Gay cartoon ducks killed David Menton

Ken Ham is very concerned about sin, and cartoon ducks, and the curse of homosexuality — more than he is concerned about the pandemic, apparently. Pink News wrote about his fury over gay ducks appearing in the cartoon Duck Tales, prompting him to condemn gay reporters for not being more concerned about sin than COVID-19.

In a new Facebook post, Ham said: “A gay news source wrote an article about me with this headline: ‘Thousands of people are dying from coronavirus every day, but this Christian fundamentalist is raging over two gay cartoon ducks.’”

He suggested that he would have preferred the headline to be “150,000 people die each day in the world, and Ken Ham is concerned for their spiritual state and their eternity because of the raging pandemic of sin”, but added, while knowing nothing about the journalist’s religious beliefs, that they would not understand because “God of this world has blinded the eyes of those who don’t believe”.

He then, bizarrely, went on to speculate about the journalist’s death and whether they even cared about people dying from COVID-19.

Ken Ham wrote: Yes, the worst pandemic of all – sin – is raging about us and the death toll is 100 per cent. I predict the writer of the article about me will one day die.

From a perspective of a non-Christian, why do they care if people die?… If you die and that’s it and you won’t know you ever existed, why do they care about people dying?

It’s true: Ken Ham doesn’t care much about the pandemic. From Dan Phelps: “From early in the pandemic the Ark Encounter amusement park only “suggested” the use of masks and complained bitterly about closures and Kentucky mask mandates. YouTube videos by Ark visitors indicate mask wearing is practiced by a small fraction of visitors.” So yes, he is not at all inconsistent here — he really does believe that sin is a greater worry than dying of COVID-19. He has even claimed that viruses are a good thing for humanity.

Evolution, on the other hand, says that death has always been a part of nature. This view, found nowhere in the Bible, was actually embraced in a recent article by the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. His belief in evolution led him to declare that it is a biological reality that “bacteria and viruses are not bitter fruits of the fall, but among the first fruits of good creation itself.” But this idea makes God the author of bad things.

Even in a fallen world, God remains omnipotent and perfectly capable of sustaining and protecting His fallen creation. But when Adam sinned, the world was cursed. Suffering and death entered into His creation. The whole universe now suffers from the effects of sin.

In the biblical worldview, viruses had an originally good purpose in creation. In fact, many viruses today are being investigated for their positive benefits, including possible symbiotic relationships and the regulating of populations of bacteria in our gut. Viruses are also used for gene therapy. Such modern-day research offers us a glimpse into the original created purpose for viruses.

Cool cool cool. So what sin was David Menton guilty of, and what virtue has he acquired?

If you don’t recall, David Menton was one of Ken Ham’s pseudoscientific minions — I’ve mentioned him a few times. He’s a guy who got a Ph.D. in biology, and used it to lie for Jesus. Ken Ham has now announced that David Menton died “after a brief illness”. He doesn’t say what that illness was, but the newspaper obituary does.

Dr. David Norman Menton, 83, of Petersburg, KY passed away from Covid Saturday, December 11, 2021 in Edgewood, KY.

Hmmm. Maybe if Ham had been a bit more diligent and rational in policing all those people strolling around his “museum” and Ark Park, his great friend would still be alive today.

David Menton — pwned!

David Menton, one of the ‘authorities’ at Answers in Genesis, has scribbled up another mendacious collection of nonsense about tetrapod evolution. Alas, poor Menton — he caught the attention of Martin Brazeau, a real scholar and researcher in sarcopterygian and tetrapod evolution, who did what creationists dread: he actually checked on the facts behind Menton’s claims. Would you be surprised to learn that there are not only dishonest quote mines that twist the author’s meaning, but that he is caught making up facts about the fossil? Brazeau even contacted Ted Daeschler, one of the authors of the Tiktaalik work, to check on some of those assertions … and there’s no way around it. David Menton is a liar.

It’s hilarious. Brazeau also takes care to document some of the real facts about transitional tetrapods — well worth reading even if you don’t care for the spice of schadenfreude.

