I get email

I am often chided by morons.

Consistent

Dear Mr. Myers,

To be wrong is always acceptable, because we are human. But, to be consistently wrong, especially when you call yourself a Professor, is going way beyond the bounds of good sense. Anyone who even gives ear to people such as Dawkins and Kitchens is no less than a fool. There is nothing wrong with being a fool, but teaching others to be one is unacceptable and irresponsible, at the very least. Furthermore, to have a degree or degrees in biology and to still believe in Darwinian theory, shows ignorance in the worst degree. Macro evolution is founded on absolutely nothing but blind faith. No evidence has ever been provided for it. Several hokes and false attempts, but no real evidence. A large group of sciences, including biologists, have concluded that the theory is false. Why, other than you can make a living no way else, that a professional biologist would continue on with such a shenanigan, is beyond comprehension. It is a poison to society and you are one who doses it out. As common as a drug dealer. I hope you will come to your senses, as a thinking rational man, before too long. If it is the result of bitterness about something in your past…get over it.

Sincerely,
Michael Aprile

I’ve split half-billion year old stones to expose the shells of trilobites, I’ve seen the bones of Tiktaalik, I’ve held in my hands the skull of Neanderthal. I’ve compared the genes of mice and flies, I’ve studied the embryos of grasshoppers and fish, I’ve read thousands of papers produced by a scientific community that values curiosity over money. I’ve also read dozens of books by creationists, and I can say with complete confidence that they, and you, Mr Michael Aprile, are full of shit.

You write chastising email built out of condescending ignorance, and can’t even be troubled to check the spelling and grammar. You claim there is no evidence for evolution, when you haven’t even looked. All those people with degrees in biology know genetics, molecular biology, anatomy, physiology, and ecology — what do you know, Mr Aprile? The science points ineluctably to evolution as a fact, as the mechanism for biological change over time. The only people who argue otherwise, and that includes those ‘sciences’ [sic] you claim have concluded that the theory is false, are ideologues who have had their brains addled by non-scientific presuppositions, and who have decided that their fallacious traditional myths must supersede observation and evidence.

The professional biologists whose work you do not comprehend are not spreading poison or drugs: they are sharing knowledge. I know you find that anathema, since it directly displaces the ignorance you and your religion thrive on, but I do not concede an iota of respect to your stupidity, and will be spending the rest of my life opposing it.

I get email

Keep that recent xkcd in mind when you read this one. This is from a creationist who is convinced all those biologists have it completely wrong, because Clovis points are beautiful artifacts.

Im digging in Ancient mans kitchen

Why is it that the deeper I Dig , the more brilliant the artifacts become… Isn’t that opposite of the Darwin view? Clovis, First view, Plainview,… these guys were far advanced when it came to the quality of life.. I always was taught the older man was the dumber he was.. That’s not accurate in my pea brain view of what I am personally researching… My digging buds discovered written stones in association with Clovis man back in the 80’s.. the local “professionals” would not acknowledge our finds. They then proceeded (over the next 20 years) to claim our site for themselves and as recently as this year have come out and said, “We must rethink the intelligence of early man” da……….Ask Dr. Mike Collins, a Texas archeologist, about David Olmstead’s inscribed stones found in association with Clovis.. bet he doesn’t have much to say… over one hundred such stone were found at the Gault Site in Texas, where we used to dig…You will never convince me that early man wasn’t brilliant and by design. .. read the Bible man…are you afraid? Are you so “professional” you will not even look at another view? I hurt for you brainyacks.. thank God he has kept me simple that I might understand the leap of faith I have taken. He loves you to ya know… after all, He knew you before you were born….John Bishop

Well, this guy has a few misconceptions. Clovis doesn’t represent “ancient man”: these are artifacts on the order of 10,000 years old. It’s still far older than the standard creationist idea of the age of the entire universe, but they are still relics of relatively modern Homo sapiens.

Mr Bishop should stop listening to creationists. I don’t know of any biologists who claim that the older Homo sapiens are dumber than the more recent examples.

