A school exercise seems to have roused the ire of creationists. It included a statement about common creationist behavior.

Not Just a Theory

Next time someone tells you evolution is just a theory, as a way of dismissing it, as if it’s just something someone guessed at, remember that they’re using the non-scientific meaning of the word. If that person is a teacher, a minister, or some other figure of authority, they should know better. In fact, they probably do and they are trying to mislead you.

I would like to see some clarification of the objection.

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The Discovery Institute thinks Following Kitzmiller v. Dover, an Excellent Decade for Intelligent Design. What planet are they living on? Intelligent Design is basically dead: Kitzmiller v. Dover killed it as a legal strategy, and none of the expectations of the Wedge document have been met. But Casey Luskin provides a list of their great accomplishments post-Kitzmiller. It’s very sad.

The very first item on the list is Lots of pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific papers published. No, not really. They’ve been publishing in tamed pro-ID journals like Rivista di Biologia and their own in-house journal, Bio-Complexity, with occasional forays into marginal pay-to-publish hack journals. Their most prolific contributor is a retired veterinarian who has labeled his house the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation.

One of their “triumphs” is that Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt, was reviewed in Science. Have you read the review?

As Meyer points out, he is not a biologist; so perhaps he could be excused for basing his scientific arguments on an outdated understanding of morphogenesis. But my disappointment runs deeper than that. It stems from Meyer’s systematic failure of scholarship. For instance, while I was flattered to find him quote one of my own review papers—although the quote is actually a chimera drawn from two very different parts of my review—he fails to even mention the review’s (and many other papers’) central point: that new genes did not drive the Cambrian explosion. His scholarship, where it matters most, is highly selective.

Yay. Winning.

Also, via Nick Matzke, while they’re busy claiming that Kitzmiller was irrelevant and that they’re gaining on science, here’s what Google Trends has to say about Intelligent Design.

So that’s what victory looks like, huh?

Who knew that being an Oxford professor was such a lousy proxy for being intelligent? Christians do seem to adore John Lennox, the Oxford apologist for Jesus, yet every time I’ve read anything by him, it’s been embarrassingly silly and stupid. You want an example? Here’s ten. Lennox was asked to give rebuttals to ten common atheist arguments, and he blew it each time with a series of inane responses.

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I cannot do a facepalm big enough.

After that last post (and now that I’m home from Winnipeg), I discover that Richard Dawkins has joined in the chorus of right-wing loons, like Sarah Palin, accusing Ahmed Mohamed of some kind of nefarious scheme. Dawkins claims that the kid was lying and committing fraud and exaggerating his accomplishment…when last I heard, Mohamed had only said he put together some circuit boards in 20 minutes before school. What did Dawkins imagine, that he’d built his transistors from scratch, etched the circuit boards, and invented The Clock?

That this was some wild Wile E. Coyote scheme, where he’d ordered parts from Acme in a brilliantly convoluted plan to get invited to the White House?

This is nuts.

People are noticing that self-proclaimed leaders of atheism are targeting a 14 year old boy — for being enthusiastic about electronics?

I’m fast learning why “movement” is a synonym for “shit”.

He has announced that Dr. Mehmet Oz is changing the direction of his show! No more quackery for him!

The entire upcoming season of The Dr. Oz Show — which kicks off Monday, September 14 — will focus on the mind-body connection and feature a partnership with former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD.

In the past, Dr. Oz has come under fire for the advice given on his show. Now, the newly focused program will use medical and other experts whose advice is based in research.

Orac is not impressed. Neither am I. It’ll take a sustained improvement in rigor before I’ll believe it.

Unfortunately, his choice of a topic does not fill me with confidence. I can imagine the frantic meetings to try and hammer out a new direction that has just enough credibility to let them claim they’re being scientific, but still plenty of slop to allow them to continue to pitch snake oil. Green coffee beans don’t have any evidence of medical efficacy, but there’s evidence that if you believe hard enough in green coffee beans they can have a therapeutic effect! Also, Placebos work!.

Yesterday, I brought on the wrath of the defenders of Slippery Sam. Sam Harris has an amazing talent: he can say the most awful things, and a horde of helpful apologists will rise up in righteous fury and simultaneously insist that he didn’t really say that, and yeah, he said that, but it only makes sense. And they have a battery of excuses that boil down to another contradiction: you must parse his words very carefully, one by one, and yet also his words must be understood in their greater context. They actually have a lot in common with radical Islamists: the sacred holy texts can only be understood in their original language, and the appropriate way to study them is by rote memorization.

So, in a report literally titled racial profiling, we’re told that it’s not about racial profiling at all; the new line is that it’s about anti-profiling, that we should be able to look at a group of people and easily rule out on appearance alone a whole bunch of individuals and make security so much easier. So people who look like grandmas and little old Asian ladies and five year old Scandinavian girls are all perfectly safe, would never harm a fly, and we should just wave them through the lines at the security gates. We should just screen youngish to middle-aged men, because old people and women and children are harmless.

See? He’s not about racism at all, it’s all about ageism and sexism. Nothing to see here, folks.

But at the same time, it’s a lie. Practically the first thing he says is this:

We should be honest. We’re looking for suicidal jihadists.

It’s not anti-profiling at all, whatever that is. He’s got some sort of vaguely undefined search image in his head for what we ought to be looking, and he’s not very clear on what it is, except that it’s suicidal jihadists, and not Norwegian grandmas. I think it’s something like that guy on the right. I quite agree that if a wild-eyed long-bearded fellow with an AK-47 and an explosive belt shows up at the airport, you shouldn’t let him on the plane. But then, the 9/11 hijackers showed up at the airport clean shaven, nicely dressed in Western clothing, and acted professionally to get aboard. We actually aren’t looking for mad boogey men — we’re looking for rational, determined human beings with evil plans. I don’t know what they look like. I’d rather the people in charge of my safety did not have narrow preconceptions about what they look like. Slippery Sam has bigoted ideas about what they look like, and wants that implemented as policy.

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