creationism
pharyngula | August 10, 2011Why? This makes no sense. Ken Ham is putting up a for-profit theme park, has already got big sales tax breaks from the state of Kentucky, and now we learn that he's also getting a major break on property taxes.
The property tax agreement means the Ark Encounter would pay 25 percent of the local taxes due on 800 acres of property where the $150 million theme park will be built. Mayor Rick Skinner says the reduced property taxes will generate far more revenue than unoccupied land.
Well, with that logic, we all ought to get tax cuts on our homes to just slightly more than the valuation of an…
pharyngula | August 7, 2011This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of crap.
(via Skepchick.)
(Also on FtB)
pharyngula | August 4, 2011I've got a lovely crocoduck tie, but maybe I need a new pigbird tie. Look! Evolution is impossible! It's like a flying pig!
This is somenew awful short video from Answers in Genesis. It's slick and fast and just babbles rapid-fire lies at the viewer — don't stop, don't think, you might catch on to the nonsense!
It makes precisely two discrete claims that it claims disprove evolution. All you have to do is watch this video and yay, you're done, you can forget that science stuff and move on to loving Jesus. Here are the arguments:
There is no known observable process by which new genetic…
pharyngula | August 3, 2011I can't believe we elected any of these hypocritical loons to office anywhere. Look at the shenanigans in Dayton, Ohio.
Kelly Kohls, who was elected in Springboro on a platform of fiscal responsibility two years ago, requested last week the district's curriculum director look into ways of providing "supplemental" instruction dealing with creationism. Fellow member, Scott Anderson, who was elected with Kohls when the district was struggling financially, supports his colleague's idea.
"Creationism is a significant part of the history of this country," Kohls said. "It is an absolutely valid…
pharyngula | August 1, 2011I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia's redefinition of Archaeopteryx's status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn't. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy, ignorant claims in this short passage that I'll answer one by one.
Precisely when has any evolutionist reconsidered either a) the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection1 or b) the corollary and requisite hypothesis that life evolved from non-life2, as a…
pharyngula | July 30, 2011We all knew this was coming. Xiaotingia, the newly described feathered dinosaur, suggests a reevaluation of the taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx, so the creationists are stumbling all over each other to crow about the failure of science…which doesn't make any sense, since reconsidering hypotheses in the light of new evidence is exactly what science is supposed to do.
David Menton and Ken Ham appear in WhirledNutDaily to say that 1) it's all a lie anyway, so this evidence can't teach us anything new, and 2) forget Archaeopteryx! It's just another dinosaur!
Uncommon Descent, the intelligent…
pharyngula | July 26, 2011I've received a couple of shocked emails from people lately, about something called Dinosaur World. It's a set of three theme parks, in Plant City, Florida, Cave City, Kentucky, and Glen Rose, Texas (that last one probably set off alarm bells already) which feature life-size fiberglass and concrete dinosaurs in a park-like setting. They also have a web site and blog which has some popular appeal: all of the entries in the blog are short descriptions of dinosaurs, with a photo, geared to the level a young child could understand. Here's an example:
Maiasaura was a large, plant-eating, duck-…
tfk | July 25, 2011Sorry for not posting an update last Friday, but I was in the Board meeting and then on a plane. I gather most of you found the news update at NCSE's website, where traffic hit record levels.
As you recall, the Texas State Board of Education met on Thursday as the Committee of the Full Board to hear public testimony and to debate among themselves as much as was feasible. Friday was the official board meeting, when the final votes on new science supplements were taken. In the end, all of the good supplements were approved (some with minor tweaks still to be made) and the creationist…
pharyngula | July 24, 2011Behind all the sweet imagery of the animals willingly marching two by two into the Ark, there had to have been eight people going insane.
pharyngula | July 23, 2011Casey Luskin has been at it again. The underwhelming squeak toy of the Discovery Institute, the good Christian kid with an undergraduate degree in earth sciences who couldn't cope with reality so he went for a law degree instead, has written another of his uninformed screeds explaining evolutionary developmental biology to the masses, despite knowing nothing about the subject himself, except what Jonathan Wells shat into his cranium. And I'm not going to waste any more time with it; I've hammered home the stupidity of his comments often enough recently. He also wrote an appalling pile of…
mikethemadbiologist | July 23, 2011Mike Konczal is disappointed in the behavior of one of the members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission ('FCIC'), Peter Wallison, movement conservative and member of the rightwing faith tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Like many conservatives, Wallison blames the housing crisis on efforts to provide African-Americans with loans, even though, as Konczal explains, that's simply not true. Here's what the FCIC was charged to do:
First off, let's remember what this document is. The FCIC report was designed to be our age's Pecora Commission, a collection and investigation of…
pharyngula | July 22, 2011Answers in Genesis has done something really stupid (I know, that's no surprise). The Creation "Museum" has some new exhibit, and they're trying to come up with a name for it.