I guess it’ll be another IMDB credit for me

I was informed yesterday that I am the ☆STAR☆ of yet another movie, a movie that I was not told about and just sort of stumbled into. I’m losing all respect for movie celebrities, though: apparently, the way a movie star works is to have some guy with a camera record you talking for a bit, and then they all go away, and you don’t even think about it for five years, and then suddenly this thing is available online and you see it and say “Oh crap, I was in that piece of shit?” and you never get paid. I’m beginning to wonder how those other movie stars can afford their beach houses in Malibu.

So here, you can watch my fabulous movie, Origins of the Universe: The Great Debate on Amazon Prime.

Oh, yeah, they also misspell my name, because of course they always do.

You don’t really want to watch it.

As I was watching it, I remembered the circumstances. I think it was a conference in Winnipeg; this guy asked me nicely if I’d answer some questions on camera, and I said sure, so I end up in this oddly lit hotel room with a stranger (I hate how that happens) and he starts firing questions at me, for about an hour. I had no idea it was a debate, but I guess that after the fact, it was. And then I literally went away and completely forgot about it.

The interviewer, Todd Cantelon, then spliced me in with other footage of such luminaries as Ken Ham and Terry Mortenson and David Menton and Jason Lisle and Georgia Purdom and PZ Meyers (oh, wait, that was me). It’s weird to be retroactively ganged up on, but I’m unconcerned, they were all idiots.

There’s also a woman named Mary P. Winsor who was interviewed, so I wasn’t alone on my side. She’s a historian of biology, and has written criticisms of Mayr’s claims about pre-Darwinian essentialism. I don’t know much about her work, but if she’s been opposing some of the ahistorical BS that Ernst Mayr spent a long lifetime injecting into the discourse, she and I are on the same side.

Anyway, it’s a long boring set of spliced-together clips of me saying a sentence or two, then Ken Ham babbling out his fallacious canned spiel about “observational science” and then more creationists talking, then another sentence or two by me or Mary Winsor followed by more nonsense from creationists.

Also, to spice it up, the creationists were recorded at the Creation “Museum” in some place where dinosaur roars and honks occasionally drown them out. Todd Cantelon pretends to be a moderator, but all of his segments were filmed in some spectacular red rock canyon somewhere. It’s kind of unfair that all I got was a grey Winnipeg hotel room.

Only a bird

Another feathered dinosaur has been found in China, prompting Ken Ham to dig in his heels and issue denials.

Yet another supposed “feathered dinosaur” fossil has come to light, again in China. (Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, AiG–U.S., reported on another Chinese fossil of a supposed feathered dinosaur in April 2012) Now, one headline described the fossil as “almost birdlike,” and the authors of the report in Nature Communications note many features the fossil shares with living birds, particularly those that live on the ground. In fact, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell and Dr. David Menton (AiG–U.S.) both examined the photos of the fossil and the criteria the authors used in classifying the fossil as a dinosaur. They agreed that it is a bird, not a feathered dinosaur.

Oh, really? It’s just a bird? Take a look at this image of Eosinopteryx, and you tell me.

eosinopteryx2

Notice a few things about this animal: it’s got teeth. The forelimbs have clawed digits. It has a long bony tail. It lacks the bony keel that anchors breast muscles in modern birds.

The only thing that might cause you to question its dinosaur nature (and it’s a criterion that’s proving more and more inappropriate) is that lovely gray fringe of feather impressions that surround the whole fossil. And look at those forelimbs! It looks like it has stubby wings. It does not, however, have the skeletal and muscular structure to allow for extended flapping flight, and the wings are way too short for it to have been an adequate flyer.

But Mitchell and Menton and Ham looked at that and said ‘ALL BIRD’. They’re idiots.

Ham goes on: there are no transitional forms, he squeaks, there can be no transitional forms, transitional forms don’t exist…all while looking at a winged, feathered reptile with teeth and claws and a bony tail.

The fossil record doesn’t reveal any kind of dinosaur-to-bird evolution—and it certainly does not show a molecules-to-man evolution. We have no proof of transitional forms, and we won’t. God’s Word says clearly that He created animals and plants according to their kinds (Genesis 1). Through genetic loss and other factors, new species have emerged over time—but birds are still birds and apes are still apes. Nothing in the history of biology has legitimately shown that dinosaurs could develop the genetic information to evolve into birds.

