Any 5 year olds want to explain the problem to the Discovery Institute?

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute has published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe in which he makes a rather anachronistic argument for ID: Thomas Jefferson was a supporter. I knew the creationists were sloppy scholars and had a poor grasp of history and science, but this is getting ridiculous.

Here, I have to help them out.

Date

Jefferson

Darwin

1743

 born

–

1776

 Writes the Declaration of Independence

–

1809

Ends his term as President of the US

born

1823

Writes the quote Stephen Meyer will find so appealing:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.

 14 years old.
1826

Dies.

 Darwin is a student at the University of Edinburgh.

1831

Dead.

Voyage of the Beagle

1859

Still dead.

Publishes the Origin.

1882

Still very dead.

Darwin dies, too.

They do overlap a bit in time, but Jefferson was 33 years in the grave before Darwin got around to explaining how we don’t need a designer to explain the living universe. I rather suspect that no ship was dispatched from Virginia to Shropshire to get young Charlie Darwin’s rebuttal of the 1823 claim, either. It’s even less likely that Jefferson’s zombie rose up in 1859 to take a quick gander at these new ideas spreading through biology and decided, nah, he likes intelligent design better.

I could be wrong. Maybe the Biologic Institute has been holding seances and has received Jefferson’s imprimatur — I wouldn’t put it past them. Otherwise, though, Meyer is making a ludicrously stupid argument.

By the way, even if the DI had Jefferson’s revivified head in a jar, and it was making anti-evolutionary pronouncements, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to evolutionary biologists. Doctors might be excited, though.

Blake is even more succinct.

The Disco Institute has a new hack

And following the lead of all past hires by that eminent institute of advanced ideology, Ann Gauger doesn’t understand biology or logic. She does have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, but it just goes to show that having a degree doesn’t mean you necessarily understand science. I will look forward to further examples of poor reasoning from yet another incompetent in Seattle.

By the way, she also hails from my old hometown of Kent, Washington…a completely meaningless coincidence that still manages to embarrass me.

The Ultimate Proof of Creation!

We’re in big trouble on our trip to the Creation “Museum”, people. We’re going on 7 August, and on that very same day, they are planning to present…

THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF CREATION!!!

What is the Ultimate Proof of Creation, you might ask?

There is a defense for creation that is powerful, conclusive, and has no true rebuttal. As such, it is an irrefutable argument–an “ultimate proof” of the Christian worldview. This presentation will equip you to engage an unbeliever, even a staunch atheist, using proven techniques.

Holy crap! It’s a trap! I’m going to be bringing along a whole mob of young atheists from the Secular Student Alliance, and this speaker, Jason Lisle, is going to be like Darth Vader among the younglings. I might be able to put up a fight against Emperor Ham, just like Samuel Jackson, but then his apprentice will show up and zap, blam, zowee, I’ll be chopped up and blown out a window. We’re doomed. DOOOOOOOMED.

At least I insist on being informed before going to my ignominious fate. The first chapter of the Ultimate Proof of Creation is available online, so I read it cautiously, fearing that I would see science demolished with an irrefutable argument.

Wait a minute.

This thing is complete garbage. It’s the same old routine that Answers in Genesis always trots out: “We’re using the same evidence,” they say, “only we’re just interpreting it differently. We’re just as sciencey as you are!” Only they aren’t. They’re leaving out all the evidence that contradicts their views, and twisting the bits they want in inappropriate ways. And then they make stuff up! Here’s an approach I’ve been seeing a lot from creationists lately: they invent scientific “laws” and then declare that evolution is unscientific because it violates those “laws”. The most common one is the so-called “law of biogenesis” that dictates that life can only come from other life, but here’s a pair that Lisle pulls out of his butt:

  1. There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no
    known sequence of events that can cause information to originate by itself in matter.

  2. When its progress along the chain of transmission events is
    traced backward, every piece of information leads to a mental
    source, the mind of the sender.

These are quite simply false. Chance can generate new information in genetics, so we know the first law is bogus, and since we can trace a useful piece of genetic information back to unguided mutations, we know the second is yet more baloney.

I don’t think I’m too worried about the Ultimate Proof of Creation anymore. I suspect it is going to be more like this.

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David Klinghoffer will be eaten last

There are intelligent true believers, deluded as they are, but there also a few of them out there who will simply take your breath away with statements of such pretentious stupidity that you wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning. Case in point: David Klinghoffer. If you’re already familiar with him, you won’t be surprised at this. He’s written an essay in which he takes to task the concept of convergent evolution, as espoused by Ken Miller and Simon Conway Morris. I don’t care much for the way Miller and Conway Morris use the idea myself, but Klinghoffer’s argument…man. You’d think it was a parody if you didn’t know Klinghoffer.

His argument against convergence is that if it were true, then evolution could have led to something truly repulsive, like Cthulhu.

Literally Cthulhu. He quotes a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, “Darwinism’s visionary storyteller,” and cites me linking to the “Unholy Bible”, and claims that “Darwinists love him”. Apparently, we aren’t just unbelievers, or even merely Satan-worshippers anymore — we’ve moved on to worshipping inimical alien beings beyond space and time that intend to remorselessly destroy us. Ken Miller (!) is naively promoting the adoration of monsters when he suggests that maybe his god wasn’t so specific in his mechanisms as to demand mammalian bipeds as the recipients of ensoulment.

Ken Miller hasn’t publicly expressed any known fondness for Lovecraft, and I don’t think his idea of evolution as a natural process undetectably adjusted by a benign deity would accommodate itself well to a Cthulhu-dominated universe. As for the rest of us, and me personally, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are clearly fiction: we don’t see them as a portrayal of our universe at all. I find them entertaining because the descriptions are so flamboyantly over the top, and because, well, tentacles. There’s also the factor that, as an atheist, I find the similarities between a hostile anti-human monster and the Christian religion’s petty, cosmic tyrant amusing. Really, my shrine to the Elder Gods is very tiny, only taking up one of the smaller wings of my mansion. (Uh-oh, it’s Klinghoffer—he might think I mean that for real.)

Besides, if we rewound the tape of life and ran it forward again, and evolution led to intelligent cephalopods, an anthropocentric bigot like Klinghoffer might well regard them as “grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly”, but I’d think them pretty cool…and most importantly, these beings would consider their own forms beautiful, and us strangely twisted chordates as hideous.

Oh, by the way: nobody should tell him how Pharyngula appears in some dusty corners of Cthulhu lore.

I’m just going to have to get this shirt, to make Klinghoffer tremble.

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Because we know that in his house at R’lyeh dead C’thulhu waits dreaming.

Best criticism of Cynthia Dunbar yet

Dunbar is the creationist, anti-education kook that Governor Perry of Texas is considering putting in charge of the state board of education. Slacktivist explains the problem with this — putting someone who wants to destroy the public education system in charge of the public education system is like making an arsonist the fire chief.

And actually, it’s not as much a criticism of Dunbar — she’s an out lunatic — but of the system in general, that a leading politician would think this kind of appointment is at all appropriate.

My little trophy

Look what came in the mail today:

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It’s an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind! It’s impossible to read in this photo, but it has a nice engraving on the back: the Creation Minute logo, and this message.

To PZ Myers

In hopes that your quest for TRUTH will end with God.

The CSE Team

Isn’t that nice? I’d been hoping they’d add some little distinguishing touch like that to it — it makes for a splendid victory trophy.