Ken Ham is still getting his PR for free

Ken Ham is in the news again, and he knows exactly what he’s doing, the cunning little rat.

While foreign media and science critics have mostly come to snigger at exhibits explaining how baby dinosaurs fit on Noah’s Ark and Cain married his sister to people the earth, museum spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said the coverage has done nothing but drum up more interest.

“Mocking publicity is free publicity,” Looy said. Besides, U.S. media have been more respectful, mindful perhaps of a 2006 Gallup Poll showing almost half of Americans believe that humans did not evolve, but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Creationists really aren’t stupid—they’re clever in getting the support they need to protect their ignorance.

Looy said supporters of the museum include evangelical
Christians, Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics, as well
as the local Republican congressman, Geoff Davis (news, bio, voting record), and his
family, who have toured the site.

Everyone knows now not to ever vote for Geoff Davis, right?

They also repeat this weird claim that I have read in every single frickin’ article about the AiG creationist museum…

The museum’s rural location near the border of Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana places it well within America’s mostly conservative and Christian heartland. But the setting has another strategic purpose: two-thirds of Americans are within a day’s drive of the site, and Cincinnati’s international airport is minutes away.

It really isn’t that close to the bulk of the country. It makes one wonder about the quality of the reporting going into these stories when no one even bothers to look at a map.

Now we also get a dose of the persecution complex:

The project has not been without opposition. Zoning battles with environmentalists and groups opposed to the museum’s message have delayed construction and the museum’s opening day has been delayed repeatedly.

The museum has hired extra security and explosives-sniffing dogs to counter anonymous threats of damage to the building. “We’ve had some opposition,” Looy said.

That’s just weird, and not at all fitting with the attitudes I’ve heard. Even the most fervent evilutionists I’ve talked to respond to the news of this “museum” with laughter, and look forward to visiting it and mocking it. They say now that even bad reviews are still good publicity, but I don’t think that will last long after they’ve opened: unremitting mockery is not going to help their cause in the long run. There will be a surge of interest when it first opens, followed by a steady decline in attendance.

Never trust science again!

Doonesbury hits one out of the park today—don’t trust science, it’s just too controversial.

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I like the definition: situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts. The Discovery Institute ought to etch that on their front door, filigreed in gold.

I almost feel sorry for them

Hey, I’m the wild-eyed creationist smasher in this family. So why are all the lame creationists doing their stupid act in my daughter’s blog? She’s actually getting comments like this, intended to refute evolution:

why is it that nothing today is evolving and why is it (if we did come from apes)that they haven’t all turned into humans?

Dogs are not evolving. different kinds of dogs yes but not dogs becoming cats

It’s pathetic and creepy how they think they can get their arguments past the 16 year old girl instead of the curmudgeonly old college professor—and she and her friends are still kicking their butts.

Oh, and this “For the Kids” character is really repellent. Concern trolls are even slimier when they go after your kids…but again, Skatje’s pretty good at handling herself.

Accept the implications

Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I’m sorry, guy, but that’s what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.

At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That’s because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same correlation holds today, only more so.

One other thing that that graph shows is that conservatism is associated with disbelief in evolution, and several people have complained that they dislike the way I phrased it, as “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science”. They’ve complained that it’s only a correlation, not evidence of causation, and that it’s not about science, it’s about evolution. However, I stand by my wording.

The voice of conservatism in America is the Republican party, and the Republican party stands against evolution, against stem cell research, against reproductive rights, against education, against the environment, against alternative energy research, against pollution controls, against good science education, against universal health care, on and on and on. I appreciate that individual conservatives in good conscience may deplore the anti-science agenda and divorce themselves from rather large chunks of the Republican platform, and I understand that the party has not always been such a refuge for know-nothings and may someday reshape itself, but face it: conservatism in this country is tightly coupled to scientific ignorance. If you are a conservative, that is your problem (just as the ineffective, dithering dullards of the Democratic party are my problem, as an openly declared liberal). Buck up, accept the responsibility, and do something about it. Fight for reform of America’s conservative political party.

Or maybe you sensible people who believe in conservative values just need to found a new party and get out from the umbrella of what should be called the Insane Christianist party.

Ridicule is a useful tool

And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.

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The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He’s got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it’s a MS Word file that doesn’t help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.

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American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science

Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.

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(click for larger image)
The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent’s religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.

It looks to me like being a fundamentalist means you’re about half as likely to believe in evolution as a non-fundamentalist of the same level of education and place on the political spectrum. The majority of fundamentalists of any kind (except the liberal ones with a grad school education; I wonder how many of those there are) reject evolution. To get a majority of conservatives to accept evolution, you have to drag them through grad school and make sure they aren’t fundamentalists.

It’s not surprising that fundamentalism puts such a strong damper on evolution, but it is surprising that political conservatism would do likewise. That, I suspect, is a consequence of the strong association between the religious right and Republicans in this country, and I have to wonder whether conservatives who reject religion completely are as screwed up as this sample indicates, and if conservatives from other countries would do as poorly.

One problem I have with these data, though, is there is no indication of the sample size in each category. It’s taken from a total of 3673 respondents, but I rather suspect that the liberal-fundamentalist category was significantly smaller than the conservative-fundamentalist group in raw numbers, so that, for instance, there are actually many more fundamentalist grad students who disbelieve evolution than believe it.

The chart also shows that a college education has a negligible effect on fundamentalist’s belief in evolution, but what we don’t have here is any data on what kind of college education we’re talking about. The fundamentalists may have mostly attended a bible college that reinforces their ignorance for all we know, and they may have had a very different experience than the non-fundamentalists, who would have been more likely to attend a secular school.

The association of anti-evolutionism with conservatism is not a particularly reassuring trend to me. Despite being liberal myself, I think the acceptance of good science ought to be independent of political affiliation; the data says it isn’t. The chart is about belief in evolution, and that’s a good word for it—if you are saying you agree that humans evolved from earlier species of animals because your political views say you should, you may not be evaluating the evidence rationally…or perhaps liberals are simply more receptive to education.

Mazur A (2007) Disbelievers in evolution. Science 315(5809):187.

William Dembski says something useful

This is a concrete image of biology’s future under the Intelligent Design creationists: it would be dissolved by fiat.

If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).

Dembski’s ignorance of biology departments apparently rivals his ignorance of biology. I don’t know what he means by “engineering”, but I know a fair number of physiologists who will go on and on about Reynold’s numbers and force-structure relationships and other such esoterica…and every single one of them is an evolutionist.

I think they already understand the problem, but such a vivid example of creationist lunacy will be very useful in discussions with my colleagues.

Creationism in Turkey

I reported on this survey of people’s attitudes towards evolution, in which the US was second to the worst. We beat Turkey. The point was to emphasize the poor shape of US education, but it unfairly made fun of Turkey … imagine, though, how awful it would be to be in their shoes. This week’s issue of Nature has a letter from several Turkish scientists describing their plight and what they are doing to fight it; I’ve put it below the fold.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Doug Kaufman, PA, Pastor, Kansan, Gumby

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The Kansas Board of Education is going to be re-evaluating the anti-science standards the formerly overwhelmingly right-wing crazy board had approved—they’ve since elected more moderate members—and the creationists aren’t happy about it. When reading the stories, there was this name that kept coming up: Doug Kaufman. I don’t know a thing about the man, but from all of his newspaper quotes, I’m getting an impression of a real Gumby, a fellow who has one thought in his head and who bellows it out at every opportunity. If only that thought weren’t wrong…

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