Here’s a hot prospect for the Discovery Institute: Fred Sigworth, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale. Snap him up, quick! He’ll fit in perfectly! He gave a talk to the Yale Christian Fellowship which sounds like it was hilarious.

“Being a Christian is good preparation for work as a scientist, and science can help prepare you for being a Christian,” he said.

Oh? How does faith help you be a better scientist?

Sigworth said that both religion and science require working with incomplete data…

That’s a revelation right there. Science does require working with incomplete data, and religion requires working with no data at all. Therefore, religion must be more powerful than science! I am converted! Hallelujah!

OK, seriously, it sounds like a very silly talk by yet another gomer striving to invent rationalizations for his ridiculous religion. No news there.

Wait…how does that qualify someone to be a fellow of the Discovery Institute? Isn’t ID a secular theory?

Not if you listen to Bill Dembski’s Q & A last night…where he said, “I’ve got plenty of ulterior religious motive, I’d like to see ID succeed because of my Christian background and beliefs.” In addition, it sounds like not only did a professor get up and rip him apart on the flagellum, but the audience was laughing at poor Dembski. That’s what we need more of: the creationists getting laughed off the stages at their propaganda ops.

ERV was also at the Q & A, and recorded the audio. We’ll have to check later and see if she’s put anything up on it … although I’m a little concerned about the sound quality. It sounds like she might have been laughing hysterically the whole time, which could have drowned out some of the juicy bits.

We’ve all heard how the Creation Science Evangelism, Kent Hovind’s organization, has been strongarming YouTube to suppress criticisms of his bad science. Well, check this out: now CSE has been caught red-handed revising their licensing. Where before they declared everything free and good to disseminate, now they are retroactively claiming copyright.

I take that as an admission that they can’t stand the heat.

…don’t bother.

A reader sent me a link to his photo set from the BVCSM, and I’m afraid all you’ll find there is the Wall O’ Text approach to instruction. You know what that is: print out a page from Answers in Genesis, blow it up real big, and slap it on a wall … instant museum!

There is one amusing revelation — creationists sometimes have the wackiest ideas — and it made me laugh.

Did you know that ALL dinosaur footprint fossils found are pointing in the same direction?! This is IRREFUTABLE PROOF of the dinosaurs running from a global flood!

Creation Logic 101: you don’t need any! And now that you know everything that’s entertaining about the place, you won’t need to pay out $5 to some nut in a small town in Alberta, Canada to see it. Go to the Royal Tyrrell instead.

Actually, the funniest comment I’ve seen in a while is a testimonial proudly displayed at the top of the BVCSM website:

“I spent more time in this museum than I did in the Smithsonian”

The picture at the top of this article is the Big Valley Creation Science Museum: a small remodeled ranch house. This is the Smithsonian Institution: 19 museums and 9 research institutions, and over 100 million objects in their collections. That statement above is a testimonial to the delusions of the creationists, nothing more.

Oh, that little scamp, Billy Dembski. He’s all upset about his shabby treatment at Baylor, and he’s displacing his anger into a defense of Robert Marks.

President John Lilley of Baylor appears to have made up his mind that Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab is to have no place at Baylor. There is only one court of appeal now, the Baylor Board of Regents, who can reverse Lilley’s decision and even remove Lilley as president. Here is the list of board members. I encourage readers of UD to contact them (respectfully) and share their concerns about this gross violation of academic freedom.

One amusing bit of background, though: the Evolutionary Informatics Lab didn’t exist. It was a web page, nothing more, so it’s a little strange to complain that it doesn’t have a place at Baylor. What’s actually been refused is that the Evolutionary Informatics Lab doesn’t get to pretend that it’s a Baylor initiative. It’s a bit excessive for Baylor to refuse to host a faculty member’s wacky web page, but there’s nothing to stop them from putting it up on, say, the DI’s servers. It’ll be just as effective there as anywhere. Or, hey, does geocities still exist and offer free hosting?

The other thing, though, is that Dembski then goes on to list all the members of the board of regents, including home phone numbers and addresses. I guess Dembski responds to the fact that he has been Expelled with Intimidation and Incitement, which must be the next two movies in the creationist trilogy.

Oh, and no more links from me to UD while Dembski has his hit list online.

Got an hour or so? A BBC special on the Dover trial has made its way to YouTube. See how the rest of the world sees that bizarre episode of American inanity.

Here’s the first part.

The other four are below the fold.

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Larry Caldwell has a history of suing in California courts for creationist causes. Mike Dunford has some material on the latest attempt to claim that leaving out Christian myths was “viewpoint discrimination”, and in particular on their interesting choice of a star witness.

The Christian schools hired Dr. Behe (for $20,000) as an expert in “biology and physics.” (That second part should make Chad and Rob’s heads explode, given that Behe has absolutely no physics experience of any kind.) To earn his fee, Dr. Behe prepared a report that said, basically, that the Christian textbooks are excellent works for high school students. He also defended that view in a deposition that was taken back at the end of May.

Wooeee, that Behe fella has a real racket going. No wonder he’s so committed to his absurd version of creationism — there’s profit in it.

Anyway, Chad and Rob can break out the superglue and reassemble their crania now, and use a pastry gun to reinject their splattered brains. The case has been dismissed.

I’m sure Mr Caldwell will be back next month, filing another frivolous lawsuit. I’m also sure the Discovery Institute will be very, very quiet about this new failure in their history of legal shenanigans.

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Oops. Behe was testifying in a different case in California. How many suits are the creationists involved in, anyway? Wesley has the rundown on the correct legal case.

A couple of graduate students have a group called Extant Dodos Productions that uses YouTube to rip into creationist claims. In particular they’ve used some of Kent Hovind’s materials to dissect his arguments. It’s a clever idea — they take creationist videos and edit them to insert rebuttals to each argument as they are made.

Apparently, though, Creation Science Evangelism doesn’t like the fact that their claims are being popularly weighed, analyzed, and pulverized, and they’re now trying to strong-arm Extant Dodos Productions with intimidating letters that say they are infringing on their copyright by using their videos. It seems to me that this work certainly ought to fit under the conventions of fair use, but they have an even stronger case: the videos they used all come with a formal waiver of copyright with the stipulation that the material not be sold.

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