Remember: watch your local PBS station tonight for the premiere of the documentary on the Dover trial, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. Imagine how the creationists will writhe and squeak about all the people seeing their fraud and failure exposed.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
We have a number of school board members and citizens across Florida who need to watch this program. Evolution is proposed to be included in the statewide science standards (the word isn’t in the current standards) and it’s amazing how people are coming out of the woodwork to oppose it. See the Florida Citizens for Science blog for the latest on the craziness here. It isn’t pretty. They need to learn a lesson or two from Dover.
http://www.flascience.org/wp/
I think we could apply the judge’s use of the description “breathtaking inanity” to cover all discussions of ID, not just that school boards!
For those of us 5.7 or billion of us who are not USAian or resident in that lovely nation will there be access on that wonderful tube of delights: Teh IntarWebz?
Come on America, the rest of the world wants to see IDCists get spanked on PBS and we want to see it ASAP. Get your shit together! :angry:
;-)
Louis
P.S. I’m serious: will this be available somewhere?
Oh goody. It is being aired (cabled?) a number of times in my area. I may have to watch it on Saturday. I will be running a lab tonight until 9PM and I don’t have a Tivo hooked up. The VCR died years ago.
-DU-
I believe it will be available online after tonight. check here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/?campaign=pbshomefeatures_1_novabrjudgmentday_2007-11-13
The educated PBS folks in my area judged that it was best to put this on in the middle of the night/very early morning, followed by a Saturday afternoon.
Nova
Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
A 2005 law suit about intelligent design.
Wednesday, November 14, 1:00 AM
Wednesday, November 14, 4:00 AM
Saturday, November 17, 5:00 PM
Way to go.
“Imagine how the creationists will writhe and squeak”
Expect more constant lying, especially from the Disco Institute.
Thanks CleveDan. It’s available there on the 16th of Nov. Nice!
I cannot wait.
Louis
School is supposed to be about fundamentals. Why should we waste money and time on a subject that has not even been fleshed out enough to be a proper theory? No predictive power, not useful in other subjects and there is mounting evidence against macroevolution.
Microevolution perhaps, but what good is this to students? Better would be to spend the time learning something useful like statistics or how to balance a checkbook.
8 PM in Indianapolis. It’s a date! Now, where is the popcorn . . . .
I predict there is a high probability of a troll-infestation of this thread. It, of course, is not certain, because it’s not linking to a wing-nut blog. But, I’m sure there are enough deluded cultural warriors that someones got to make an appearance.
I’ll be sure to make popcorn.
On a related subject, I went to Amazon to write a book review on “The God Delusion” and discovered that they have customer forums. There are forums relating directly to books, but also general forums. I wandered around and found a number of discussions in the religion forums that were rather interesting. A surprising number of atheists hang out there, to the consternation of many of the Christian posters, and I joined in a number of conversations. After doing this for a couple of weeks, all I can say is that the experience is akin to hitting yourself in the head with a hammer – it feels really good when you stop.
Getting through to religious people is incredibly difficult. I wasn’t really surprised by this. What I was surprised at was how many people who claim to hold higher degrees in the sciences are practicing Christians. The mental gymnastics required to be able to be a scientist and blindly believe in the inerrancy of the Bible is simply astounding. Knocking down their arguments is child’s play, but they don’t even realize they’re getting their asses handed to them because they can’t divorce themselves from their beliefs long enough use their brains. I found the twilight zone.
I made a disparaging remark about the Discovery Institute and had someone demand that I show how my qualifications were superior to those of the DI. My reply: I never had frontal lobotomy.
So if you’re looking for some cheap thrills or a chance to see the mind of a creationist in action, you now have a new destination.
devolution – I think learning where living things came from is more fundamental than how to balance a checkbook. Too bad your education didn’t include it.
#9 edited for clarity:
School is supposed to be about fundamentals. Why should we waste money and time on a subject that doesn’t show enough flesh? No nudity, not useful in other subjects and then there is the problem of mounting macroevolution.
Microevolution perhaps, but what good is this to a student who needs a macroevolution? Better would be to spend the time learning something useful like reading comprehension, ability to think critically, or how to set yourself on fire using only a bible and a copper hat.
No predictive power? Stop the presses! Millions of hours and dollars are being wasted at every university in the country daily making, and then testing predictions which don’t actually exist! Entire departments are hallucinating their entire research budgets away, then writing papers which produce useful data and medical breakthroughs by dumb luck!
Holy Jesus! Think how we can revolutionize the university if we only manage to remove the waste of investing in evolution-based theories, and instead pull data and solutions from THIN AIR as we’ve been doing all along!
Genius!
