Answers in Genesis has a new article up whining about their nemesis, the National Center for Science Education. The bad press they’ve been getting from the science side must be getting to them.
The funniest bit is at the end. Did you know that Eugenie Scott was prophesied in the Bible? She must be a sign of the end times.
Behe has written a very bad book, so poorly supported that I don’t want to waste a lot of time taking apart every sentence, but I did want to say a few words about chapter 9, where he takes on evo-devo. I waited a bit because I knew that Sean Carroll was writing a review of the book for Science, and I expected he’d go gunning for chapter 9, too—but no, he didn’t. I guess he felt as I do, that since Behe’s fatally flawed premise was exposed in the first few chapters, there was little point to addressing his incompetent nit-picks later in the book. After all, when the construction crew has built a foundation of tissue paper in a pool of quicksand, by the time you get around to criticizing the roofers for using graham crackers for shingles, you’re about out of outrage.
I’ll briefly note the best parts of Carroll’s review, though, and I’ll try to gather up a few tired shreds of indignation and exasperation to critique some of the more ridiculous canards of Behe’s evo-devo chapter.
The article has nice photos, but is anyone else beginning to feel that the content of the “museum” was thoroughly plumbed on the very first day, and that what’s happening now is that we’re seeing demonstrations of just how shallow the whole thing is?
The latest USA Today/Gallup poll probably is valid, unfortunately — it’s not far off from my impressions. 44% of Americans think evolution is probably or definitely false, and two thirds think a god created human beings in the last ten thousand years. Those two numbers don’t quite fit together well — those who think a god created humans recently should also consider evolution false — but we can safely say that about half the country is ignorant or deluded about science, anyway.
We will now, of course, all close our eyes and pretend that religion has nothing at all to do with this catastrophic epidemic of stupidity.
I’m rather peeved and disappointed, too. The Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division posts a rebuke of bad bloggers and scientists who are mean to their shills, and there’s a link in there to Pharyngula…and I thought for sure it would be whining about something I said.
But no. The link is directly to one of Scott’s comments.
Poor guy. Now he’s going to have Casey Luskin squeaking at him. The rest of you are going to have to work at catching up by hurting the DI’s feelings badly enough that they point at you and cry. (You’re going to have to really work to beat me out, though—they have invoked my unholy, fearful name in their fundraising literature.)
On Edge, Jerry Coyne has a response to Sam Brownback’s dissent from evolution. These are excellent questions, and I’d like to see them answered!
The various ID blogs are all atwitter over the new textbook the Discovery Institute is going to be peddling, Explore Evolution. I’ve seen a copy, but I’m not going to give an extensive review just yet. I will say that it’s taking a slightly different tack to avoid the court challenges. It does not mention gods anywhere, of course, but it goes further: it doesn’t mention Intelligent Design, either. The book is entirely about finding fault with evolution, under the pretext of presenting the position of evolutionary biology (sort of) together with a critique. The biology part is shallow, useless, and often wrong, and the critiques are basically just warmed over creationist arguments.
What it actually is is Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution rewritten and reworked as a textbook.
While we’re waiting for the Panda’s Thumb server to come back up, with some new material on Behe’s new book, I’ll recommend Blake Stacey’s dissection of the malaria mutants. This little fable that Behe summarized about the frequency of chloroquine-resistant mutations in the malaria parasite is the centerpiece of his book, and the important odds of 1 in 1020 was the yardstick by which he measured evolution — it was the magic number, the limit to evolution, the likelihood that a fairly simple set of mutations could occur … and the whole story is bogus. The book has been out for only about a week and the whole thing is just crumbling to pieces already.
Not that it will matter in the slightest, of course. The Edge of Evolution isn’t a science book, it’s a propaganda piece — and the big lies are just fine for that purpose.
It’s an article titled “I love teaching evolution”…on the Chalcedon foundation page, in column on homeschooling, beneath a quote and a picture of crazy ol’ R.J. Rushdooney.
Evolution is a topic that repeatedly enters into our curriculum the same way that sin is a topic that gets covered in depth. How am I adequately educating my child if I fail to cover in detail the lies and deceptions that are prevalent in our humanistic culture? The Christian homeschooling parent must be prepared to understand, articulate, and refute the preposterous claims that currently serve as explanations for the origins of life and the presence of all creatures great and small. Fortunately, there are many good books and publishers that have taken the time to make this task much easier.
I think this one belongs to Greg Laden. I’m going to stagger off and rest my bedazzled, overloaded brains.
(thanks to Jesse for that horrible vision.)
I passed on listening to the Democratic debates, so you can sure as heck bet I skipped the recent Republican debate. Just as well, too; the candidates got pressed on that evolution question again, and wouldn’t you know it, it simply triggered an avalanche of idiocy, with Mike Huckabee leading the way. Just look at these quotes.
