Uh-oh. I’m being chastised by Jason, and by more than a few commenters in the thread about Mitt Romney’s views on evolution. You’re all going to have to crack the whip harder, though, because I am still unpersuaded, and I’m still mildly disgusted with all the people praising Romney for his anti-science statements.
What is going on here? I read Mitt Romney’s comments on evolution on TPM Cafe and was surprised at how many people think it was a positive development.
Is this a first? Mitt Romney isn’t pandering to religious right voters or flip-flopping on an issue important to them in this interview, in which he reveals that he opposes the teaching of intelligent design:
“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”
He was asked: Is that intelligent design?
“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”
While governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney opposed the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.
“In my opinion, the science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed,” he said. “If we’re going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that’s for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class.”
How about that?
Read the comments over there. People are calling it “startling”, “intelligent”, and that it’s brave of him to accept a basic tenet of biology. What the hell are they talking about?
It’s always so exciting to see a new creationist argument…until you actually look at it and see how silly it is. And they’ve been getting more and more desperately absurd as the years go by and the flaws in the old arguments get harder and harder to support. Once upon a time, they could just say it rained really hard for 40 days to flood the earth. When it was pointed out that you can’t wring that much water out of the atmosphere, they had to contrive all kinds of elaborate conditions for earth prior to the flood, with deep reservoirs and a “vapor canopy” of crystalline hydrogen to keep huge volumes of water under pressure above the earth. That was awfully silly, so now this new argument tries to rescue it with “evidence” for some mighty weird conditions on God’s earth.
Hey, this isn’t a half-bad critique of creationist arguments — short, written at a simple level, and with a list of references at the end.
Too bad he’s another of us repugnant atheists — he’ll frighten the children and never convince anyone of anything.*
*That’s sarcasm, ‘k?
First, an important message from Randy Olson:
Second, another important message from Randy Olson: one of the DVD extras for the movie has been released to YouTube! It’s got my picture in it, but skip that, watch for…
Jack Cashill’s little falsehood about Haeckel’s embryos. He accuses SJ Gould of sitting on the problems of Haeckelian recapitulation for 25 years, only mentioning it in 1995. Of course, Gould published a whole book in 1977, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, that laid out the failures of Haeckelian recapitulation in pedantic detail. Cashill also claims “…the Haeckel embryos which are being reproduced in every single significant textbook1 in America as the single best proof2 of Darwinism3…”; how many errors can you count in that short sentence? I get at least 3.
And most importantly, catch the cynical quote from Michael Behe at the end of the clip. It’s worth watching for that alone.
“My kids don’t go to public schools, what do I care?”
A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That’s his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it’s a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There’s a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity.
The description in the book of this image is like so:
Subtlety was not one of [William Jennings] Bryan’s strong suits. His campaign poster from that same election [1900] depicted, among other things, a sort of Lady Liberty archetype attacking a giant octopus with an axe.
This is clearly an incorrect interpretation. The octopus is central and beautiful, and if that were actually Lady Liberty, she ought to be half-naked. I think it’s Bryan advocating an uprising of the servile classes to destroy loyal invertebrate-Americans, the treacherous dog. I’m glad he lost the election.
Some conservative named Patrick Hynes is unhappy that the Republican candidates were asked their opinion of evolution. His argument is two-pronged: it is reasonable to disagree with scientific opinions on the matter, and it is unreasonable to ask the politicians of his party what their opinion of a scientific issue might be.
A reader sent along an
an article from the Lancaster Sunday News, announcing a lecture on 17 May by John Morris, an infamously silly Young Earth Creationist. It’s a little peculiar; it’s written by Helen Colwell Adams, bylined as a staff writer for the paper, but it is completely credulous — she seems to have interviewed Morris and blindly written down everything he claimed, without so much as cocking an eyebrow and wondering if there were anything to these absurd claims. It’s a wonderful example of very bad journalism.
Morris also panders to his audience with talk about how the Pennsylvania coal fields were all laid down in one great flood. I don’t know what it is, but some people from that part of the state have the wackiest ideas about coal—witness Ed Conrad.
Then you should sign this letter protesting the bogus creationist propaganda on display at Ken Ham’s Creation “Science” museum.
(via Greg Laden)
As a fan of Roy Zimmerman — I’ve mentioned his Creation Science 101 before, among other lovely songs about the modern world — I have two revelations for you. If you’re a guitar player, he has released a short clip that is a tutorial on how to play Creation Science 101. There are fingerings and keys and chords and things that lost me. If you aren’t a guitar player (like me!) you can still enjoy the wisecracks.
Secondly, he has a new YouTube video titled “Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual”. Watch out, it’s a little bit risque — he rhymes “schism” with … well, it’s obvious from the subject matter, isn’t it?
