I cannot resist. Tomorrow (30 December) at 1pm Central, I’ll be hosting a livestream to laugh at Kent Hovind. It might just be an hour of belly laughs.

This is a bizarre (but very short) video talking about a letter written by Eric Hovind, about his father, Kent Hovind. It’s a bit inside baseball — Kent Hovind divorced his wife, Jo Hovind, the woman who got dragged into prison as a consequence of her participation in his scam to defraud the government of taxes. He then married a woman named Mary Tocco, who later left him because she suspected he was up to no good again. Hovind told everyone that his divorce and remarriage was fully endorsed by his family and all the good Christians he knew, but apparently not. This letter lists all the people who told him this was a bad idea.

Kent Hovind lied, no surprises there.

The video was posted by his current “wife”, Cindi Lincoln (he seems not to have divorced Tocco before the wedding), who is also the woman he was convicted of abusing, and at this point I am overwhelmed by the soap opera and give up. Lincoln tries to explain.

Eric’s email lists 17 professional counselors, attorneys, Board Members, family members and friends who advised Kent NOT to marry Mary, but Kent refuses to heed. Kent also lied to the public about “everyone telling him to marry Mary, and that only 1 or 2 people told him not to.”

Just like with me, Kent and I had several friends, DAL leaders, family, legal, and counselors give advise for Kent to pay me what he signed for, and to put his wife over Steve, and to NOT torment me with Steve, Ernie, and Brady’s abuse. Kent refused to heed their advise.

Here’s a PSA: don’t ever get romantically involved with Kent Hovind. He’s a psychopath, and it will always end badly.

Matt Powell, I hope you’ve got everything in writing.

But that doesn’t stop them from misinterpreting them! Here’s a classic example of Evolution News & Views completely missing the point of an article to claim it supports their beliefs about junk DNA.

I am so punchy and tired today that I wrote out a script. I had to. So transcript below the fold:

[Read more…]

I’m obliging, so I whipped out a response video to a creationist comment.

I sure wish they had something original and substantive to say.

How stupid can creationists get? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s even more stupid than they assume me to be.

A short while ago I mentioned this Indonesian creationist who was posing as an evolutionary biologist writing a book “for the science community”. He wrote to me Just Asking Questions.

He wasn’t very good at the pretense. His first question was about the Atlas of Creation.

I was not very nice in dismissing him.

Really, if you can’t explain what is wrong with the Atlas of Creation, you’ve got no business writing a book about evolution. It’s that simple.

Alas, he is persistent and has come back with more requests. Dude, you are obvious, go away.

Ray Comfort only asks questions that biologists can’t answer because they are based on his misconceptions. Have you seen a cat evolve into a dog? The first elephant to evolve would have had to wait for millions of years for the first female elephant to appear. How do you explain elephants, then?

Not to mention that if you do give an answer, he’ll cut it out of his video.

I’m not responding directly to Mr Arif — I don’t want to encourage him. But if Muhammad Arif wants to be exposed as a dishonest fool, I’m happy to help.

Before my email went down, I was engaged in an exchange with an Indonesian student.

He wrote to me asking if he could ask me a few questions about evolution. All right, it’s an excess of manners to ask if you can ask, but OK, I told him to go ahead. For future reference, anyone, I’m not into formalities or deference — just put your questions up front, boldly. I’ll either answer or not. When someone is that cautious, though, it makes me suspicious.

His next email informs me that he is writing a book to correct misconceptions about evolution in the Indonesian community, and that he is an undergraduate. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Most undergraduates are just learning about evolution and lack the knowledge to write a book, but maybe he’s precocious, and maybe he’s exceptionally well educated, and maybe he’s going to narrow the focus of his book to something appropriate. There are undergraduates who are mature enough to do a good job presenting the scientific perspective, but you’re going to have to show me that you’ve got the chops.

His question, though, floored me. He tells me he’s been reading Harun Yahya’s “beautifully illustrated” Atlas of Creation, and that he wants to know if ‘living fossils’ that have been totally unchanged for hundreds of millions of years exist, and gosh, isn’t that a problem for evolution? And then, I knew he’s playing a disingenuous game and trying to trap me.

Yahya’s book is a transparent fraud full of stolen images that strikes one note over and over again: here’s a stolen photo of a fossil. Here’s another photo of a modern animal. See? They’re identical! Therefore evolution is false. Nobody with even a glimmering of an education in biology would fall for it. Stasis is part of evolutionary theory, and besides, a superficial photo of a fossil or animal with murky provenance, selected specifically for their similarity, is not evidence of much of anything. Creationists have no respect for the evidence, though, so anything that reinforces their faulty assumptions is acceptable, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamic or Christian creationists.

So here’s a guy whose source of information about evolution is a creationist propaganda book, who claims that he has sufficient authority to write his own book about evolution, and he’s asking this fucking stupid question. It wouldn’t be stupid from a layman, but he’s making this obnoxious pretense of authority, and most offensive of all, he thinks I’m stupid enough to fall for it.

I see this over and over again. Creationists have this absurd confidence that they have discovered the great flaw in evolution that thousands of scientists who studied it for years have missed, and they love to spring ‘zingers’ on us that they’re sure will stagger us and send us reeling backwards, to quit in defeat like the professor in Big Daddy.

It’s not going to happen. Trotting out some poorly referenced factlet and your profound misconceptions about evolution aren’t going to shock me. I’m also not at all impressed when you’re the kind of weasely coward who can’t even be honest about your intentions.