Last night, I saw this video where a trio of Evilutionists romped through a memelist written by a teenager raised on Tumblr quizzes and mocking it.
Oops, no. It’s a 40 question questionnaire written by un-esteemed old crank, William Dembski, which purports to reveal your degree of devotion to the dogma of Darwin. It’s far more revealing of the ignorance of the twit who composed it than anything else. You don’t have to watch the video to deal with this childish test: take it here. It’s bad.
Each item consists of two statements, one being what a creationist imagines an evolutionary biologist believes, and one being what the creationist imagines is actually true. For instance,
1.
•Evolution in the sense that all present-day organisms arose from one or a few ancestors (common descent) is now a proven fact.#
•Evolution in that sense is still an unproven hypothesis.
The one with the # symbol is always the evilutionist position, in Dembski’s mind. In this case, he gets it right, except that I don’t like the word “proven”. It is a fact, though, supported by the molecular evidence.
Other statements get it thoroughly wrong.
2.
•The theory of natural selection (i.e., retention of chance variations) adequately explains common descent.#
•Even assuming full-blown evolution to be a fact, the theory of natural selection does not adequately explain it.
Nope, selection is not sufficient. What about mutation, drift, recombination, and most trivially, that cell division is a binary process? We are all children of our parents.
Others expose creationist misconceptions.
19.
•The concept of “junk DNA” was a major scientific blunder directly attributable to Darwinian thinking.
•Darwinian thinking advanced science by correctly characterizing non-coding DNA regions as “junk DNA.”#
No biologist ever thought non-coding was synonymous with junk. That’s the false idea promoted by creationists.
Others are just plain weird.
30.
•The motivations of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice cannot be understood at the deepest level without a knowledge of evolutionary theory.#
•Jane Austen had no need of evolutionary theory to understand human motivations at the deepest level relevant to literature.
Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, when Charles Darwin was 4 years old.
It’s just badly designed, too. Each question has the “incorrect” choice marked with that # symbol, so a creationist can march through, selecting the answer without the # and get a perfect creationist score; if you’re a biologist, you’re often going to be stumped because both options are wrong. Would you believe this “test” was designed for an educational website?
James Barham and I developed this questionnaire some years back for an educational website. To appease the search engines, the website eventually dropped it. Lightly dusted off, it is presented here. The questionnaire provides a useful mirror for understanding the influence of Darwinian ideas on our lives and culture.
It’s more of a mirror for letting creationists see what they want to see. Evolutionary biologists (not “Darwinists”) are invisible in it.
Saying it was dropped to appease the search engines is as nonsensical as the quiz itself.
But I believe in the Elder Gods above all else, so his questionnaire is misaligned from the very start.
Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are fictional characters in a work of fiction, so it is unnecessary to know any science to explain their motivations. The same applies to the comic strip B.C. by Johnny Hart.
No, no. We never understood fiction, drama, romance, or humor until Darwin explained it all, according to the creationist fantasy of science.
Neither of these is all that accurate.
Junk DNA was discovered empirically over many decades. We observed it first and explained it later.
We always knew by reannealing kinetic studies that eukaryotic genomes had a lot of repetitive DNA.
DNA sequencing gave us a lot more information about exactly what they were. Functional studies told us what they did, which often enough was…nothing.
I suppose you could make up an evolutionary explanation for some junk DNA like the 8% of our genome that is wrecked retroviruses.
It is in the interest of retroviruses to invade our genomes. That is where they live.
It is in our interest to deactivate them, because they aren’t doing us any good and can be harmful.
Dembski the creationist doesn’t have any better explanations for anything though.
It is always, godidit. God created us with 8% defective retroviruses.
Or, our genomes were perfect 6,000 years ago and after the Tree of Knowledge mishap, it’s been going downhill as we get repetitively invaded by retroviruses that then die without anyone noticing it.
Does 21/40 count as “close to zero” or not?
Dembski is a crackpot who has at least faded from sight along with his toxic fundie version of xianity. He has said a lot of exceptionally dumb things.
A common theory of the creationists since Darwin published his book in 1860 is that the fall of The Theory of Evolution is imminent,
Dembski claimed in 2002 that Intelligent Design was going to overcome evolution. Here it is, 22 years later and we are still here and ID hasn’t gone anywhere. What happened is that people lost interest in ID because there isn’t anything there.
