Culture Wars
tfk | April 14, 2008Tomorrow, NCSE is putting out a comprehensive response to the crockumentary called "Expelled: No Intelligence..." We're putting the finishing touches on now, despite the browbeating of Rob Crowther and Denyse O'Leary.
There will be more to say anon. I may even address "bittergate," a leading contender for "stupidest controversy ever" award. But hey, the election's not over yet!
Below the fold, secret, as yet unreleased, content from ExpelledExposed.com:
"the failure of intelligent design can readily be laid at the feet of its advocates, whose main activity appears to be to carp about the…
tfk | April 10, 2008The more that the producers of Expelled talk, the more they demonstrate their abject idiocy. Chris Heard transcribes part of producer Mark Mathis's discussion with Scientific American:
[SciAm editor] Mirsky: Why not also include comments from somebody like Ken Miller—
Mathis: Uh—
Mirsky: who is famously religious—
Mathis: well— [Laughs.]
Mirsky: and an evolutionary biologist.
Mathis: I would tell you this. And this is keeping in mind who you’re talking to is an associate producer. I don’t make decisions about who gets interviewed, and, and I don’t make decisions about if they’re interviewed…
tfk | April 8, 2008How pleasant to know Mr. [Crowther]
Who has written such volumes of stuff
Some think him ill-tempered and queer
But a few think him pleasant enough.
I can't say I know who those would be, though Mr. Lear would undoubtedly have been worth knowing.
Mr. Crowther, flack for the Disco. Inst., is not nearly as funny as Edward Lear, alas. In his latest semiliterate scrawling at the Disco. blog, he mangles a paper about directed evolution of RNA enzymes. Actually, given that papers are hard to read, Crowther decided to mangle a press release about the paper. After mistaking the story for a comedy…
tfk | April 1, 2008Mike Dunford has a great rundown of the ruling in ASCI v. Stearns, a lawsuit in which Christian schools attempted to force the University of California system to rework its admissions standards to accommodate some atrocious textbooks. The court dismissed all of the motions for summary judgment by the schools, and granted the UC system's request for partial summary judgment. A trial will sort out whether the decision not to give credit for courses was properly rooted in UC policy. Claims that the policy itself is biased were tossed out, along with a range of claimed violations of religious…
tfk | March 31, 2008The York Daily Record (known for its coverage of the Dover ID trial) interviews Barack Obama:
Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design. What's your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?
A: "I'm a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there's a difference between science and faith. That doesn't make…
tfk | March 20, 2008If you make a movie that falsely claims there's a massive conspiracy to expel dissenting voices, it's probably unwise to then expel dissenting voices.
And if you are going to pass photographs around to security guards and instruct them that certain people are threats to your movie, and must be expelled, you might as well have the guards be on the lookout not only for PZ Myers, an innocuous professor from a small liberal arts college in the backwoods of Minnesota, but also for the biologist, best-selling author of numerous books, and TV star Richard Dawkins. Just on the off chance that…
tfk | March 12, 2008Michael Heller, this year's Templeton Prize winner, may be more willing to merge science and religion than many scientists are, but he's no pal of ID. In a statement at the press conference announcing the award, he explained:
Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories, that ascribe the great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes, should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They…
tfk | February 27, 2008Making Light reminds us of William F. Buckley's greatest hits:
“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” —William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957
He continued defending nonsense in erudite ways through his long and often tedious career:
What we contend is that everyone should acknowledge…
tfk | February 26, 2008Bruce Chapman, president of the creationist Disco. Inst., complains about "young adults talking about politics and making fools of themselves in television and radio interviews." This is already rich, coming from a group that hosts such intellectual lowlifes as Johnny West and Billy Dembski. But the comedy doesn't stop there.
Chapman, whose organization encourages school administrators to disregard advice offered by the leading scientific societies, explains that:
many no longer learn much history in school, they no longer study "civics" (the way our form of representative government…
tfk | February 25, 2008Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds - New York Times:
More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.…
The report shows, for example, that every religion is…
tfk | February 12, 2008
199 years ago, in a log cabin in Kentucky, a boy was born to a pair of farmers on the American frontier. His parents named him Abraham, after the father prepared to sacrifice his own divinely promised son when called to do so by his God, and who, the Apostle Paul said, "against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations."
