I gave a Nelson laugh to England a while back, for the creationist theme park that was going to be built there. I may have to take it back. It looks like the backers are a gang of confused prevaricators with no concrete plans, just a lot of wishful thinking on their part.

I propose that they crawl into their churches and pray real hard. That’s probably as viable a business plan as what they’ve got right now.

It’s all a bit too convoluted to make for snappy copy, but Dembski had been using Harvard/XVIVO’s animation in his lectures without permission…and now it’s clear from his Design of Life book that he did so in full awareness that he had no right to do so.

Hey, I thought these Christian folk were supposed to be the morally upstanding ones. That’s what they’ve always told me, anyway — have they been lying about that, too?

And when you hear the grand announcement
That their wings are made of tin.
Then you will know the Junior Birdmen
Have sent their box tops in.

Human beings cannot fly.

It’s simply impossible, and we’ve known it for centuries; there is, however, a conspiracy of committed, dogmatic aerodynamicists who have a vested interest in preserving the myth of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and despite the obvious impossibility of flight which is readily apparent to anyone with common sense, they persist in promoting their “theory.”

There are honest engineers who can lay out in detail for you the impossibility of flight. The dogmatic Wrightists simply ignore weight-to-lift ratios, surface area, power output, and Reynolds numbers. Reynolds numbers prove that humans can’t fly, but you will never, ever see that in any aerospace engineering textbook. There is a world-wide cover-up: they don’t want to risk their cushy grants and their payola from the aerospace industry.

They hide the truth. That strange “flying machine” to the right? It never got off the ground! It fell apart on the first attempt to fly! Yet you still find it portrayed in the textbooks, intact and looking like it’s about to leap into the air. This is a long-running and disgraceful fraud. And if you look at the history of the Wright brothers, you’ll see that they relied on the prior work of people like Lilienthal and Maxim and Boeing and Curtis, all frauds and charlatans. How can you trust a theory built on failure and fakes?

You want to show me what?

That proves my case.

Look at this birdman. We can all agree that that guy never flew — it would be a joke to think otherwise. Yet you expect me to believe that you can add many tons of weight, millions of complicated parts, and make it all out of metal, and now it can fly? You’ve amplified all the problems in the original design a million-fold, and now you try to tell me it works? You silly Wrightists.

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No, I haven’t gone insane. I made the absurd argument above just to give you a sense of what I feel when I read the latest from the Discovery Institute. They have this ridiculous site, Judging PBS, that purports to be a rebuttal to the PBS documentary on the Dover trial. It’s actually just another rehash of the dishonesty found in Wells’ Icons of Evolution — a series of misrepresentations of the state of biological thought. I keep hammering on the lies in that dismal book, but the DI keeps using it. In this case, it’s particularly egregious; the PBS documentary didn’t say anything about the specific issues they’re trying to rebut. It’s as if they’ve got nothing else but the same old recycled garbage.

[Read more…]

The threat of an eruption of creationism in Polk County, Florida, is dying down. The school board hasn’t changed, it still has a number of confident creationists on it, but they’re all going to keep their religious beliefs at home and in church, and in fact, they have a “great eagerness simply to return to the day-to-day work of running a school district with 90,000 students.” It’s great news all around.

What got them to confine their interest to doing their job? As the article explains, a lot of factors contributed. The county wants tech sector jobs and expansion of a University of South Florida campus, and they got biting comments from the people behind those economically important initiatives. They had the Dover trial waved in their faces, and saw the threat of expensive litigation and even more expensive defeat. And they got ridiculed on a local and national level—bloggers and magazines mocked them, they got mail from proponents of the flying spaghetti monster, their quaintly ridiculous religious views got publicized on the front page of local newspapers.

Creationists hold some very stupid ideas, but most of them aren’t stupid people. They know deep-down that their religious beliefs are indefensible on a plane that demands evidence and results, and while they aren’t going to give up those beliefs, they’d rather be spared the embarrassment of having to lay them out and explain them in scientific terms. A good loud campaign of public ridicule can be just the thing to convince them to put their heads down and buckle into the secular work they’re supposed to be doing.

Godless heathen that I am, even I can read the subtext in Don McLeroy’s recent letter to the Dallas Morning News. First he reassures us that he is very, very, very Christian, and then he promises to purge the dogma from Texas education. We know what that means in the up-means-down world of Christianist fanaticism: the dogma is the science and his empirical evidence is the revealed word of his Lord, Jesus Christ.

I’ve heard a few words about the situation looking up in Florida, but Texas is a dismal scary place for evolution education — I’m going to have to put a few more quatloos on Texas in the creationist courtroom catastrophe pool.

Steve Fuller, the smug sociologist who testified for the creationists in the Dover trial, has a new book out. Who cares about the book, though? You want to read Norman Levitt’s review, “The Painful Elaboration of the Fatuous”. Wow. Fuller gets deconstructed.

Here’s a small taste.

A similar farce plays out when Fuller tries to address the larger question of the supposedly contentious nature of evolutionary theory within the scientific community itself. In the World According to Fuller, evolutionary theory never really got past the stage of being a “well evidenced ideology” rather than a “properly testable science” (p. 123). What he is saying, in effect, is that the claims from all branches of biology and related science that they have contributed to a vast stream of convergent evidence verifying the essential precepts of evolution are in great measure delusional. He seems to think that biology, as a constellation of disciplines, is some kind of socially-constructed freemasonry in which assent to basic Darwinian principles constitutes a ritual formula necessary to make one part of the brotherhood rather than a cognitively-justified inference from hard evidence. More, he seems to think that evolutionary thought is mere ideological window-dressing, contributing nothing to the “hard science” behind molecular biology and the like.

None of this is backed up by serious analysis of the working methods and logical structure of biology itself. Fuller complacently views the ascendancy of evolutionary thought as a “rhetorical” rather than a “scientific” development. His principal evidence? The paucity of Nobel Prizes awarded for work on evolution! Of course, he never pauses to consider that under the idiosyncratic organization of the Nobel awards, there is no prize for biology as such. Biologists are smuggled in under the “Medicine and Physiology” category, which is just expansive enough to accommodate ethologists like Lorenz or Tinbergen, but not hard-core evolutionary theorists. In all of these pronouncements, Fuller is hard-pressed to hide his scorn for actual scientists who, it is obvious to him, know much less about what they think and how and why than a social theorist like himself who is enormously content to cite his own work endlessly.

…and that’s one of the kinder bits. Enjoy it all!

It’s a strange thing to read another review of Behe’s Edge of Evolution. This one is by David Levin, and it strongly highlights the compromises and the irrelevancy of the book.

In the end, the most irritating aspect of this book is Behe’s selective use of the ever-expanding base of scientific knowledge as a soapbox from which to shout his embrace of perpetual ignorance. The better our understanding of the intricate details of complex biological systems, the stronger is his belief that they must have been designed and that science will never unravel how they came to be. This is a trend for him. As Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs at the Dover trial, observed of Behe’s claim that the immune system is irreducibly complex, “Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system … Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire “intelligent design” movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother.” Scientists have never listened to him. But with so many concessions to evolution mixed with his new message of God-as-mutagen, will anyone?

It’s a good review, but does anyone care anymore? His thesis is rejected by biologists and ignored by creationists, and the man is on his way to well-deserved obscurity.