It’s the Arizona electorate’s moment of shame. The earth has been here for 6000 years and we haven’t destroyed it yet, so we don’t need no stinkin’ laws to protect the environment!

Yes, Texas could. After ditching creationist dentist Don McLeroy as head of the state board of education, Governor Rick Perry is now considering Cynthia Dunbar for the job. Dunbar is the author of a book called One Nation Under God, and despises public education…just the person to put in charge of public education, right?

In a book published last year, Dunbar argued the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.” She endorses a belief system that requires “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

Also in the book, she calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.”

The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she wrote, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

The discussion in that article is bizarre. Crazy Dunbar is regarded as a likely choice because her selection would make far-right conservatives happy; they don’t even want a moderate Republican to be considered for the job. And Dunbar claims that she is just the person to bring together the various factions on the current board!

The British Council has carried out an international survey on people’s opinions about evolution. I cringe at these sorts of things; they so rarely give me an opportunity to put on a big foam rubber hand and chant “WE’RE #1!”. There aren’t really any surprises here.

The results show that the majority of people polled have heard of Charles Darwin with the highest levels of awareness in Russia (93%), Mexico (91%), Great Britain (91%), and China (90%) whilst less than half of people polled in Egypt (38%) and South Africa (27%) saying they had not heard of him. Overall, the majority (70%) of people surveyed have heard of the British naturalist.

Adults in the United States (84%) showed the highest levels of awareness and understanding of evolution and Darwin’s theories followed by Great Britain (80%) saying they had a ‘good or some knowledge’ of the theory of evolution.

Not so fast there — the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play here. People in the United States do not have a high level of understanding of evolution, and this survey did not measure actual competence. I’ve found that the people most likely to declare that they have a thorough knowledge of evolution are the creationists…but that a brief conversation is always sufficient to discover that all they’ve really got is a confused welter of misinformation.

That’s pretty easy to see in this next sad result.

Only Russia (48%), USA (42%), South Africa (41%) and Egypt (25%) remained sceptical about the scientific evidence that exists to support Darwin’s theory.

So more than half disbelieve evolution, but more than 80% think they’re knowledgeable about it. There’s a problem.

We also have a number for the accommodationists: 53% of Americans are.

In all countries polled more people agreed than disagreed that it is possible to believe in a God and hold the view that life evolved on Earth by means of natural selection at the same time, with those in India most likely (85%) to be of this opinion, followed by Mexico (65%), Argentina (63%), South Africa, Great Britain (54%), USA, Russia (53%), Egypt, Spain (45%), and China (39%).

The old fossil is Pat Buchanan, who has published a freakishly antiquated diatribe against Darwin. It’s extremely old school — he uses arguments straight out of 1960s era “scientific creationism”, trying to tar Darwin with guilt by association with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. He is apparently inspired by a “splendid little book,” The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by a creationist crank named Eugene G. Windchy. You can get an idea of Windchy’s level of scholarship by this quote:

That Darwinism has proven “disastrous theory” is indisputable.

“Karl Marx loved Darwinism,” writes Windchy. “To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution.”

“Darwin suits my purpose,” Marx wrote.

John Lynch has rebutted this claim; I rather doubt that Marx could love someone as bourgeois as Darwin, a prosperous landowner and investor, a fellow who thought his greatest success in life was his talent as a businessman, and I can be fairly confident that any affection would not have been returned. And please, don’t even mention the false claim that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin.

It’s not enough to link Darwin to Marx; Windchy also has to turn Hitler into a committed Darwinist. You’d think he’d stop to marvel at the idea that Darwin could have inspired two such antagonistic philosophies, but Windchy and Buchanan aren’t quite that thoughtful.

Darwin suited Adolf Hitler’s purposes, too.

“Although born to a Catholic family Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs’ advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire.”

Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.

For being a “hard-eyed Darwinist”, Hitler certainly seems to have failed to make much use of the theory. Read Mein Kampf and you will find nothing about Darwin or evolution, but you will find much about God. And don’t his strange notions about an Aryan Islamic empire simply mark Hitler as a crazy crackpot, and say nothing at all about Darwin?

They do make some outrageous accusations against Darwin: he was a thief and a liar who stole his whole theory from Wallace.

Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a “completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection.”

“All my originality … will be smashed,” wailed Darwin when he got Wallace’s manuscript.

Unfortunately for their thesis, Darwin’s writings are preserved to an amazing degree — the history of his idea can be traced almost to the day. We know that he was putting together an outline of his theory within a few years of returning from the voyage of the Beagle; we have an early draft of his thesis written in 1842, well before the contact with Wallace; we have his correspondence where he bounced these ideas off his colleagues. He didn’t steal his theory at all, but had it well formulated before Wallace wrote his fateful letter, triggering him to finally publish.