Abraham's first son, Isaac, is said to be the direct ancestor of all Jewish peoples, while his son Ishmael claimed as the scion of the Arabs, including Muhammad the founder of Islam. These lines of descent are woven through centuries of…
tfk | February 7, 2008Guillermo Gonzalez, Privileged Planet author and self-styled ID martyr, lost his last administrative appeal of his tenure denial. He has previously stated that he is looking for other tenure-track jobs, and I'm confident that some Bible college will be glad to take him.
Whether Disco. Inst. and Gonzalez' lawyers will follow up on implied threats to file suit over the tenure denial remain to be seen. Such suits are risky business, since they dramatically reduce the likelihood that you'll get hired for a different job while you're in the process of suing your former employer. Gonzalez hasn't…
tfk | January 9, 2008At hearings on new science standards in Florida, bizarre misconceptions seem to be the rule:
"I think they could be teaching a lie," Oscar Howard, superintendent of Taylor County Public Schools said of evolution. "There's not a place on me where they took the tail off."
Unless he is suggesting that the new standards, which would finally place Florida among the states whose standards use the word "evolution," are also pushing bizarre Lamarckian evolutionary ideas, this statement is a non sequitur. The Taylor County school board recently passed a motion condemning the new standards.
The…
tfk | January 2, 2008Thoughts from Kansas has won two Best of 2007 contests. An entry about the vacuity of intelligent design will be in Open Lab 2007, an anthology of the best science blogging of 2007. And my nomination of "The Vitteruvian Man," David Vitter, for Talking Points Memo's Golden Dukes award, prevailed.
In a normal year, Vitter's multistate whoremongering (possibly while wearing diapers) would have been a shoo-in for the category of Best Scandal: Sex and Generalized Carnality. The year that just ended had a bumper crop of elaborate sex scandals, though, from Larry Craig's infamous "wide stance"…
tfk | December 26, 2007Casey Luskin is upset. Iowa Citizens for Science responded to Luskin's press conference on behalf of Guillermo Gonzalez a few weeks ago with their own press release, a release which mentioned that "None of his [Gonzalez's] graduate students had completed their programs." Luskin complains that the statement wasn't removed in response to an email from Luskin to Iowa CFS, which stated:
Again, that statement is completely false. The truth is that in 2001, soon before Gonzalez left the University of Washington (UW) join the faculty at ISU, he served as the primary advisor to a UW doctoral…
tfk | December 20, 2007WITH BONUS DOUBLE DACTYL and no limerick.
Higgledy Piggledy
Michael J. Behe (phud)
sees in bacteria
wee little boats.
Reducing complex fla-
gellomachinery
weakens religion which
Behe promotes.
tfk | December 8, 2007Casey Luskin continues his misguided complaints about ISU's decision not to grant Guillermo Gonzalez tenure. He approvingly quotes this passage, originally by Wired:
Though out-of-context email excerpts can be misleading, statements like "this is not a friendly place for him to develop further his IDeas” make it sound like Gonzalez was not, as the university insisted, judged solely on the content of his astronomical scholarship.
Here is the problem with this line of argument, one that Luskin has pushed pretty hard throughout this process.
If we assume that Gonzalez's work on ID (his "IDeas…
tfk | December 6, 2007There once was a man from Seattle
Who engaged evolution in battle.When the dust settled down
his work, it was found,
Was made of all hat and no cattle.
NOW WITH BONUS DOUBLE DACTYL!Higgledy Piggledy
Guillermo Gonzalez.
"God-privileged planet" books
made him his name.
Tenure's refused, so this
theoastronomer
begs for his job lest he
file a claim.
Your turn. (Or do the LOL-version).
A mildly cruder limerick on the same theme is below the fold:
Gonzales from down in Des Moines
saw in research two sides of a coinHe saw fame on the head
but got in its stead
not the tail, but parts nearer the…
tfk | December 4, 2007As fair a definition as any of Newtonism.
Suck Science on FunnyOrDie.com
I think that we can probably fit Intelligent Vacuuming into the "big tent" of Intelligent Falling. Questions about whether objects are pushed or pulled can safely be left until after we destroy the naturalism of modern physics, and replace it with a theistic science.
tfk | November 29, 2007Chris Comer's firing has been getting a lot of attention, and one question keeps getting asked: "What kind of soul-torturing electronic missive about an academic talk could be so dastardly as to result in someone getting fired merely for forwarding it?"
Read on only if you are prepared to enter a Lovecraftian world filled with squishy tentacles and phrases like "expert testimony":
Subject: Barbara Forrest in Austin 11/2
Dear Austin-area friends of NCSE,
I thought that you might like to know that Barbara Forrest will be speaking on "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse" in Austin on November 2,…