinghoffer asks us to "Try to Imagine Our Country's Founding if the Founders Had Not Been Advocates of Intelligent Design:
The Huffington Post pleasantly surprised us today with an excellent piece on the…
sa smith | February 28, 2012Second Annual Hot-Button DebateThe Oklahoma City chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State will host its second annual hot-button debate on Thursday, March 15, 2012, starting at 7:00pm and ending by 8:30pm. The location will be on the campus of Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC)...
The debaters will be Abbie Smith voicing opposition to the resolution: "Intelligent Design should be taught in public school science classrooms".
Debating in favor of the resolution will be Dr. Steve Kern of Olivet Baptist Church in Oklahoma City. http://www.olivetbaptistokc.com/
That…
gregladen | February 27, 2012Have you ever read Natural Theology by William Paley? One could say that in it he makes the famous "Watchmaker" analogy. But really, the entire book is little other than the watchmaker analogy. If you were to compare the boringess-interestingness factor of Paley's book with a similar number of pages of anything written by Darwin, it would look like this:
************************************************* Darwin
* Paley
where being over to the right is more interesting. And that could be ANYTHING by Darwin.
I have a small story to tell you (which you may have heard before) and then a…
gregladen | February 26, 2012Budget Travel is running one of those ill-fated Internet Polls to help make a list of the top 15 places to go for kids before they are 15. Sort of like bucket list but instead of dying you turn 15. One small problem is that the Creation Museum of Kentucky has been intruding in the top ten, even top five, of this list. You need to go there and vote for something else! Like, all the attractions that you happen to like that are lower than the Creation Museum at the moment.
Click here to help save the Youth of North America from certain doom!