Clovis points are spectacular and beautiful, and I certainly don’t have the skill to make one. But I’d hold up an iPhone next to a chipped spear point and argue which is more “brilliant”. Our technology has progressed to an amazing degree, and Mr Bishop is simply in denial.

I also detect some anger. I suspect he found some stones with scratches on them and has decided that they are relics of ancient writing (see Ed Conrad for another example of grandiose misinterpretation), and is miffed that the professionals disagree with him. You can see some of these engraved stones — they’re interesting, but they aren’t Dickens.

Note also the typical pretense to modesty in the letter: he’s “simple,” he has a “pea brain,” yet he also thinks he so much smarter than those “professionals” and “brainyacks”.

The bad grammar and the bizarre punctuation, together with the inane god-walloping, are just the icing on the idiot cake.

It couldn’t happen to a sleazier guy

When Ray Comfort published his own version of Darwin’s Origin, he had to come up with some original content for the introduction. He couldn’t. Instead, he stole the first three pages outright from an essay by University of Tennessee professor Stan Guffey — those are the only reasonable pages in his 50 page contribution — and the rest is a mish-mash of standard creationist arguments that you can find on the internet. It’s actually kind of impressive that he reached so low on the stupid scale with this one; there isn’t one creative thought in the whole sloppy, plagiarized piece of work.

Now the good news: Stan Guffey is considering legal action. I hope he does, in that he really does have an open-and-shut case that Comfort copied his work. The one glitch, it seems to me, is that Comfort purportedly made no profit from his effort, and Guffey lost no income from use of an essay he gave away, so I’m not sure what kind of recompense he could get for the theft. Maybe some lawyers can weigh in here.

You know it’s a stinker when they’re afraid of the reviewers

Way, way back on 16 July, I got a letter from the Discovery Institute.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I am writing to ask if you have plans to review Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne). I would be happy to ask Dr. Meyer’s publisher to send you a review copy.

I know you are busy but if you can get back to me about this, including any thoughts or comments you may have, I will grateful.

Sincerely,

Janet Oberembt
Assistant to Dr. Meyer
Discovery Institute

Oh, great, I thought — I know what kind of drivel Meyer was going to include in this book, just more of the same argument from ignorance and ‘ooh, isn’t it complicated’. I feel obligated to keep up with the creationist literature, though, and you never know — maybe someday they’ll come up with an original idea. So I replied, said yes, thank you, and gave Ms Oberembt my address. She wrote back promptly.

Thank you and I’ll send the request by email this evening.

No review copy ever arrived.

It’s going on 6 months. I’ve talked to a few other creationist critics who also received the offer of a review copy — no one has gotten one. How interesting. I almost certaintly would have bought a copy when it first came out, but held off because I thought one would be arriving in the mail any time now. They haven’t got any novel arguments for their case, but at least they’ve come up with new ways to temporarily stall their critics.

This is just like the movie studios, when they’ve got a clunker of a film on their hands: don’t let the reviewers get sight of it, make sure you’ve got only friendly audiences to see pre-screenings, and then, of course, push only positive reviews.

Yes, the Discovery Institute is also doing that: the creationists are running a push campaign to jack up the positive reviews of the book on Amazon. That’s an old and familiar trick.

I suppose I’ll have to read that 600 page pile of slop sometime…maybe in January. I’m going to be giving a whole series of talks on evolution and creationism at the end of that month, and maybe I’ll be able to squeeze in a section on just Meyer.

Kent Hovind’s Doctoral Dissertation

Now everyone can read it: Kent Hovind’s thesis from Patriot University has been scanned and put on the web. Remember to breathe now and then when you’re laughing that hard.

Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976. I’ve been very active in the creation/evolution controversy for quite some time.

He writes like a second-grader, and I haven’t quoted the Christian ravings from it.

(via Kill the Afterlife)

Do they really know how dishonest they are?

