Culture Wars
tfk | March 11, 2010Today's Washington Times covers the nexus between global warming denial and creationism, quoting from my ScienceProgress piece to show that:
diehard scientists are striking back.
Yipee-kay-yay muppethuggers!
tfk | March 10, 2010Upchucky award runner-up and Disco. 'Tute staffer Casey Luskin is upset. Last fall, we were on a panel together, and I mocked his defense of the neo-creationist "orchard model" described in Explore Evolution as claiming that life "poofed" into existence. In the course of one of Casey's regularly scheduled bouts of logorrhea, he decides to respond to this claim:
I presented some of this information discussed below at the St. Thomas conference last fall, and NCSE staff member Josh Rosenau repeatedly alleged that I was making a âpoofâ hypothesis for the origin of monkeys.
No. That is not what…
cevans | March 10, 2010
A couple of years ago, I was poking around in a European art museum and came across an exhibit of exquisitely beautiful Eastern Orthodox religious paintings, "icons." Beyond being visually striking -- they have an austere, hieratic, distant quality -- they are also, I realized at the time, in a way, scientific.
Alright, I know, that's a wild statement. But hear me out.
A religious icon is more than a painting. It has a semiotic value that's highly codified, a language and practical purpose of its own that sets it apart from all the other representational art preceding our modern era of…
tfk | March 9, 2010Casey Luskin, intrepid Upchucky also-ran, is aflutter. Last week's New York Times story about creationists and global warming deniers partnering up has the whole Disco. 'Tute in something of a tizzy, but Casey's outrage is of a special sort.
Casey, you see, thinks the the Times misdescribed Selman v. Cobb County. The article states:
The legal incentive to pair global warming with evolution in curriculum battles stems in part from a 2005 ruling by a United States District Court judge in Atlanta that the Cobb County Board of Education, which had placed stickers on certain textbooks…
tfk | March 9, 2010When I started tweeting (@JoshRosenau), I was unconvinced. I'm already overwhelmed with silliness and interesting people writing interesting stuff, so why would I a) want to read more and b) want to restrict myself and others to 140 characters. And the character limit still grates, though I'm learning to have smaller ideas.
But what's nice about twitter is that it's a massive conversation across continents with the people you like chatting with. And the 140 character limit eliminates the throat-clearing and extended explanations that tend to come into contentious blog posts. You can link…
tfk | March 6, 2010Attention conservation notice: This post should have been broken into about three parts, but it's written now and I don't care. Read it at your risk. Consists of points I've made before to little avail, thinly veiled disdain for people I respect, and cartoons.
As I've said before, reading anti-accommodationists is bad for the health and bad for the brain. It was a habit I kicked, and getting back to it, even slightly, has not been a cheering experience.
It reminds me of the reason I don't write about Israel/Palestine. One side commits some atrocity, and this leads the other side to commit…
tfk | March 5, 2010The Disco. 'Tute is displeased. Or perhaps not. They love attention, especially in a venue like the New York Times. But they hate having attention drawn to their agenda or the details of what they advocate. Thus, we getâ¦
Shorter Disco.:
Yes we think AGW and evolution are bogus, but how dare people draw attention to our views!
Disco had started calling for a wahmbulance even before yesterday's front-page-above-the-fold article about efforts to link global warming with creationism. Then it got published, and the calls to whine-one-one started rolling in. "Oh my ZOMG," the pearl-clutching…
tfk | March 4, 2010James Hrynyshyn has a great response to John West's quote in today's New York Times article on creationism and global warming:
Any efforts to ensure science education is "balanced," in any subject, must be accompanied by reassurances that science classes will stick to science, and not embrace misinformation from ideological or religious think tanks masquerading as proponents of science.
How can one tell the difference? It can be challenging for dilettantes not familiar with doing a little work. For example, when John West of Seattle's creationist Discovery Institute says things like this:
"…
tfk | March 3, 2010For the last year or so, I've been in touch with a reporter at the New York Times about a growing trend of creationists adding global warming to their enemies lists. Tomorrow, her story â Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets â hits the front page of the paper of record:
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nationâs classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.
In Kentucky, a bill recently introduced in the Legislature would encourage teachers to discuss…
tfk | March 1, 2010It's true that there's a lot of overlap between creationists and global warming deniers. Lots of creationists have been conditioned to reject claims of scientific consensus, and so throw in with the deniers.
However, the global warming deniers know that creationism is bad science, and that linking themselves to it would just be embarrassing, which leads to the possibility of internecine warfare, as creationists try to glom onto global warming denial and global warming deniers try desperately to shake them loose.
