I’ve had a few run-ins with this wacky retired chemist and obsessive creationist, and recently pestered Jeffrey Shallit. There’s a good tip in that account; Shallit just mentioned my name, and Skell fled. I guess I’ve become an anti-creationist talisman now.

Liberty University is fielding an expedition to Turkey to dig up Noah’s Ark.

When your professors are looking for a 4,000 year old boat that beached on a mountain top after a global flood, you might as well give up on any pretense to scholarly credibility, OK?

This is absurd. The Italian National Research Council is sponsoring the publication of a creationist book, titled Evolutionism: The Decline of an Hypothesis. Right away, from the title alone, you can tell that the book has problems: evolution is not a theory in decline, no matter how much the creationists declare it so, but is guiding a thriving research program. The contents are something else, too: apparently, it declares that dinosaurs went extinct just 40,000 years ago, and that radiometric dating is wrong.

Wow. It’s not just a creationist book, but a young earth creationist book. Right away, we can make some predictions about the author. Roberto de Mattei: that he knows nothing about science, and that he’s a political creature.

Bingo.

De Mattei, a political appointee to CNR, teaches the History of Christianity and the Church at the European University in Rome and is president of the Rome- and Washington, D.C.-based Lepanto Foundation, a Catholic group.

You know, when you sponsor a book that proposes to throw out basic physics, chemistry, and biology, you really ought to make sure the author has some chops in those fields.

Ken Ham is distressed that he gets no respect. This triggers a little litany of self-defense.

Guess what’s missing from Sunday’s Cincinnati Enquirer‘s (our main Cincinnati newspaper) long articles about local Christmas/holiday activities?

This long piece-plus other Christmas-related articles–appeared in the paper yesterday (Sunday). No mention of the Creation Museum and its Bethlehem’s Blessings Christmas programs–not even the free day on Thursday (the museum is open to the public for free for Christmas Eve), even though through our publicist, we sent two news releases to the paper about our Christmas activities.

Interesting, considering over 920,000 people have visited the Creation Museum–tens of millions of dollars has been brought into the community each of the past two years–hundreds of jobs created locally–already 7,500 people have visited the Creation Museum’s Live Nativity (five more dates for this spectacular event) and phenomenal garden light display. (By the way, we have submitted a letter to the paper to inquire about the omission of our major series of Christmas events that will attract over 15,000 people to a place that has won major tourism awards for advertising excellence–maybe there is some explanation for this oversight; while the paper’s reporters over the years have generally been fair towards us, we sometimes wonder why some of the editors seem to look at us differently–see a previous article of ours, for example.

There’s a reason the world looks at you differently, Ken.

It’s because you’re a gibbering nitwit. Your “museum” is a popular freakshow for ignorant yahoos, and it’s existence is an international embarrassment. You bring about as much prestige to the Cincinnati area as a combination leper colony and lunatic asylum; sure, it’s well-populated with the unfortunate afflicted, and it provides employment to local citizens, and the fact that you’ve turned it into a spectacle of stupidity for gawkers brings in tourist dollars, but it’s not something to be proud of. And unlike the leper colony/asylum, your institution provides no useful or charitable function for the community or its residents. Instead, you lie to children for money.

I suspect the omission was merely an oversight, because the American media tends to drool for money over principle, and one thing the phony “museum” has is buckets of money — for the same reason P.T. Barnum thrived — but one can always hope that the slight was intentional, and that someone at the Cincinnati Enquirer is aware that the presence of a Temple to Lunacy brings disrepute to the region.

You lie to children for money. You don’t get respect for that.

Once upon a time, in vague exasperation at a persistent creationist, I opened up two of his questions to the Pharynguloid horde in a contest to see who could answer them most clearly and succinctly. I shouldn’t have done this; I’m lazy, and this was too much like grading term papers. Still, there were a lot of good answers, so it was a worthwhile effort.

The winner, judged for clarity, brevity, and accuracy, was Calilasseia, an infrequent commenter here who clearly needs to increase his or her frequency. I’ve sent off an email in hopes of a reply with a mail address, or if Calilasseia notices this, maybe I’ll be sent one soon. Or not. The Prize in this contest is an appropriate and ironic one: a copy of Slaughter of the Dissidents, by the incredible Jerry Bergman. Only the first volume, though; he hasn’t finished writing the other dozen or so he says are in the offing.