Tim Lambert of Deltoid is discussing a book about climate denialism on FDL. I quite enjoyed his putdown of the ubiquitous Viscount Monckton, and also this familiar joke:

Question: What’s the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?

Answer: A used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

The point he’s making is that there are two broad categories of denialists, the ones who are sincerely nuts (like Monckton) and the ones know better but are lying to make a profit for their cause (like the odious Steve Milloy).

I wish I could make that distinction in my personal choice of targets in the denialist clan, the creationists. I think they are all, as far as I know, personally convinced of the truth of their position and are entirely sincere. That even goes for the most reprehensibly dishonest ‘scholar’ of the bunch, Jonathan Wells, who got a Ph.D. in developmental biology and should know better…but everything I’ve read by him has led me to the conclusion that he is also profoundly stupid. He makes the errors he does because he wants to, but also because he floated through a degree program without ever thinking or learning anything.

That’s the catch with the religious motivation: it couples evangelism with willful ignorance so efficiently that you can’t really separate the tangle and assign intent to their misrepresentations.

Another debate with creationists

Oh, when will we learn? Michael Shermer and Donald Prothero duked it out with a pair of Discovery Institute charlatans recently, to predictable results: the creationists cried victory afterwards. It simply doesn’t matter that they had no evidence.

Anyway, a couple of things struck me as too typical in these affairs.

  • The creationists changed the topic the morning of the debate, from the general “Origins of life” to the “Adequacy of Neo-Darwinian natural selection and mutation to explain the origin of life”, which already skews the subject. It’s amazing how common it is for creationists to pull this tactic of shifting the goalposts the day of the game. It’s also surprising how often we let them get away with it.

  • Despite their change of topic, the creationists ignored it! One guy yammered on about “information,” despite not understanding it; the other made the impossibility of whale evolution the centerpiece of his argument. Whale evolution is cool, but it’s a fact…and note that there were no whales around at the time of the origin of life.

  • As usual, our side is all about the evidence. Their side is all about rhetoric and appeals to biases. Guess which side fares best in the debate format? It’s even true in their books: note that Meyer’s book is subtitled, DNA and the Evidence of Intelligent Design, and he couldn’t gasp out any evidence at all for their theory, which they cannot even state.

Oh, well. We’re game, at least, and willing to charge into their playing field no matter how much they have to stack the odds against us. Now if only they would try to do likewise…but of course, they can’t. They’ve got nothin’.

Why did it take God so long to create the sun?

One of the weirdest elements of the Biblical chronology of Genesis is that God waits until Day 4 to create the sun, moon, and stars. I know, it makes no sense at all, but as it turns out,
God had a reason for that. Just ask a creationist!

Why did God wait till Day 4 before He made the sun, moon and stars?

Answer: Perhaps because God knew that some people would worship the sun, moon and stars, and He wanted to show us that they are not so important after all. The sun did not form the earth, and the stars do not control what happens on Earth. God wants us to worship Him, not anything that He has created.
Some people use the stars to make horoscopes. These are charts that supposedly say what is going to happen to people from day to day. God forbids this. He wants us to read His Word, the Bible, and to ask Him for wisdom; not to consult horoscopes, which people make up out of their own imagination.

So, you see, God juggled the whole chronology of creation in this crazy way simply because he hates astrology. And he thought that doing it in that order, when no human beings existed to see what he was up to, would convince the astrologers that the motion of the stars was meaningless.

No matter how hard I try, I’m sorry, I just can’t think like a creationist. That’s really stupid.

Hemant Mehta interviews Ray Comfort

And all I take away from it is that Comfort is as sleazy as I thought. You may have heard that he has retracted his banana argument; not true, as you’ll discover, he’s kind of waffled around objections to it, but he still thinks the banana is an argument against evolution. He also denies that he makes a lot of errors when talking about science. Comfort is the fellow who made this claim:

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half (“Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).”

It’s not only historically false, but is a complete misrepresentation of what the science says about the evolution of sex.

It’s good that Hemant got him to say a few things that testify to his dishonesty, but I would have liked to have seen him squirm some more.