Here are a couple of accounts of encounters with creationists that are amusing to read.

• Jobe Martin. Jobe Martin is, well, a radically insane classic young earth creationist, whose favorite arguments are all ancient chestnuts, like the receding moon and the woodpecker’s tongue and other such tripe. And he was invited to speak by an IDEA club? That kills the notion that IDEA has anything to do with science, I think. I’ve got one of Martin’s books (my son Alaric gave it to me: I think he was trying to kill me to get his inheritance early, but it didn’t work), and it’s positively ludicrous.
• Kent Hovind. I put up that request for good questions, and gnosos carried through. Hovind cut the mic on him, so despite losing his cool a bit, he must have been effective to some degree—he also got lots of questions from other attendees afterwards.

We laugh at the yahoos on the Kansas Board of Education who are dragging their state down the drain with bad science education, but don’t confuse that with laughing at Kansans. There are some very smart people down there. I am very impressed with this op-ed by Cassie Gentry—she very effectively takes down an Intelligent Design advocate…and she’s a college freshman in English.

I’d suggest that she ought to think about coming up to Minnesota and majoring in a science, but I think they need more like her right where she is.

The DI has long had this goal of getting their work published in mainstream science journals; unfortunately, they don’t want to bother with that unpleasant business of trying to do real research. Give Up Blog has examples of their prodigious output: 5 abstracts that have been published in science journals. That’s it.

They’ve managed this feat by exploiting a loophole. Here’s how to get published in a major journal: 1) Write an abstract about just about anything. 2) Send the abstract and your registration fee to a conference organized by the scientific society behind the journal. 3) Watch your abstract get accepted and published in an issue of the journal that lists presentations at the meeting.

That’s it. There’s no peer review involved, except that, ideally, people at the meeting will come by your poster or talk and critique it. Everything is open and not monitored for quality at all, which is exactly how the crap the DI does can get in.

I’m going to disagree with Give Up a bit here: I think this is a good thing, and I don’t want the journals to tighten up the standards. Meetings like that are very helpful, especially for students, because you can show preliminary results (stuff that would be very difficult to publish) and get immediate feedback from your peers, criticisms of what’s wrong in your work, and suggestions about new approaches to take. This is incredibly useful.

The real test is whether a presenter pays attention and uses that feedback to improve and polish the work to make it suitable for formal publication. The work by Nelson and Wells that I’ve seen at these meetings is terrible, so bad that most of the people attending might gawk incredulously at it, but don’t bother to make suggestions, or as I did with Nelson at the DB meetings, might just stop to tell the author that he is completely wrong.

Rather than changing the culture of these meetings, I think we just have to inform the public that the publications in a meeting list are meaningless and do not represent any kind of legitimization of their work…and that actually, their work gets razzed at these events.

Unbelievable. Orac and Matt have found an amazing carnival: Darwin is Dead. It’s short; you can read all 5 entries in about 5 minutes, and I promise, it won’t kill more than a few thousand brain cells.

My favorite entry is the same as Orac’s, but for a different reason. He seems to have missed this jewel of creationist illogic:

So here goes. To the evolutionists: First, evolution claims that humans and apes have a common ancestor. But since apes are not still evolving into man that notion is debunked without performing a single experiment. Science is the study of things obervable, and man evolving from apes has not been observed. Since both creatures still co-exist, something such as this WOULD be obervable if it were true.

Yep, it’s the old “if we evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?” argument. I laugh every time I see it.

OK, rifle Jesus, I’ll answer that one. Apes are still evolving, and have been evolving in the roughly 6 million years since humans and chimps diverged. There is no inherent tendency for apes to evolve towards humans, though—we are the product of chance—so every lineage has gone in its own direction.

We do have a darned good record of human evolution. We have the observable evidence, there is documented pattern of organic change in our history, other apes have also been evolving, and of course both creatures co-exist—if diverging species couldn’t simultaneously exist, there’d only be one species on the whole planet.

Here’s a request from gnosos:

“Dr” Hovind is giving a speech on my campus tomorrow night in a 450 seat auditorium. Usually, questioners only get 15 seconds at the mic at these kinds of things, and I’m trying to think of a question that approaches one of his many glaring errors in thought in a novel way. Do you (or your readers) have any ideas about what you (or they) would say to Kent Hovind given 15 seconds?

I’m cynical: I think the rapid-fire limitation is intended to prevent deep, thoughtful questions or any kind of considered rebuttal, and I also think he’ll just reply to anything with more empty-headed, rote creationist jingo, so I think it’s all an exercise in futility. But maybe someone here can come up with a simple stumper of a question.

Texans for Better Science Education is one of those strident creationist fronts that tries to undermine science teaching in favor of religious nonsense while pretending to be promoting rational thinking—they might as well have called it Sound Science, that sneaky and misleading label conservatives like to toss around. Their site is a collection of half-truths and quote-mining, one of those places you have to visit just to gawp at the awe-inspiring ignorance and dishonesty on display.

However, as a reader pointed out to me, there is one shining ray of truth in the whole site. They have a new project that they proudly announce in several places: Operation Teach Weaknesses! You got it, their goal is to teach more weak science in Texas classrooms.

I’m so sorry your state is infested with these clowns, Texans. I hope you can throw a few of them out in the next round of elections.

What’s wrong with this statement?

“We’re very pleased,” said Rick Blake, spokesman in Chicago for Holt, Rinehart and Winston. “Science is a very strong area for Holt.”

Since it is in response to Holt’s decision to water down biology textbooks in Florida, it’s wrong.

I’m sorry, Mr Blake, but science is not a strong area for Holt. You wouldn’t be listening to the Discovery Institute if it were.

(via Red State Rabble)

Creationists have been chanting, “Teach the controversy” at us for some time, to which most biologists simply look puzzled and ask “What controversy?” There is no ongoing debate about the ideas peddled by the Discovery Institute within the scientific community, because, well, there have been no data presented to suggest that it would be a worthwhile and productive discussion.

That’s what I say, but I’m just one peon in the academic complex. But now Bob Camp has done a comprehensive survey to assess whether there actually is a controversy. He wrote to the department heads of a number of biology departments, and asked this simple yes/no question:

Q: Regarding the issue of “Intelligent Design theory” vs. current biological consensus on the mechanisms of evolution – is there a difference of professional opinion within your department that you feel could be accurately described as a scientific controversy?

97% said no. Only one said yes, and that was from a theological medical university.

That’s a handy piece of information. When we’re told to “teach the controversy” in the future, one good answer is to reply that there is no controversy to teach.