Pitiful. Pathetic. I’d like to see a creationist sit down in front of me with that illustration and try to defend the claim that it’s only a bird.

Godefroit P, Demuynck H, Dyke G, Hu D, Escuillie F, Claeys P (2013) Reduced plumage and flight ability of a new Jurassic paravian theropod from China. Nature Communications 4, 1394. doi: 10.1038/ncomms2389

An entirely predictable outcome

We 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 design creationist blog, has a couple of posts on Xiaotingia. One claims that a big hole has just been blown in an icon of evolution, but that the “tenured Darwin bores” are all flapping their hands and telling everyone to ignore the damage. Another claims that evolutionary biology was looking for a simple linear trajectory in avian evolution, and now it’s shown to be a complex mess, therefore…what? Because creationists have a misconception about what was expected, evolution is wrong?

Ho hum. Science will keep on strengthening our understanding of the past with new evidence avidly sought, creationists will just keep on clamping their eyes even more tightly shut.

Gandalf rose from the dead to save you

There is a church in Romsey, Australia which is getting lots of attention because they offer a “Sci-Fi and Fantasy Friendly Church Service,” where people dress up as fantasy characters and wave light-sabers around while quoting Buffy and Bilbo. It’s a weird story, because every church service offered everywhere is fantasy friendly, so what’s the big deal? Obi-Wan and Gandalf are both Jesus-figures, anyway.

Predictably, though, some stuffed shirts are outraged, which just fills me with more appreciation of irony. Says the Baptist minister who hears voices in his head and promises escape to an imaginary paradise after death,

“I don’t have a problem with people enjoying sci-fi, but church isn’t the place to encourage escapism and fancy dress,” Mentone Baptist minister Murray Campbell said.

“It is the time where real people with real lives need to hear the real God speak his word, the Bible.

Another of the men wearing a dress speaks up:

Catholic priest Gerald O’Collins said: “There should be no need to dress it up.

“There is a magical story there already – We just have to start selling ourselves properly.”

At least he’s honest—yes, religion is all about selling magic. The Romsey church is embarrassingly blatant about it, which is nothing new — but their real crime is making the silliness obvious by inviting comparison with openly fictional stories.

Dave, Andy, and Georgia and their unbelievable, ridiculous fable

David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom, three creationists working at the Creation “Museum”, have written an outraged op-ed correcting some misconceptions about them. I read this far before I had to stop:

For one, the guest columnist, Roger Guffey, claimed there were no “serious” scientists who are creationists. We are full-time Ph.D. researchers with the Creation Museum and Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, and we will be helping to design the full-scale Noah’s Ark and other attractions to be built north of Lexington.

There are thousands of serious scientists who doubt evolution. At the Creation Museum, we have full-time staff with earned doctorates (one from an Ivy League school) in astrophysics, geology, cell biology, genetics, medicine and the history of geology, plus several adjunct speakers and researchers who hold doctorate degrees.

Our intrepid three claim to be scientists, part of a body of real, genuine, credentialed scientists who support the claims of Answers in Genesis. Let’s stop right there. There’s something you have to understand about the staff of the Creation “Museum”: they all have to sign a testimonial that asserts, among other things, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. These are self-proclaimed scientists who flout the evidence to argue for an absurd conclusion. I’m not talking about “interpreting the same facts” differently, as they like to claim, but ignoring and denying the evidence that refutes their dogma.

That’s all you need to know. David Menton, Andrew Snelling and Georgia Purdom are all absolutely certain that the creation of the earth is an event that occurred somewhere near the end of human prehistory, which was itself a very late, geologically recent event in the history of the universe. How absurd is that claim?

The city of Jericho — it’s in the Bible, look it up — is 11,000 years old. Isn’t it remarkable that a city with a population of zero sprang up on a planet that didn’t exist at the time? The chthonic dingleberries of Answers in Genesis would apparently have you believe one of our oldest urban centers must have been floating in the primordial chaos, waiting for Jehovah to conjure up the Jordan river and the West Bank and the Middle East and the Mediterranean and the firmament and the sun and stars.