@chrislawson #1
All hail the search engine.
I keep seeing creationists proclaiming that evolution theory has collapsed, been discredited or failed. Jusr that with no “because”.
Oh dear their god, question number 12. Comparing the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision to fucking Lysenkoism.
I can’t even.
“None of the above.”
Arrogance of Ignorance.
Creationist fails.
Jane Austen had no need of evolutionary theory to understand human motivations at the deepest level relevant to literature.
She didn’t need particle physics to do that either. That doesn’t mean particle physics is wrong.
I gotta say, this whole shtick is lame and pathetic, even by the standards of “lookit me, I’m still alive and relevant, please clap!” stunts.
Sadly, it’s a false idea promoted by a great many molecular biologists, generally as a strawman position to attribute to one’s opponents.
Isn’t this guy supposed to be the Fig Newton of Information Theory?
Well, looks like I’m a Darwinist although a better description might be a Ray Bolgerist since most of my replies were straw.
Whoa, a blast from the past! Dr. Dr. “Billy Boy” Dumbski! Somebody must have said his name three times. Shame!
I thought Dr. Dr., aka Baylor Faculty Cafeteria Stalker, had slinked off to his beach house on the shores of the Lake o’ Fire after he got fired from his Bible College job for not being Bible enough. I guess being a fundy just ain’t fun no mo’.
OP: “…I don’t like the word “proven”.
As far as i can tell, that’s the crux of the problem. Many people…perhaps most…want absolute, proven certainty. Their belief in the “inerrant word of god” gives them certainty. It’s fake certainty to be sure, and it can cause them harm, but it’s comforting.
Science thrives on uncertainty, on what we don’t know, on what we need to learn. There’s no result in science that can’t be revised, and even overturned, by new substantiated evidence.
Grolar bear hybrids in N.W.T. all traced back to same ‘strange’ female polar bear
“an educational website?”
I am constantly amazed that a theory developed in the 1840s and 1850s, and confirmed and refined by hundreds of thousands of biologists and those of other disciplines over the subsequent 165 years, can still be subject to this kind of nonsense. But then I thought the age and shape of the Earth, and the value of vaccines were pretty well established too…
let’s face facts. The creationists will never give up their idiocy. The big problem is to not let them water down science education in our schools, which in many states, the creationists have managed to do. Down here in Texas, many members of our Texas state board of education are creationists and we in Texas fight them every year. And not a few teachers are complicit in pushing creationism into our school curriculum.
This pisses me off but good.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/02/02/texas-education-board-approves-curriculum-that-challenges-evolution/10153292007/
creationists sure do have little faith in their God if they think that it weakens Him and His Word to teach about how life functions and diversifies.
Ancient pig-like animal shows beginnings of mammalian brain evolution
#24 Thinking of Gordonia as a protomammal is just weird. It’s a dicynodont, far out in a little corner of Synapsida with only a remote connection to mammals. Has somebody confused dicynodonts with cynodonts?
Because Darwin’s birthday falls on the same day as Abraham Lincoln’s (February 12, 1809), if Americans were to celebrate one or the other, we should celebrate Darwin Day.#
Lincoln’s impact on the U.S. and the world was far more positive than Darwin’s and we should continue to celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday as it is.
Not being from the USA, the question is incredibly bizarre. Who cares when Lincoln’s birthday was? I am much more worried about the birth date of Hammurabi.
I have seen some bad surveys but this is so bad I’d use it in a survey writing class.
Strangely tempted to go down the list and answer each in haiku.
Dishonest Dembski
fails to grok evolution,
brings back tired tropes.
Well, that took up way too much of my day.
Selkirk @24: “Dawn of/Rise of/War for the Planet of the Pigs?” Not sure that would work…
I could be missing something, but re: the joke, Tumblr’s never had quizzes that I know of. They have made polls a thing as of last year though, but people mostly just use them for fun silly things.
Nothing in this sentence makes sense. Natural selection and heritable mutation (“retention of chance variations”) are two distinct evolutionary mechanisms, and the bare fact of common descent is sufficiently explained by the latter. Even in the absence of natural selection, genetic drift, sexual combination and gene flow, you would still expect an organism’s distant descendants to be genetically and phenotypically diverse.
I remember reading Dembski’s PhD thesis a decade or two ago, and being struck by the careless math errors. Guess he still doesn’t error-check his own writing.