If you want to see how the other side thinks, and I mean more than just the vocal leaders at the top of the creationist movement, there’s an excellent example at The Friendly Atheist. It’s written by a fellow who visited his local church, Parkview Christian Church, and reviewed a 25 page pamphlet on creationism put out by the pastor, Tim Harlow.

I have to be blunter than the Friendly Atheist (he’s friendly, after all; I have no such qualifier): Reverend Tim Harlow is sincere, caring, literate, and open to conversation, but his pamphlet is 199 proof distilled stupid, aged in oaken casks and decanted with love. It’s a collection of “scientific” creationism’s greatest hits, from “evolution is just a theory” to “evolution causes sexual deviancy and Naziism”, by way of quote mining, tornadoes in junkyards, Piltdown man, the Loch Ness monster, and every logical fallacy trotted out by the parade of fools we’ve heard from between Henry Morris and Phillip Johnson. This thing is a hotbed of quote mining. He’s quoting Richard Dawkins in support of Intelligent Design creationism; he quotes Carl Sagan to say evolution is impossible; he’s even got the infamous dishonest partial quote of Darwin on the evolution of the eye.

This pamphlet is written as a letter to his children’s teacher, and it’s presented as the work of a well-meaning parent begging a teacher to be fair. I’ve had students who ask me to be fair, before—it usually means they’ve thoroughly bombed on some test, and want some special consideration for their errors. That attitude holds true here, too.

So, as a teacher, you are bound to teach evolution. That is not your fault: it is simply the reality and I do understand that fact. I just want to try to keep you open to the idea that my child, and probably most children in your classroom, do not believe that “theory.” I am asking you to teach (or continue to teach) evolution as just that — a “theory,” and keep your classroom open to other theories of the origin of the world. The essential issue of the famous Scopes trial that started all of this was the fundamental right in a free country to study any theories of origin. At that point, the courts decided that evolution could be taught with creationism. Somehow the pendulum swing went way over to the other side. I would suggest that many people — some scientists included — would like to see it swing back.

Right there in his opening entreaty he demonstrates that he doesn’t know what the scientific meaning of the word “theory” is; I am not kindly disposed. The rest of the pamphlet is even worse, and there wasn’t a single paragraph I could find that was untainted by error. Sorry, Harlow, but it’s only fair that I flunk you.

I hope no teachers are taken in by his phony plea, either. Yes, you are free to learn any old stuff and nonsense you want—does anyone doubt that Harlow’s children are getting thoroughly and repeatedly indoctrinated into the baloney in his pamphlet? —but the job of the public schools should be to teach the best, established, superstition-free ideas, not echo the unscientific myths of ill-informed parents in the community, of whom Harlow is an excellent representative.

Harlow is also representative of the kind of authority figures standing at church pulpits all across the country, trading in fellowship and community good works, and handing out lies, nonsense, and ignorance with a happy glint in his eye. And people believe him—after all, would a preacher lie to you?

Now the scary part: there are pastors like Harlow in your town, right now. And they have congregations that listen to them, and vote, and harass your public school teachers. You should be afraid.

Kent Hovind is still blogging…from jail!

His sentencing is on 19 January, he’s busy “saving” men (five so far!), and he has been without a pillow for 8 days. They play the TV too loud.

His fellow inmates are “starved for real affection.” This could get disturbing fast.

He has a list of reasons why God allowed him to be tossed in jail. One is to make him more like Jesus.

The insanity will go on.

Why is it that the funny stuff always breaks out when I’m away from the interwebs? The always looney DaveScot takes issue with the claim that the virgin birth of Jesus is biologically unlikely, and cobbles up a bizarre scenario to allow it. Why, I don’t know; is ID dependent on the chromosomal status of Jesus Christ, or something?

Anyway, DaveScot proposes that 1) meiosis was incomplete in one of Mary’s ova, producing an egg that contained 2N chromosomes; 2) this egg also bore a mutation that causes XX individuals to develop as phenotypically male; and 3) something then activated this egg to develop. Then he crows,

What I want to know now is whether ignorance or dishonesty explains why you’d quote someone who claims the virgin birth of Christ defies everything we know about mammalian reproduction.

His scenario has a number of problems. It won’t work. I don’t even need to touch on his mangling of the concept of diploidy, which Allen MacNeil dispenses with in the comments.

