Be careful, Nathan Zamprogno. The background research behind compiling a list of all the insane things Kent Hovind believes can be very hazardous to your mental health.

Reading the list can be very entertaining, though, so thank you for the sacrifice of some of your psychological stability.

Eamon Knight finds an irritating debate (you can listen to the podcast) between a real evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, and a theologian and a philosopher, and … Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute. The first three are all pro-evolution (although I found the theologian to be annoyingly apologetic for religion, naturally enough; Denis Lamoureux is a weird and obnoxious kind of Christian who seems to use science as a tool to proselytize) and Nelson fulfills the stereotype: he opens the debate with a quotemine and gross misrepresentation. He claims that W. Ford Doolittle rejects common descent. He claims that this notion that “all living things share a common ancestor” is being challenged; unfortunately and misleadingly, he puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Doolittle would say that “all living things share a common ancestor”. Doolittle argues that there was a large pool of organisms down near the root of the tree of life that liberally swapped genes among one another, so that you can’t trace life back to a single common ancestor — you can trace it back to a large population where species distinctions were greatly blurred.

Misrepresentation of legitimate scientists it’s about all Nelson brings to the debate. It’s an excellent example of why it’s a waste of time to treat these kooks as fair and equal and trustworthy.

For another example, Nelson claims that one justification for pushing ID is that our past understanding of biology was flawed (not that he says anything that ID contributes to our current understanding). He claims that when he was in school he was taught that “cells are just bags of enzymes”, and that ID has revealed all these amazing, unexplainable “molecular machines.” Nelson is about my age or younger; when I was taught cell biology back in those same dark ages, I certainly was not taught any such nonsense. Compartments and transport, for instance, were major parts of the curriculum.

It’s not just that these creationists don’t understand biology — it’s that they actively lie about biology. Don’t trust them.

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Mike Dunford has another recent example of Nelson mangling a scientific conclusion.

The National Education Association is having their annual meeting in Philadelphia right now, and guess who’s there?

Answers in Genesis!

It’s rather like finding the Mafia has a booth at the police convention, but there they are, with lots of pictures, proudly peddling creationist dogma that is not legal to teach in public schools, and which can get school districts embroiled in expensive lawsuits, to teachers. This has been going on for years — there is a retired teacher who rents the booth, and AiG ‘donates’ huge quantities of freebies, so they don’t have an “official” presence, but they still have people advocating what, to a teacher, should be considered criminal activities.

I’m mystified why the NEA would allow this — any teacher in a public school who followed the advice of these clowns could land their school in very hot water, not to mention that they would be misleading and miseducating their students. Are there any teachers now at NEA who could let us know if there is any counterprogramming going on? Has anyone tried to inform the teachers visiting the AiG booth that teaching creationism in school spells big trouble? I’d also be curious to know what the attendee reactions are like: AiG is only saying positive things about their booth, of course, but I can’t imagine that no teachers are loudly arguing with those idiots.

A rather unsavory character, Dr Johannes Lerle, was jailed in Germany for violating their laws against neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial. I discussed this earlier this week, and as
Gerard Harbison and Andrew Brown have recently pointed out, he was not a very nice man at all…a bit of a kook, really.

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You may recall that I’d mentioned how Cheri Yecke was hiring a company called “reputationdefender” to expunge unflattering references from the net. One of her targets was Wesley Elsberry, who had reported that she was in favor of allowing local school districts to elect to teach creationism (this is not permissible in Minnesota). She claims that’s false; unfortunately for her, Wesley has found a video recording of her at that time proposing exactly that. Ooops. So Yecke is trying to get her own words removed from the net? How interesting.

In a related issue, I’d mocked the whole premise of “reputationdefender” — they claimed to be able to get any offending article on the web taken down for only $20, using “proprietary” techniques. There’s no word yet on exactly what their techniques were, but another, similar company has had their procedures exposed. They sent letters to the host of the offending article.

This letter is being sent to you in the name of more than 500 businesses. No matter where you go, we will cause you a problem. Your life is in danger until you comply with our demands. This is your last warning.

Your neighbors already know about your criminal dealings and how you are making many people loose (sic) their business. You will soon be beaten to a pulp and pounced into the ground six feet under with a baseball bat and sleg (sic) hammer. You will soon be sorry not just from what I am capable of doing to you, but what other members will do as soon as they know exactly where you are. Its (sic) just a matter of time until I get to you.

That didn’t work, so they sent another one.

We warned you ed magedson. Did you hear the gun shots last night? Because of you innocent people will die. Your tenants, family members and those that work with you. Think we’re joking? I told you that your site will be down and it is. That is all we want and we will not hurt anyone.

This was not the same company that Yecke hired, and I haven’t heard that Wesley received any mail with a similar tone. It’s still about what I expected the only effective way of getting an article removed from the web might be: extortion.

At least one metaphorical wolf, that is: Richard Dawkins reviews The Edge of Evolution (behind the NYT Select paywall, sorry). Again, he focuses on the argument from improbability that is at the heart of Behe’s book, and he comes up with a clear counter-example: if Behe were right, the modifications achieved by plant and animal domestication would be impossible.

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Another review of Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution, has been published, this time in Nature and by Ken Miller. This one focuses on Behe’s central claim, that he has identified a probabilistic limit to what evolution can do that means no differences above roughly the genus level (and in many cases, the species level) can be generated by natural mechanisms. This is his CCC metric, or the probability of evolving something equivalent to the “chloroquine complexity cluster”, which he claims is the odds of evolving two specific amino acid changes in a protein. It’s a number he pegs at 1 in 10²⁰, right at the edge of what a large population of protists can do, but beyond the reach of what a smaller population of slowly reproducing metazoans, like hominids, could hope to accomplish even with geological time limits. It’s the same problem I addressed in my earlier criticism, although Miller manages to slap it down with much greater brevity.

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In the Index to Creationist Claims, there is an entry to an old argument from Walt Brown:

Claim CE302:

The sun has 99 percent of the mass of the solar system, but less than 1 percent of the angular momentum. It is spinning too slowly to have formed naturally.

Source:

Brown, Walt, 1995. In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 19.

Response:

Among solar-type stars, there is a strong correlation between age and rotation rate; the younger stars spin more rapidly (Baliunas et al. 1995). This implies some kind of braking mechanism that slows a star’s rotation. A likely candidate is an interaction between the star’s magnetic field and its solar wind (Parker 1965).

So we have a theoretical explanation, braking, and a correlation. Now Phil Plait discusses new evidence supporting the braking model : observations of stars with and without accretion disks show that all that material does seem to slow the rotation of the star down. There are some nice animations, too — the magnetic field of the star is like a big paddle-wheel moving through muck. Very cool.

This is why biologists keep the astronomers around — so they can answer the occasional off the wall questions we get from creationists about stars. And angular momentum. And magnetic fields. You know, all that physics stuff.