With a poll.
And here's the best thing: it's on facebook, and it's a poll in which you can suggest names. It's up over 30 suggestions now, and most of them are making fun of the thing. Go ahead and add your own ideas, but vote for a good one, too: so far, "From Ignorance to Stupidity…a Journey" is leading in the mocking names, so I suggest we all throw our votes behind that one.
pharyngula | July 22, 2011Texas, that hotbed of creationism, has been reviewing curriculum supplements, including some additions composed by creationists. Governor Rick Perry recently appointed a hard conservative, Barbara Cargill, to head the state board of education. It was looking gloomy.
And now the board voted 8:0 to reject the creationists and approve good evolutionary biology standards. I'm impressed. But I can't quite shake the feeling that they've got something devious in mind.
Just maybe, though, the board is wising up.
tfk | July 21, 2011As folks who follow me on twitter know, today was a pretty good day in Texas. I'm here watching the board vote on science supplements for public schools. I put together a 20 page report on the flaws in a supplement provided by International Databases, LLC, and presented it to the board. Most of the speakers opposed the ID, LLC supplement, and urged adoption of the supplements recommended by expert review committees.
As often happens, board member Ken Mercer asked many of the folks who testified a series of carefully crafted questions, meant somehow to trap them. It wasn't totally obvious…
tfk | July 20, 2011Tomorrow, I'll be speaking to the Texas Board of Education to urge them not to undermine science textbooks, and to reject any supplement that includes creationist content. The only textbook supplement I know of that was submitted containing such creationist content comes from a one-man publisher called International Databases. ID, LLC's supplement, not surprisingly, promotes IDC.
If only that were its greatest flaw. The supplement is rife with errors, probably over a thousand all told. It doesn't address all the topics required from supplements. And there's this:
I've driven from Salt Lake…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011How do people stomach this stuff? Bill Dembski was on the Bible Answer Man broadcast, so I tried to listen — the host goes on and on about his dogma, and it makes no sense. "Here's what the Bible says, it's true, therefore you have to believe." And then he introduces Dembski as someone who uses science to justify Christian superstition in a "biblically satisfying" way.
Then Delusional Dembski gets on, and the first thing he does is claim the evidence for design in nature has been getting stronger and stronger…and he claims that the reason scientists haven't been embracing it is the problem of…
tfk | July 18, 2011This Thursday, the Texas Board of Education will vote to adopt science textbook supplements.
You'll recall that the board approved new science standards a couple years ago, and that they were a mixed bag. They dropped inaccurate language about "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories (language used to attack evolution in textbooks last time they did textbook adoption). But they stuck in a line about "all sides of the evidence," whatever that means, and inserted language requiring greater scrutiny for evolutionary concepts than for all others, and inserting creationist ideas about…
tfk | July 15, 2011Remember when I invited readers to take a survey on the Miss USA evolution answers? And I was kinda vague about why I was doing it? At last it can be told, I was working on a guest blog post at Scientific American. You should read the whole thing, but here's the bit about how I used the survey data:
Watching the video and reading the transcript, it is obvious that many contestants were conflicted in their views, and quite a few had to discover their views on the spot. Instead of mocking these women for struggling with the issue, it should be said that most Americans probably go through a…
tfk | July 14, 2011I'm here in Las Vegas, and already my work is done. Genie Scott, Occidental College's Don Prothero, and I did a workshop at 9am today about Defending Evolution in Classrooms.
Planning for this was complicated, because we wanted it to be a true workshop, i.e., to have interactive aspects, and time for people to work through exercises in small groups. But we didn't know what sort of crowd to expect for the first workshop of the first day. Chatting about our plan, we joked about how embarrassing it'd be if only 3 people showed up, but we planned for about 30, and made 60 copies of the…