Sometimes my email contains a few good and sincere questions — and here’s an example. This is probably the most common rock on which creationists founder: a profound misconception about what evolution says, and a natural human desire to see a guiding plan to the world.

I’m tormented.

I appreciate the struggle many creationists are having about evolutionary science. I find myself tormented as I observe the world around me.

What I seem to be focused on is how a plant or animal is self aware of it’s need to evolve? How does a tree know how to “evolve” it’s seed to fly on the wind? How would a lizard “know” that it needed to develop camouflage to survive?

I can’t imagine who any plant or animal other than human would have the ability to “know” and as well as pass it along via DNA to future hundreds of thousands of generations?

I’d appreciate your feedback…this is really starting to bother me.

The first part of the answer is that the organism doesn’t know that it must evolve. There is no plan, no guidance, no goal imposed ahead of time, the tree or lizard are not following a program that says they have a goal. The outcome emerges as a consequence of selection and chance.

The tree did not plan ahead. In a population of trees, there was chance variation in how far seeds fell from the parent; seeds that fell in the shade of the parent would not flourish, while seeds that were fortuitously caught by the wind and fell further away were more likely to thrive, and produce more offspring. Lizards that blended in with their environment were less likely to be eaten, and had more offspring that, inheriting their parents inconspicuousness, were also less likely to be eaten, and variation in their progeny was selected further approximations to camouflage.

There is no “know”, no awareness. Darwin’s insight was that life didn’t need it to produce a pattern of change — unguided random variation, filtered after the fact by natural selection, produces an appearance of design.

And yes, this is a fact that many people find troubling. We’re brought up thinking we’re cuddled in the swaddling hands of a god who has a grand plan for us all, and that every little up and down in our life is the product of some cosmic intent — it’s reassuring and makes us feel important. It’s an interpretation unsupported by any evidence, too, and often contradicted. We live in a world of chance, and we’re all on our own.

OK, readers, maybe you have a better explanation. Go ahead, chime in with a comment and explain how we’re going to wean the general public away from their imaginary sky father.

One of the fun things about traveling to strange places like Seattle is getting to meet new and interesting people — or, at least, people who are made of meat rather than the more familiar bit patterns of the net. I’ve had a few occasions now to talk to Alan Boyle, who has just summarized my NWSA talk…and done a pretty good job of it, too.

One thing I want to expand on a little bit is something I brought up for the Seattle audience: I think the Discovery Institute is toast, and are going to be increasingly irrelevant. The Wedge document is dead and gone; their strategy of pretending to have a secular goal has failed; and everyone can see through their claim that “Intelligent Design” is something other than creationism. All along, the buzzword has been a front for old school creationism, of the type favored by more traditional, openly Biblical groups like Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research, and what’s driving the base is not the attenuated rationalizations of the DI, but the Jesus-lovin’ evangelical beliefs of its supporters.

I should have said more about a remaining concern. Creationism is not dead, but is still a dangerous force for ignorance. And of course, the Discovery Institute is going to be trying hard to reinvent itself. We’re looking at several new strategies already: there’s the clamoring for “academic freedom” bills, and also the magic words of “strengths and weaknesses”. Note that they still have the common thread of misleading with labels — their version of “academic freedom” isn’t about freedom at all, but about giving preferential treatment to ideological inanity, and when they talk about “strengths and weaknesses”, they intend to overlook the strengths of modern biology and focus on imaginary weaknesses invented by ignorant creationists.

So more accurately, what I should have said is that one line of rhetorical noise is failing fast, but that they’re rapidly generating new clouds of obfuscatory squid ink that they hope will stick and confuse another generation of innocent students. Liars and con men just have to keep moving to keep their misdeeds from catching up with them, and the DI is going to have to scramble to redefine their intellectual swindle.

At the last couple of talks I’ve given out here on the west coast, I’ve begun by introducing the appalling ignorance and illogic of creationist arguments. I think I have a new favorite example.

To summarize: God ordered the soldiers of the Hebrews to march around Jericho 6 times on 6 days, which means they would have traversed 6 * 360°, or 2160 degrees. The moon has a diameter of 2,160 miles. Therefore, God exists.

Bonus points! If you argue that the Hebrews would not have used “miles” as units (although I would have first pointed out that degrees and any linear measurement aren’t directly comparable), that’s just proof that God knew about English units 3,000 years before they were invented. Therefore, God exists and knows everything.