Six thousand years ago, the Plano culture was hunting bison on the Great Plains. The predynastic Egyptians of the Naqada period were colonzing the Nile. The precursors to the Indus River civilization were making copper tools and growing barley. The Mesopotamians were building city states. The people of the Hongshan culture were carving jade dragons in northeastern China; the Yangshao were producing silk along the Yangtze river; the Majiabang people were cultivating rice and pigs. The ancient Britons were building tombs and erecting wooden posts on Salisbury plain, precursors to Stonehenge. The Funnelbeaker people were trading pottery across northern Europe, while the Chasséen people were living in a village near the site of modern Paris. All this at a time when the human population of planet Earth, according to this risible trio, was two. What did Adam and Eve do? Commute a lot?

People were manipulating the precursors to modern wheat, rice, barley, taro, and soy at least 9000 years ago; Sumerians had invented irrigation 7000 years ago; and Mesoamericans began to tweak teosinte by artificial selection about 6000 years ago. The crops we grow are the product of millennia of selection and cultivation, and show the marks of our ancient biotechnology. The bread that God casually commanded Adam to sweat over and eat for all the days of his life after the Fall was already the product of thousands of years of development.

A middle-aged woman in northern Israel died and was buried with her puppy dog…twelve thousand years ago. We know the first dogs with skeletal indications of domestication appeared over 30,000 years ago. What kind of crazy cosmology do the loons of AiG have when they have to account for a world they claim is 24,000 years younger than Fido and Rover?

There is a colonial colony of shrubs in Tasmania called King’s Lomatia that is probably over 40,000 years old. They can’t produce sexually, so they’ve just been propagating vegatively, clone after clone after clone, right through the whole creation of the world, according to a certain small dismal clan of meretricians. In fact, those plants were well into late middle age when the god of the Hebrews purportedly decided to create real estate.

According to these “scientists,” all of modern geology, from the Himalayas to the ocean trenches, was formed in one immense cataclysmic event that occurred over the course of a single year, four thousand years ago; an event that essentially sterilized all multicellular life on Earth except for one small family and their livestock who weathered the catastrophe in a wooden boat. That was some disaster, and that must have been some boat.

Now the people who believe this unscientific nonsense claim to be “serious scientists.” I don’t think so. They haven’t demonstrated that their superstitions are serious science at all; all they’ve shown is that some few people who are totally nuts can graduate with doctorates. Which is not a surprise, and is actually a far more parsimonious conclusion than their bizarre idea that all of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology are completely wrong.

The worst article on Ardipithecus yet

The dishonor goes to ABC News, which put together an appalling mess of an article that gives credibility to creationist denialists. Right from the beginning, you know this article is bunk.

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape — an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

The whole article is like that: they cite Creation Ministries International, the Institute for Creation Research, and Answers in Genesis, puffing up the credentials of these loons and credulously reporting their dissent. None of these fellows is any kind of researcher, all are looked upon as utterly crazy, and there is no reason to consult any of them on a science story, let alone dedicating a long article solely to their batty position (they quote one of the real researchers just once, saying that the discovery was an important find — but it is more to lend weight to the parade of nutcases declaring it trivial.)

They give a lot of space to Answers in Genesis, especially to one of their pet frauds-with-a-degree, David Menton.

“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

Menton is not an acclaimed anatomist. His sole claim to fame is his weird belief that the earth is only 6000 years old. Although, I must say, I agree with his sentiment here: the first page is metaphorical, poetical nonsense and should be thrown out, and the rest should be tossed right after it. But what really annoys me is the patent disrespect for knowledge in these people. Ardipithecus is a genus that lived over 4 million years ago. Shouldn’t there be a little bit of awe at that? Not from the ICR.

“This is a meaningless discovery of another ape. As far as the creationist community is concerned, this is a big yawn. There is nothing about Ardi that has anything to do with the evolution of man,” said John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas.

Menton just keeps on bringing the dementia.

Menton believes scientists sat on the Ardi discovery for over a decade just to roll it out during the Darwin anniversary. He questions the ability to accurately date any fossils more than a few thousand years old, let alone millions, and he said the condition of the skeleton was so incomplete and fragile that serious research was almost impossible.

Menton said Ardi’s skull and feet are exactly the kind of skull and feet you would expect an ape to have and have none of the features of modern humans.

“Evolutionists want to call Ardi ‘ape-like.’ This creature is ape-like, because she is an ape. Just call it an ape,” he said.

