Yecke, Minnesota’s former odious education commissioner, is now campaigning to be odious education commissioner for the state of Florida. Her history in our fair state is now a bit of a stain on her reputations, so she hired a company called “reputationdefender” to sanitize the internet for her. This company googles up people who have said unkind things about their clients and sends out email threats to them, telling them to take it down. Their first target: gentle Wesley Elsberry. What’s particularly weird about this is that the post in question is simply a collection of news clippings with sources, with virtually no commentary at all.

Even weirder, if you google Cheri Yecke, Wesley’s post is #5; posts on Pharyngula occupy the #3 and #4 slots, and I guarantee you, I take much greater joy in stomping on yucky Yecke than Wes…but “reputationdefender” hasn’t hassled me at all.

It is amusing, though, that her efforts to whitewash the past and silence her critics are going to win her wider attention on the net. Look, here I am, once again adding to the links pointing to her creationist-friendly history!

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You have got to take a look at “reputationdefender’s” claims to believe them. For the low, low price of $29.95, they promise to DESTROY any online entry you don’t like. That’s good to know—the limit of their efforts is that they’ll put $30 worth of time into expunging the web of undesirables. What is that, about 10 minutes of a lawyer’s time spent drafting a letter? $30 wasted on an exercise in futility?

Here’s what they promise to do. For about $15/month, they’ll regularly search online content for you, and send you a report. Then, at your request…

Next, we DESTROY. You can select any content from your report that you don’t like. This is where we go to work for you.

Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.

If we find an item of online content you don’t like, we’ll carry out our proprietary DESTROY process for you on that item for the one-time low fee of $29.95. This is where the rubber hits the road. It is an arduous and time-consuming process for our team of specialists, but we work hard so you can sleep better at night. You don’t pay this till you command us to DESTROY unwanted online content.

The “proprietary” and “arduous and labor-intensive task” seems to involve meekly asking the author to take down his article.

This should win a prize for the dumbest excuse from a creationist that I’ve heard in, oh, about 24 hours.

…don’t you find it interesting that there is NO recorded history prior to less than 10,000 years ago? If man has been around millions of years why the heck did it take so long to learn to write? Most kids are doing it by 2nd grade! Man evolved enough to suddenly figure out how to record his thoughts just a few thousand years ago? Hmmm.

This same creationist also makes a “marketing” argument, that creationism is better because it is easier to understand than evolution. He claims to have read both Darwin’s Black Box by Behe and Finding Darwin’s God by Miller, and that Behe’s book was easier and used a mousetrap to “get his point across”, while Miller’s book was too complex. That’s an interesting example of selective memory: both books deal with similar subjects on a roughly similar level. Behe’s book has details (some of which are wrong) of cilia and blood-clotting cascades and such, all of which seemed to have slipped out of this creationist’s memory. Miller’s book deals with similar subjects, but doesn’t make the stupid errors Behe’s does.

Yet all Mr Marketer remembers is that mousetraps don’t evolve.

I’m more concerned that if man has been around for 6000 years, why the heck didn’t anyone patent the snap-trap until 1897? Hmmm.

The UK government does not mince words.

The government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.

It has also defined “Intelligent Design”, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with “creationism”.

Cue another DI media blitz, they’ve been dissed. It’s too bad for them that this is a government decree that actually aligns well with the position of scientists.

…and I didn’t even get a lousy t-shirt. Professor Steve Steve,
Jason, Tara, and Wesley, along with quite a few others, all took the grand tour last week. I’m glad they went, but it’s becoming obvious there isn’t a heck of a lot going on there — it’s the same old tripe in every report at this point — and I think I can skip ever going myself.

I guess I’d always thought Wingnut Daily would at least put up a pretense of rationality (it’s a paper-thin pretense, obviously, draped over a great massive lump of lunacy), but no—they’ve just published a hoary old heap of old-school creationist apologetics. It’s all about Barry Setterfield’s long-disproven claim that the speed of light has been detectably decreasing in recent history. This is completely bogus: here’s a short refutation, or you can go for the longer dismantlement. This stuff is over 25 years old, and it’s pure garbage…but that’s no obstacle to being eternally perpetuated in the great Church of Scientific Ignorance.

One of those annoying habits creationists organizations have is the appropriation of legitimate scientific research to ‘support’ their claims. They almost never do, actually—the creationists have to misrepresent the science, and often they even offer interpretations flatly contradicted by the contents of the paper. For an excellent example, here’s the author of a paper on ERVs complaining that Reason To Believe’s use of her work was unjustified.

I eventually decided to reclaim my research from the people who have consistently tried to distort the science to support their own agenda. I checked a few months ago and found my paper in the RTB archives. I emailed the website’s creators, explained that they had misunderstood the meaning of my paper, that it actually provided evidence in support of evolution, and politely asked if they could please remove it from their site. I repeated my request a couple of times. I never received more than a bland message in reply saying that they would look into it.

She has also posted a summary of her work that shows she was testing evolutionary predictions, and that the evidence fit the predictions of evolutionary biology, not the ones Reason To Believe (an old-earth creationist group) wanted.

You know, I’ve seen a fair number of creationists misrepresenting scientist’s work to fit their conclusions, but I’ve never seen the reverse, where a scientist grabs some creationist’s hard-earned data and claims it supports evolution. I wonder why?

Oh … I forgot. It’s because the creationists don’t have any data! Silly me.

Aaron Kinney tells me that Egnor is still going on and on about dualism. He’s still floundering; are you surprised?

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Here’s another sample of strange creationist email. This one spares the freaky fonts and excessive style changes, and instead we get an abrupt opening with no explanation, and a healthy dose of paranoia.

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