To whit, this slide from a presentation by global warming denier Richard Lindzen…
tfk | February 26, 2010I've got a column at Science Progress arguing just that (in my internal accounting, McLean was Scopes II, Kitzmiller was Scopes III):
Legislators in South Dakota seem bent on becoming anti-science pioneers. After a century of anti-evolution policies and legislation across the United States, the South Dakota legislature is set to become the only one in the nation to micromanage what teachers should say about global warming.
This attack on global warming was prefigured in the announcement last August by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it planned to gin up âthe Scopes monkey trial of the…
tfk | February 17, 2010Martin Cothran, defender of Holocaust deniers and sometime friend to the eugenicists at the Disco. 'Tute, unleashes his inner Freudian psychoanalyst to determine that I have "logic envy." He seems to think his perverted logic is so big and beautiful that everyone else must want the same thing.
The nubbin of his argument is that he was not, when last we met, advancing a tu quoque argument about climate change. He does this by focusing on a line of argument I ignored as irrelevant, meanwhile admitting that he was using a tu quoque where I said he was. The relevant line is:
I simply pointed…
tfk | February 1, 2010Via Lamebook via BoingBoing, an update of the classic beachside homily:
"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand is when I was off kicking the janitor in the 'nads."
tfk | January 26, 2010Darwin biopic Creation premiered in seven movie theaters across the country last weekend, earning $53,073, an average of $7,582. That's not a lot of money, but at roughly $10/ticket, this works out to 760 viewers per theater, a solid showing. I know the theater I saw it at was full for their 7 pm showing.
Compare that to creationist schlockumentary Expelled: No Intelligenceâ¦, released two springs ago. Part of its promotional strategy was a big opening weekend; coordinating with the owners of Regal movie theaters, they opened in 1,052 theaters, earning $2,970,848, or $2,824 per theater (…
tfk | January 21, 2010This weekend marks the U.S. premiere of Creation, featuring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife Emma. It's an adaptation of Darwin descendant Randal Keynes' Annie's Box, an account of Darwin's struggle to decide whether to publish the Origin while overcoming the death of his favorite daughter.
I got to see a preview of it last fall, and it's a tremendous film. The history had to be tweaked here and there to make the picture hang together, but the science, the ideas, and the basic sweep of the history are accurate. As a bit of a nerd about such things, that's…
tfk | January 18, 2010Some time back, we had an interesting discussion about whether fiction contains truth or not. I tended to think it did, though a different sort than that found in science textbooks, while some commenters argued that no, fiction might have metaphor and analogy and references to the author's state of mind or whatever, but did not have any intrinsic truth.
This was all balled up in the accommodationism clusterfuck, so actual productive dialog tended to get bogged down.
Anyway, science fiction publisher Tor has a neat essay on its website about how to read SF (via), which bears on these issues…
tfk | January 18, 2010Max Lampenfeld of Lehigh Township is upset. The Allentown, PA Morning Call had an illustration referencing the Big Bang, and Max won't take that lying down:
The disturbing part of the article is the way the ''Big Bang'' is presented as fact, when it is only a theory and cannot be proven, at least not yet.
Forget about ''In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth'' -- what really happened was, there was this Big Bang!
Mr. Lampenfeld notes that the paper recently re-ran the famous "Yes, Virginia" letter, and concludes by summarizing the entire conflict:
Evolution, global warming…
tfk | January 8, 2010Billy Dembski is concerned. His latest book, The End of Christianity, was attacked by a Baptist minister as a work of theistic evolution, and Dembski defended his honor by charging that windmill:
Johnny T. Helms' concerns about my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY as well as his concerns about my role as a seminary professor in the SBC are unfounded. I subscribe to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. I believe Adam and Eve were literal historical persons specially created by God. I am not, as he claims, a theistic evolutionist. Within the…
tfk | January 8, 2010This headline is hardly news, but still noteworthy. A few days ago, Todd Wood (a young earth creationist from Bryan College, in Dayton, TN) noted an article in ICR's Acts & Facts on trilobite tracks by his predecessor at Bryan, creationist Kurt Wise:
"Why would dozens of feet of rock have tracks but not the animals that made them?" asks Wise. He proposes that the Flood uniquely solves this dilemma.
He quotes Wise:
What if, when the "fountains of the great deep were broken up" (Genesis 7:11), the spreading waters surprised the trilobites living on the ocean bottom? As the water became…
tfk | December 26, 2009ID-blog Telic Thoughts, between efforts at debunking 9/11 and denying the last few decades worth of climate research, has time for A Christmas Story. Shorter version:
For Jack Bauer so loved the world that he sent his only daughter out into it, then died in her arms after she was brutally raped by drug-selling white slavers. And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.
Personally, I think it's nice to celebrate the notion of peace on earth and good will toward all more than vigilante fantasies, but whatever nogs your egg, I guess.