So who better to have on school boards than fundamentalists? ;-)
School is supposed to be about fundamentals. Why should we waste time and money on a subject that is unrelated to giving students the bare minimum of knowledge to make them drones for the workforce and maybe vote pro-business if they can get over their apathy long enough to get to a voting booth? No predictive power that I know of (and my mind is made up on that point), and the non-scientifically inclined folks with their pretty and easy-to-read pamphlets at my church say that there’s mounting evidence against some ill-defined aspect of it.
Things that I can just about intuitively grasp, perhaps. Better to spend the time learning something useful, like how to sit still and not be curious and obey the men in stiff suits and funny robes.
been looking forward to it since I found out last week. Thanks for the link CleveDan.
I’m looking forward to the showing, as well. Two hours on Tuesday, some more scattered PBS showings, Frontline, youtube, dailymotion and other online showings, liberal cheerleaders like the LA Times, NYT & Washington Post doing op ed pieces, and no doubt many others world wide.
But then lookout! Nightline, O’Reilly Factor, Larry King, etc. will continue to stir the pot, and then week upon week of comments and rebuts. Reminds me a little of the OJ verdict, (altho I do agree with the first part of the Dover verdict). ;-)
I’m very excited about the show. Our atheist/freethinker group on campus is having a watch party and discussion after the show. I hope that it is entertaining and informative, and probably a little scary.
Something interesting to note about this piece is that when the discovery folks were approached for interviews they said they would be open to it but only if the producers allowed discovery to film the interviews with their own cameras as well. the producers of judgement day refused. hence no one but phil johnson is in the piece.
School is supposed to be about fundamentals. Why should we waste money and time on a subject that has not even been fleshed out enough to be a proper theory? No predictive power, not useful in other subjects and there is mounting evidence against macroevolution.
Microevolution perhaps, but what good is this to students? Better would be to spend the time learning something useful like statistics or how to balance a checkbook.
1.evolution is a huge part of the fundamentals of biology
2.there’s been 150 years or so of research on the subject
3. i refer you to eg the tiktaalik rosea find as an example of its predictive power. any time you start turning up those hominid fossils in the precambrian, let us know about it.
4. a bit like you can have micro tree growth, but not macro tree growth…[/sarcasm]
5. people do get taught how to balance checkbooks. it’s called mathematics.
where do people come up with the nonsense in the quoted post?
ctenotrish:
We’ve got the popcorn and root beer.
fusilier, just north of Stop 11 and east of Madison
James 2:24
Looking forward to the show, though the BBC did a good spot on it recently and Ed Brayton has a talk on YouTube where he goes over the details of the trial (very entertaining too).
I get frustrated and worried about the theistic assault on “offensive science” but then I get a warm, comforting feeling knowing that science is on the side of evidence and theists are purely on the side of conjecture.
I dare you to find anything more fundamental in biology (that doesn’t also belong to other divisions of science) than evolution. It really is crucial to the understanding of anatomy, physiology, and genetics.
That’s why ID was ruled to be inappropriate to bring up in school as an alternative to evolution.
Of course it only exists as a science due to its predictive power. The sciences that explain creationist dolts are also quite capable of predicting inane lies from IDiots like devolution.
You guys should get your lies straight, since the IDiots sometimes complain that evolutionary theory spills over into other disciplines (as if fecundity were an argument against MET–it’s certainly the opposite of ID, however). It’s crucial in psychology (even without evo-psych per se), geochronology, geochemistry, and has analogies with language evolution and textual criticism.
This is just something you dolts mouth, isn’t it?
Sheesh, even your fellow morons usually admit “microevolution” (scare quotes are because the IDiots usually change what that term means to fit their preconceptions), and of course microevolution would be an orphan concept without macroevolution (that is to say, microevolution cannot stand alone as a science).
Aim for the stars, indeed. I’m sure it would do you well to learn those skills, and if you ever learn those, give learning biology a shot, and then maybe you’ll know more than antievolutionist lies.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Of course they’ve not actually run out of fraud or failure, and even now are babbling about the “errors” in the Dover trial (there are some relatively trivial ones–not the fault of Jones–like one may claim that there are some low-grade peer-reviewed ID papers. This is true just so long as you’re not looking for actual evidence in favor of ID (that is, since ID can only criticize evolution, yes, there are some poor “ID” criticisms of evolution that have been peer-reviewed, but there is no ID science at all)).
More important may be the question of direct and hidden pressures brought against PBS for actually documenting the appalling failure of ID at Kitzmiller. Let’s not forget that evolution has been expelled (or greatly reduced) in much of American education, in most commmercial media programs on science, and they do their best to make PBS uncomfortable in stepping in and discussing IDist attempts to censor science (after all, they’re probably trying more to make schools drop origins education altogether, rather than to actually teach their nonsense).
