Another accolade from a ‘prestigious’ journal

The June/July issue of Creation Matters, the house organ of the Creation Research Society, has an article about…ME. Guess what?

They don’t like me. Not one bit.

I’m so crushed that I’m going to post the entire article below the fold, and I think I may have to have a party tonight. It’s always such an honor to be hated by people who believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old, was conjured into existence in six days, and that not believing their god appeared on Earth, like Zeus before Leda, means your non-existent soul will burn in hell forever.

[Read more…]

Seven small peas do not a dinner make

Orac has another tale of the Hitler Zombie—the unstoppable corpse has met Coulter, Weikert, Kennedy, Behe, Johnson, Strobel, and Taylor and eaten their BRAAAAAAAAINS. Sad to say, that was an awfully thin diet—kinda like getting served California cuisine, a few sprigs of something weedy artfully arranged on a plate, when you’re hoping for a more midwestern meal consisting of large lumps of starch and fat—and the Hitler Zombie is going to be ravenous. He will strike again.

Hold the presses: Collins is being used

A reader wrote to Francis Collins about the use of his name to promote D. James Kennedy’s upcoming ahistorical anti-evolution program, and Collins wrote right back. He’s doing exactly the right thing.

(Oops, no — Collins doesn’t want to be quoted on this, so I’ve removed the email. He’s unambiguous in stating that he was interviewed about his book, and that was then inserted into the video without his knowledge.)

Good for him, and that’ll teach me: just when you think there are no further depths to which a creationist will sink, there they go, plumbing ever deeper. Kennedy and his crew are apparently putting together the video equivalent of a quote mine.

I apologize to Dr Collins for assuming he was a party to this creationist video, and I hope he sues those frauds.

Et tu, Francis Collins?

The Raw Story reveals that D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries will be a hosting a program that blames Darwin for Hitler. Orac has going to have to resurrect an entire zombie Wehrmacht to handle this one: look at the unholy corps of creationists he has assembled to defend this outrageous claim:

The one-hour program features Ann Coulter, author of Godless; Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler; Lee Strobel, author of The Case for a Creator; Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution; Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial; Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box; Ian Taylor, author of In the Minds of Men, and Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.

[Read more…]

Maybe we need economic disincentives for creationism…

Remember that ranking of countries by their accommodation to the reality of evolution? Take a look at an economist’s take on the problem: he gets it right.

It turns out that the United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false — and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. (Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution).

What is the penalty for this belief system? Well, you probably won’t get a Science-based job — but that’s about it.

The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.

That — and the lack of any sort of financial or societal disincentive for the belief system. At least so far…

Then take a look at the comments there. All the old creationist crackpottery emerges: evolution is “just a theory,” there is “no evidence,” it’s not “observable and repeatable,” all mixed in with people making reasonable defenses of the idea. What’s most dismal, though, are the people complaining that the blogger shouldn’t even mention evolution, presumably because it draws out all the kooks.

You know, that reluctance to engage the issue is exactly what the creationists want. They can’t win on evidence or logic, but they can harass everyone until they simply automatically recoil at the word “evolution”…and that’s how they win.

Chris Mooney is crazy for agreeing to do this

He’s planning to debate Jonathan Wells…on Fox radio. I guess we can only hope the host, Alan Colmes, is a little less passive than Flatow was in the Mooney/Bethell debate, but we can guarantee that Wells is as ignorant and foolish as Bethell.

I am going to have to turn my attention soon to Wells’ new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but for two things: 1) The New Semester! Is! Flying! into my Face! for the next few weeks, and 2) Wells is a tawdry slug of a writer, who just thumps out lie after lie about the state of modern biology, and since he supposedly was trained in developmental biology, he really pisses me off with his poor scholarship.

For example, here’s his description of chapter 3 of his new book (this will look familiar: he’s clearly rehashing his old, much debunked book, Icons of Evolution.)

[Read more…]

The internet never forgets

I feel a little bit sorry for Joel Borofsky, Dembski’s ‘research’ assistant. Over at Inoculated Mind, Karl Mogel has excavated Borofsky’s tawdry history on them thar IntarWubs. I’d forgive him some of the earlier illiterate, whiny stuff—he started at a very young age, at about the same age as my daughter (who seems to be able to use the internet without sounding like a doofus, though)—but he doesn’t seem to have improved with age.