I’m busily tied up for the most of the day at the Twin Cities branch of the University of Minnesota — Skatje is taking the new student tour because she plans to transfer here in a year — but I also took advantage of this visit to get my own copy of Haryun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. My thanks to Aaron Barnes, who rescued a copy from a recycling bin here, It’s a behemoth!

As everyone has said, it’s full of pretty pictures, but the content … well, it leaves much to be desired. It’s mostly a collection of pictures of fossils and animals that asserts a non-existent contradiction between them and what evolution predicts, followed by text that claims most of the fossils we have are fakes.

I haven’t had a chance to look closely, though. Skatje won’t let me have it — she’s leafing through it and giggling.

John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn’t want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo.

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The Evolution Sunday project, which tries to recruit clergy to advocate good science at least once a year, has sent out a request for scientific expertise to help them. They’re well-meaning, but they need it. Try reading some of their collection of Evolution Sunday sermons, and what you’ll find is usually attempts to piggyback the validity of truth by religious revelation on the credibility of evidence-based reasoning.

I personally do not support the Evolution Sunday project — I think it benefits religion far more than it does science in that it lends support to superstition and taints evolution with nonsense — but in a truly ecumenical and catholic spirit, I’ll at least mention it for those of you who think otherwise.

Besides, imagine giving me a red pen and a sermon to edit. My eyes would start to glow, I’d channel the damned soul of Abdul Alhazred, and the end result would drive whole congregations mad.

I’d just like some reassurance that there are other targets out there, since
Korn is on the run.

An anti-evolutionary Christian extremist suspected of sending threatening letters to biology professors at the University of Colorado has gone on the lam, according to a staff member familiar with a police investigation into the matter.

Not that I’m panicky or anything, but I am more comfortable knowing he’s in Colorado than just somewhere.

OK, just to be on the safe side, I let the local police know that this guy is on the loose, and that he’d sent me some strange email yesterday. It’s highly unlikely he’d show up here … but if he did, there would be only one reason for him to be here.

Some guy in Virginia didn’t like this op-ed by David Barash, and didn’t like being characterised as an “illiterate troglodyte,” so he set out to demonstrate that he was an illiterate troglodyte. He wrote a letter that’s simply non-stop bogosity.

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So