I feel a little guilty. That’s like going on a game show, picking door #2, and discovering that your prize is a goat. In this case, it’s a GOAT ON FIRE, which helps a little bit, but still…I’ll also slip in a surprise book of a more worthy nature if Calilasseia gets back to me.

Here are the two questions and the winning answers. I repeat, these aren’t the only good answers—go back to that thread and browse and there are plenty of well written short replies.

Was evolution a significant and essential factor in guiding Nazi thought?

No. First of all, as has already been established courtesy of searching through Mein Kampf in detail, Hitler’s assorted eructations on nature reproduce well-known creationist canards, including the static species fallacy, and Hitler also asserted that fertile, viable hybrids were inpossible, which is manifestly refuted by this scientific paper (among many others):

Speciation By Hybridisation In Heliconius Butterflies, by Jesús Mavárez, Camilo A. Salazar, Eldredge Bermingham, Christian Salcedo, Chris D. Jiggins and Mauricio Linares, Nature, 441: 868-871 (15th June 2006)

Also, even an elementary search of Mein Kampf reveals the following statistics. The number of instances of key words are as follows:

“Darwin” : ZERO

“Almighty” : 6

“God” : 37

“Creator” : 8

Hitler was inspired by the anti-Semitic ravings of one Lanz von Liebenfels, who was a defrocked monk, and whose magnum opus bore the Pythonesque title of
Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron. This was in effect a warped Biblical exegesis, which rewrites the Crucifixion story, and also contains a mediaeval bestiary replete with instances of Liebenfels’ florid imagination.

Additionally, the Nazis placed textbooks on evolutionary biology on their list of seditious books to be burned, as illustrated nicely here, where we learn that in 1935, Nazi guidelines with respect to seditious books included:

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

Translated into English, this reads:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)

The evidence is therefore conclusive. Nazism was not inspired by evolution, and indeed, much of Hitler’s own writings are creationist in tone. The Nazis destroyed evolutionary textbooks as seditious (much as modern day creationists would love to), and the Nazi view of the biosphere is wholly at variance with genuine evolutionary theory, involving fatuous views of race “purification” by the establishment of monocultures that are the very antithesis of genuine evolutionary thought, which relies upon genetic diversity.

Can natural processes produce an increase in complexity?

The overwhelming evidence from the scientific literature is yes. Appropriate papers include:

Evolution Of Biological Complexity by Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria and Travis C. Collier, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 97(9): 4463-4468 (25th April 2000)

Evolution of Biological Information by Thomas D. Schneider, Nucleic Acids Research, 28: 2794-2799 (2000)

Indeed, in the latter paper, Schneider establishes that selection processes cause the amount of information in the genome to increase to a maximum.

Likewise, instances of this taking place in real world organisms are well documented in the scientific literature. Such as Lenski’s landmark paper on historical contingency in Escherichia coli, the literature centred upon nylonase, and the evolution of antifreeze glycoproteins in Antarctic Notothenioid fishes. From the world of aquarium fishes, there is also a well documented mutation known as the double tail mutation, which results in indivduals of Betta splendens inheriting the mutation developing two complete tail fins, a mutation that moreover, obeys single-factor Mendelian inheritance. This constitutes an example of increase in organismal complexity, that comes about as close to realising creationist canards with respect thereto, as any observed instance in Nature is ever likely to.

More to the point, there exist numerous papers covering de novo origination of genes, of which:

De Novo Origination Of A New Protein-Coding Gene In Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Jing Cai, Ruoping Zhao, Hifeng Jiang and Wen Wang, Genetics, 179: 487-496 (May 2008)

is merely one of the more spectacular instances. Surely the emergence of a gene where previously there was none, constitutes an increase in complexity by any reasonable measure? Particularly as the instance in the above paper arose from a previously noncoding DNA sequence?

The Minot Skeptical Society has posted my lecture on Evolutionary Denialism to youtube. You have to work your way through a series of numbered segments to see the whole thing, and I do go on.