Poe’s Law! I saw that video and thought for sure it had to be a spoof, until I saw it was from VenomFangX, one of the more infamous youtube creationists, and that it has a lot of comments praising his “logic”.

Wow. This guy is like Ben Stein on quaaludes — and just as wrong, wrong, wrong. The opening premise for his slo-mo diatribe is ridiculous:

True science only reports observable facts, rather than interpretations and assumptions.

Then he goes on with a tedious litany of examples: you are allowed to say that Archaeopteryx is a fossil of a winged animal, but you can’t say it’s transitional or intermediate characters, you can say Tiktaalik is a fossil of a skull and some limb bones, but you can’t say it represents an intermediate between fish and amphibians, yadda yadda yadda.

Unbelievable. First, where does this gomer come off trying to dictate what “True science” is? He’s contradicting practically every scientist in the world!

To claim that science is not about interpretations — that it doesn’t include theories as explanatory frameworks — is patently false. What does he want to do, reduce science to stamp collecting because that’s the most exciting thing his lethargic little mind can handle?

Of course science is all about interpretation — it’s how induction works. We collect data, we interpret it, we make hypotheses and predictions about what we expect to see next, and we test those ideas. No interpretation, nothing to test, science would stagnate.

This is one of the more stupid statements I’ve heard from a creationist yet, but I’m afraid he’s not at all competitive with the likes of Ray Comfort yet. On style, though, the mummified, expressionless head of Daniel Keeran is ahead on points.

I had mixed feelings about Yoko Ono’s lawsuit against Expelled — fair use is a desirable goal, but I don’t think Premise Media was exercising fair use, since their movie wasn’t about Lennon’s music or ideas — so I can’t say that I’m at all surprised or upset that the lawsuit is likely to go down in flames. I’m also not appreciative of the fact that Lessig thinks this is a “great success”; it is at best a mixed result, because while it may support Lessig’s principled defense of fair use, it is also a case where he’s supporting people who are promoting lies and ignorance.

It really doesn’t matter much now, though. The propaganda movie is a dead issue, a complete flop, and it is not going to come back from the dead after a court decision that had no effect on its declining popularity is reversed.

Jerry Coyne recently gave a talk at Rockefeller University, which is now available on video. It’s a good talk, making points familiar to most readers here about the absurdity of creationism/intelligent design, with clean examples to rebut their major arguments. The real treat comes at the very end, though, when Coyne goes off the reservation to state the obvious: that religion is the root of the problem here, and that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible.

I’ve been saying this for years. Will you believe me now?

Don McLeroy is the deranged creationist dentist who was appointed to the chairmanship of the Texas State Board of Education, and who is responsible for the recent purge and intimidation of people who support good biology — he’s trouble all the way through. Take a look at his latest stunt.

The State Board of Education’s debate on new English and reading standards took another rowdy turn Friday as members approved a never-before-seen version of the lengthy document which materialized less than an hour before the board was to take a final vote.

After a wacky and terse debate on the new curriculum, the board voted 9-6 in favor of the new version, which will remain in place for the next decade and sets standards for state tests and textbooks, as well as classroom teaching.

Experts and teachers have been working on the new curriculum standards for two and a half years.

“I find it’s really wild that we can work for three years on a project and then the board is so qualified they can pull it out of their hat overnight,” said board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who, like other board members, received the substituted document when it was slipped under her hotel door less than an hour before their meeting was set to convene Friday morning.

Some social conservatives on the board prepared the latest version overnight.

This is similar to what our former education commissioner for Minnesota, Cheri Yecke, tried to pull — she tried to swap in a ‘minority report’ for the state science standards that was composed behind the back of the official committee … only McLeroy has outdone her by an order of magnitude or so. Why even bring in qualified educators and scientists to do the hard work of a standards committee if you’re just going to throw their work away and replace it with some hack job done by ideologues overnight? And to give it to them for review an hour before the meeting is just plain insulting.

This is for the English standards. What kind of circus are we going to see in response to the upcoming science standards?

At least one board of education member is calling for McLeroy’s ejection, although it sounds like she doesn’t expect anything to come of it. This is what we can expect of creationist conservatives: a dictatorship of the incompetent.