1. The resultant embryo would have a very high incidence of homozygosity. By suppressing the second meiotic division, he has generated an egg where all the pairs of chromosomes are the result of replication of a single DNA strand (less occurrence of recombination, which does ameliorate the problem.) This would unmask lethal recessives in Mary’s genotype. I suppose you could argue that Mary was picked by God for her amazingly complete lack of any deleterious alleles…

2. A second critical problem, though, is that the genes inherited from your mother and father have different patterns of imprinting. Genes in mammalian gametes are modified in different ways in males and females in order to suppress certain genes; all of Jesus’ genes would have a female imprinting pattern, and none with a male pattern, producing an imbalance in gene expression that is typically lethal. This can be overcome by experimental manipulations that mimic male imprinting by knocking out some of the genes, but it’s still problematic. Experiments that tinker with patterns of imprinting still start with zygotes containing nuclei from two different parents to avoid problem #1.

3. The end result of all this finagling is that Jesus was the highly improbable multiple mutant outcome of a cytological error, no divinity involved. That’s fine with me (does DaveScot really think that providing a natural explanation for a myth refutes my position?), but I don’t think it fits the expectations of the religious, and I sure don’t see how one absurdly unlikely chance occurrence would support the ID position in any way.

4. Watching DaveScot flail around with his barely-high-school understanding of meiosis and development is entertaining, but really, all it accomplishes is to diminish his credibility yet further, and it was already prostrate on the floor. I guess he felt the need to start digging to get it lower still.

Not content with exposing his ignorance of reproductive biology, DaveScot just had to end with a demonstration of his mastery of physics, as well.

So you see, Paul, matter and energy that we know about are only a small fraction of what makes the universe go ’round, so to speak. Who’s to say at this point in time that this huge amount of unknown “stuff” is incapable of organization that produces intelligence? Could God be lurking in the dark energy of the universe?

I wonder what Sean Carroll would think of this hypothesis that dark matter and dark energy constitute a giant intelligent entity that does genetic experiments on human females?

This is all just God of the Gaps guesswork, in which gods are tucked away in the empty spaces in our knowledge. In this case, those empty spaces are magnified by the inclusion of DaveScot’s personal ignorance…making his god a truly great god.

The cat who gave birth to a dog has failed her tests. All hope rests on their search for a lizard giving birth to a chicken now.

Some dirt is being unearthed in the tale of the biggest creationist group around, Answers in Genesis, led by Ken Ham. There were two branches of AiG, one in Australia and another in the US, and there’d been hints of a split between them—and now Jim Lippard has details. It’s looking ugly.

In short, it looks like this was a struggle over money and control, with the Australian group out-maneuvered by the U.S. group. If the information in these documents is accurate–and I am inclined to believe that it is–it shows that Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis is as sleazy in its business dealings as it is in its misrepresentations of science.

It looks to me like Ken Ham is Kent Hovind’s smarter cousin…but that he’s just as corrupt and conniving.

Casey Luskin’s ignorance is well-known, and this recent essay stopped most of us cold at his Ford Pinto comparison. We should have kept going. Karmen plucks out another particularly stupid statement, one that’s even dumber than the Pinto remark:

The article called evolution a “simple” process. In our experience, does a “simple” process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?

Luskin apparently thinks the answer is “no.” I think Karmen could teach him a few things about fractals to get him started, but it’s trivially true that yes, biology is all about the simple becoming complex through natural processes.

Five days ago, I wrote about a creationist letter that was published in Nature. At that time, there was a discussion going on in email with the gang at the Panda’s Thumb, and someone said we ought to get a pool going on how long it would take before the Intelligent Design creationists would use this to argue that their case was being seriously discussed in the pages of a major scientific journal. Four months was suggested; I said one week.

I should have put some money down on that.

It turns out one of the PhD alumni in biology from Moran’s school (University of Toronto), a respected scientist and pro-ID creationist recently had his letter published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. This is news in itself that creationists and ID proponents are getting airtime now in scientific journals…

That was the unctuous clown, Sal Cordova, of course. It was four days before they were trumpeting this crank letter as a triumph for Intelligent Design creationism.

Casey Luskin has been posting a series of articles to argue with Carl Zimmer, and has finally posted his last attempt, which Zimmer has dealt with. We have a new catch phrase, thanks to Luskin, in reference to the shortcomings of the vertebrate eye:

Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed in crash tests, not designed?

You see, we’re not allowed to infer anything about the Designer from its handiwork in the natural world (that would be theology, after all), except perhaps when it’s necessary to speculate that life was designed by Ford to counter those annoying facts.