The biggest problem Menton has with Ardi is her estimated age. The Earth, he says, is no more around 5,000 years old, a number creationists have estimated by counting the generations of man named in the Bible from Adam to Jesus.

“Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God’s word. God created everything in six days, and that’s it.”

Errm, the scientists all agree: Ardi was an ape. They say it right out. They’ll also tell ‘acclaimed’ anatomist Menton that, based on the anatomy, we humans are also apes. We also regard the even older last common ancestor of chimps (which are apes) and humans (also apes) to have been an ape. Therefore, any transitional form between an ancient ape and a modern ape is expected to be an ape.

What did Menton expect? A frickin’ giraffe?

As for the rest…anyone in the 21st century who rants about the earth being 6000 years old and unthinkingly accepts the scientific authority of an ancient book cobbled together by tribes of sheepherders really needs to be shuffled off to a rubber room.

So what is ABC News doing getting a story on a serious scientific issue from a series of lunatic asylums? I don’t know. Who is this ‘journalist,’ Russel Goldman, who scribbled up this gullible slop? I don’t know and I don’t care, except that I’ll know to throw anything else he writes in the rubbish.

The things you can find on Darwin Day

The Darwin Day website has a calendar of events, and you can search for cool things that might be happening near you next week. Except…well, apparently the site organizers aren’t very discriminating about who and what can be posted there. Like this…

Darwin Conference (Free)
Location: 3800 S. Fairview St
Santa Ana/CA 92704

Activities: Saturday, February 07, 2009 8:30 AM to 8:55 AM Video (All Ages) 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM Ken Ham: Answers for Racism – Darwin & Evolution`s Racist Roots. (Ages 11 & Up) 10:20 AM to 11:10 AM Dr. Andrew Snelling:Answers from Geology – The Catastrophe of Noah`s Flood (Ages 11 & Up) 11:25 AM to 12:15 PM Dr. David Menton: Answers about the “Ape-Men” (Ages 11 & Up) 12:15 PM to 1:25 PM Lunch Break (All Ages) 1:30 PM to 2:40 PM Ken Ham: Answers for Effective Evangelism in the 21st Century (Ages 11 & Up) 3:00 PM to 3:50 PM Dr. Andrew Snelling:Answers from Science and Scripture on the Real Age of the Earth (Ages 11 & Up) 4:05 PM to 4:55 PM Dr. David Menton: Answers from Design – Intelligent Design vs. Darwinian Evolution (Ages 11 & Up) 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM Ken Ham: Genesis: Key to Reaching Today`s World (All Ages)

So if you want to celebrate Darwin’s birthday by listening to some cranks and crackpots make up stuff about the science, preach about jebus, and teach your children a hodge-podge of lies, there you go, have fun.

I think it’s a bit inappropriate, myself. Although I am looking forward to a fun summer when I can reciprocate and crash Vacation Bible School to tell the little kiddies about the fallacies and inconsistencies of the bible, and how the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and life evolved upon it.

Don’t tell me that would be rude. They started it!

P.S. Shame on you, DarwinDay.org. Could we maybe have a little quality control?

AiG on Tiktaalik

The Discovery Institute flailed about hopelessly trying to deny the value of Tiktaalik (which, as commenters pointed out, is kind of weird in itself—I thought ID didn’t deny the facts of evolution, just the mechanisms), but what about those forthright creationists at Answers in Genesis? They also fall all over themselves to argue the bad, bad evidence away. Read the Lancelet’s rebuttal to see Menton wrung out like dishrag.

The interesting thing about all this is that the Menton and Looy are simply pointing out that Tiktaalik has attributes of a fish, but doing nothing to dispute the observed similarities with tetrapods. Has it ever dawned on them that an animal somewhere between fishes and tetrapods might actually have some attributes of a fish? What makes me wonder is why AiG didn’t post a picture of the specimen. There are, by now, tons of pictures on media websites all over the place. A Google image search for “tiktaalik” turns out four pages of results. Here’s why: they’re scared, deathly scared. The implications of Tiktaalik are so bloody obvious that they have a lot of work to do in order to deal with this one.

Give ’em time. They’ll figure out yet another dishonest line of patter to babble out while keeping their eyes clamped tightly shut.