Looking for a job? Want to travel, meet people, promote good … uh, “science”? Then here’s your chance: the Creation “Museum” is hiring! They really, really want someone with a doctorate in geology to work with them and use their degree to lend them a little credibility (don’t worry, it won’t help them at all—but after you’ve worked there a while, your degree won’t have any credibility, so you’ll be able to use it as toilet paper).

To apply, they want a “resume” and a few other things that I don’t remember ever having to submit when I was on the job market.

• Salvation testimony
• Creation belief statement
• Confirmation of your agreement with the AiG Statement of Faith

I guess you don’t have to fill out an affirmative action form with AiG.

The Statement of Faith is an intensely loony document, and one of their beliefs ought to be posted outside their “museum”.

No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.

In other words, any evidence that contradicts their religious beliefs is rejected by definition. If I had a grad student trying to earn a Ph.D. in a science, I wouldn’t let them have it if they could endorse such an anti-scientific sentiment.

(via McCranium)

Nick Matzke has dug into the literature on evolution of chloroquinone resistance in a comment so substantial it ought to be a post on the Panda’s Thumb. This magic number of 1 in 10²⁰ as the probability that a specific two-amino acid change could evolve that Behe uses as his linchpin metric for evolvability throughout his book turns out to not actually describe the probability of a pair of mutually dependent mutations…

So it looks like resistance actually occurs by the gradual accumulation of several mutations, and that what you are seeing in the wild is not a few rare double-mutation events, but instead a few much-evolved strains that have accumulated a large number of resistance mutations.

…and the number itself is of rather shaky provenance.

The evolution of malaria really is the major theme running throughout the book, and it’s looking like he hasn’t gotten any of it right. I wondered how such sloppy scholarship could have passed muster, so I took a look at the acknowledgments page to see who had helped him out. Here’s the roster of great minds:

Lydia and Tim McGrew, Peter and Paul Nelson, George Hunter, David DeWitt, Doug Axe, Bill Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Tony Jelsma, Neil Manson, Jay Richards, and Guillermo Gonzalez read the manuscript, and Bruce Chapman, Steve Meyer, John West, and Rob Crowther provide support.

In other words, his reviewers were the gang of incompetent philosophers, theologians, and creationist ideologues who willingly associate themselves with the Discovery Institute, with nary a real biologist among them. No wonder such bad science could slip into publication.

Michael Lemonick has an excellent reply to Sam Brownback’s recent attempt to weasel away from creationism.

What he ended up doing was demonstrating that he doesn’t really know much about science. If, writes the senator, “evolution means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence then I reject it.”

How curious. Does this mean that the senator also rejects the laws of gravity? Last I heard, they reflected that same view of the world. No scientist I’ve ever run into, nor even any senator, thinks that things fall to earth or planets orbit stars because God is there shoving on them. Yet many scientists do believe in God; they just don’t think he has to meddle with the physical universe to make things turn out right.

Which makes gods rather superfluous, yet they believe anyway…but correct, unless Brownback invokes a mysterious supernatural force intervening in every single physical process going on around him, that’s a silly statement that doesn’t reflect any rational interpretation of the world. Although I do wonder sometimes if the religious crazies aren’t living in an imaginary environment saturated with pixies and angels and devils and demons, all tugging away at every molecule around them — as if Brownian motion were named after Brownies.

What a delightful and well deserved development! The Australian sister organization to Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis is hammering him with a nasty lawsuit.

The Brisbane-based Creation Ministries International has filed a lawsuit in Queensland’s Supreme Court against Mr Ham and his Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis ministry seeking damages and accusing him of deceptive conduct in his dealings with the Australian organisation.

The suit focuses on a dispute over the Australian organisation’s production of a creationist magazine, sold in the US to more than 35,000 subscribers, and has led to revelations about the three-year battle between the two ministries.

A 40-page report, written by Mr Briese and obtained by The Australian, reveals a bitter power struggle across the Pacific that began with a challenge to the power Mr Ham allegedly wielded over the ministries.

I honestly don’t care who wins. The ideal conclusion will be that of the Kilkenny cats: mutual self-destruction.

Just in case you had any doubts about how the Intelligent Design creationists would react to the denial of Gonzalez’s tenure, here’s how Uncommon Descent illustrated it:

I like the little sign above his head: he’s being burned at the stake because he “believes in God”! I assure you that the fact that someone goes to church does not play any role in tenure decisions, nor does the penalty for failure to get tenure involve immolation, or even singeing. The reality is that Guillermo Gonzalez is being politely shown the door because he “believes in pernicious pseudoscience,” and more pragmatically, because he didn’t bring in enough grant money.

The president of Iowa State University has rejected Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal for tenure, citing the fact that “he simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect.” That, alas, is the result I expected, and that everyone involved should have expected.

Now, if we expected a rational, productive response from the DI (not that I do), we should see them put down the hammers and nails and peel the poor fellow off the cross they’ve put him on. It’s time for Gonzalez to focus on the future and try to recover from the PR debacle his “friends” at the DI have put him through.