This is our Expelled, and, unfortunately, we’re actually telling the truth about ID censorship, quite unlike Stein, Ruloff, and Miller.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Clinging to dogma such as common descent and billions of years for the age of the earth has held back science by 100+ years.
So Ross, how’s that flu vaccine working for you?
Which is obviously why all those scientists who reject such dogma have made such stupendous progress.
Or, as Nova put it:
Hmm. That sounds ever so slightly different.
Yes, I’m hoping that we can get back to the scientific progress made during the millenium between 500 AD and 1500 AD, when the ruling dogma was a young earth and creationism.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Wow! That didn’t take long!
And Ross Nixon AGAIN proves himself to be
a complete moronerrr I meana comatose block of cementI’m sorry, I should saydeluded“misinformed.”The beat goes on!
And no input from the Mirrorball Institute? Well! Then the producers should have invited them to participate in a documentary about “the exciting intersection of science and faith” or some such thing. I hear that’s an effective approach for gaining the trust of interview subjects.
[quote]So Ross, how’s that flu vaccine working for you?[/quote]
Coffee’s all over my keyboard, thanks!
Micro/macro, whatever. They keep moving the goal posts. Why not just skip to the end and just say “yeah, evolution is correct, but the Christian god made it that way”? You could do the same thing with the Big Bang, heavy elements only being made in the core of stars, etc. I mean, then we can finally get back work and don’t have to listen to this constant ignorance ;)
This is just sarcasm yes? It’s pretty funny.
Hmm, maybe Uber’s right, and I misread Ross’s tone and confused him with someone else. *gulp*
*cringe*
No, I don’t think so.
LOL! Comment 14 shows how to treat trolls! :-D
LOL! Comment 14 shows how to treat trolls! :-D
I plan to watch JD this evening. Two weeks ago I finally got around to viewing ‘A Flock of Dodos.’ We can hope creationism is going the way of the. . . err Elephant bird. I believe that there is still not enough evolutionary theory taught in high school biology (the last place the general public would normally receive this information) and a whole generation of wing-nuts must reach physical senescence before there can be a meaningful turn around.
Hey Ross…give me one piece of evidence arguing that the Earth isn’t billions of years old. One. This is a science blog. We can discuss data. Give me a piece of evidence arguing against a deep time age of formation for the Earth.
He won’t. He’s a hit-and-run troll. He isn’t here to learn, he’s here to tell us his unqualified opinion, and that he has done.
He won’t. He’s a hit-and-run troll. He isn’t here to learn, he’s here to tell us his unqualified opinion, and that he has done.
Possummomma has written a nice primer on how to be a fundamentalist troll, Ross – you should go take a look and maybe get a few new ideas.
Judge John Jones is interviewed for about five minutes on the PBS “Newshour” today, preceded by a few minutes excerpted from the Nova show. Newshour is available via streaming video and transcripts within a day or so afterward.
Jones makes the point that the judicial process was methodical as always, and free from considerations of popular majority preferences – and also uninfluenced by the death threats he received.
You will find some epic stupidity at the Amazon forums (unfortunately, some of this is attributable to the atheists). I was going to hop onto a thread there on several occasions, but I read a few posts, and quickly saw it was a lost cause.
Sometimes there is good fun to be had at their expense. Sometimes, there actually appears to be some hope of communicating with them. Most often, however, they are terminally deluded, incurably ignorant, and mind-numbingly dumb. Rather than waste any effort on these people, I propose that the first person to diagnose them should reply with a designation of “TFS” (Too F*ing Stupid) to let the rest of us know that, hey, there’s just no point. Yo, Ross: TFS
Well now, scientists, here’s an idea. Tired of unwittingly starring in ID propaganda? Not anxious to be known by a “pause” of your own? Still surprised at the underhanded tactics of creationists? (If so, see previous paragraph). How about you assume that, for any interview, there is a non-negligible probability that you are getting scammed, and take some reasonable precautions? There’s no excuse for the crap these people pull. At this point in time, there’s no excuse to be taken by it, either.
Ross Nixon wrote:
“Clinging to dogma such as common descent and billions of years for the age of the earth has held back science by 100+ years.”
Heck, Ross, why stop at 100+? It’s held back science by ~4.5 billion years, all the way back to when the Earth (oh, ah, sorry, Ross) began.
I had looked at the PBS site to see when this would be on in my area, and it wasn’t listed at all for almost a week. Just for ha-has, though, I pulled up the listing schedule on Replay TV, and sure enough, there it was. On two stations that had something else listed for tonight’s Nova online. So I programmed it to record, with only nine minutes to spare.