You only have to read Wallace’s own gracious account of his interactions with Darwin to see how false Windchy’s claims are.

In conclusion I would Only wish to add, that my connection with Darwin and his great work has helped to secure for my own writings on the same questions a full recognition by the press and the public; while my share in the origination and establishment of the theory of Natural Selection has usually been exaggerated. The one great result which I claim for my paper of 1858 is that it compelled Darwin to write and publish his Origin of Species without further delay. The reception of that work, and its effect upon the whole scientific world, prove that it appeared at the right moment; and it is probable that its influence would have been less widespread had it been delayed several years, and had then appeared, as he intended, in several bulky volumes embodying the whole mass of facts he had collected in its support. Such a work would have appealed to the initiated few only, whereas the smaller volume actually written was read and understood by the educated classes throughout the civilised world.

There’s another case where Windchy/Buchanan accuse Darwin of lying.

Darwin also lied in “The Origin of Species” about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

He doesn’t claim to believe in a Creator in the Origin. There is a brief mention of the possibility of a Creator initiating the universe in later editions of the book, but it’s more compatible with a deistic view than anything. He was an unbeliever in any specific religious doctrine, but that does not make him at all hypocritical to have considered the possibility of a creator beginning the whole process.

How much more can Buchanan get wrong? How about everything.

Darwin’s examples of natural selection — such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive — have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?

Like most animals, they’ll eat whatever is physiologically advantageous…but they prefer the leaves and shoots of acacia trees, where a long neck to reach the branches is advantageous. If you actually read the Origin, Darwin proposes several advantages of the long neck: for feeding, but also for observing predators, for combat, and as part of the defensive strategy of growing to large body size, and he uses the giraffe as an example of a general principle: “The preservation of each species can rarely be determined by any one advantage, but by the union of all, great and small.”

None of this has been debunked.

All Buchanan can do is a standard Gish Gallop, next bringing up canards like Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, and a typically distorted version of punctuated equilibrium. It’s quite a performance, and it really takes a lot of work to distill stupid down to something quite as concentrated as what Buchanan presents.

This man actually ran for president? There are times I have to stand appalled at the lack of discrimination in our political process.

It’s getting to be a regular feature—every year, the NY Times must do a story on that bizarre miseducation monument, the Creation “Museum”. This time around, the story isn’t too awful — it focuses on the recent NAPC meeting, in which several professional paleontologists paid a visit to the creationist carnival to be alternately appalled and amused.

Several people have asked when I’m going to visit Ken Ham’s temple. It’s been settled! It’s all arranged, but no thanks at all to Ham. Here’s the deal: I’m going to be speaking at the Secular Student Alliance conference in August, which is being held in Columbus, Ohio…only two hours away from the museum! Sharp-eyed and chronologically aware Phil Ferguson noticed this interesting conjunction, and suggested that I adjust my travel schedule a tiny bit and come down a day early, and we’d take a little side trip. The SSA was amenable and tweaked my flight dates, and it is all happening!

On Friday, 7 August, a small group of godless people, including yours truly, will be at the “museum” when it opens at 10am on Friday, 7 August. Everyone is welcome to join in—we’ll pack the joint with quietly chortling science-minded people. When I get back from Lindau, I’ll also write to Ken Ham and request the pleasure of an audience, inviting him to come on out and evangelize to secular students.

It should be great fun. I’ve got a long list of questions to ask the docents…so long that I’m going to have to prune it down a lot. Come on out and join the party! And as long as you are, you might want to think about signing up for the SSA conference, which should be more informative.

Actually, a half-hour at a nearby sewage treatment plant would be more informative. The SSA meeting will be even better than that!

They’re doing it again. There’s a new movie being released, The Voyage That Shook the World, that you can tell from the tagline — “One man, one voyage, one book ignited a controversy that still rages today” — is creationist trash (hint: there is no scientific controversy anymore on this matter). Look a little further, and you’ll find it’s produce by Creation Ministries International, which tells you right there what their agenda is: to tell lies for Jesus.

Here’s where the parallel to Expelled lies…in the lies. They got several Darwin experts (Peter Bowler, Sandra Herbert, and Janet Browne) to appear in the “documentary” by concealing their motives. And then they admit to cherry-picking the interviews to put together their story.

You know, if they actually had an honest message, if they could be trusted to present the opinions of the experts accurately, they wouldn’t need to deceive to get people to contribute to their projects. As it is, all we can trust them on is their ability to mangle the facts. Doesn’t this tell you something about the credibility of the creationist movement?

At least they didn’t hire Ben Stein as a frontman.

The list of winners of iPods of various flavors from Creation Science Evangelism:

Third place: Kirby Hobley, who created a post on the atheist sub-group of Reddit.

Second place: Richard Haynes, of Atheist Nexus.

First place: PZ Myers of you know where.

Good grief, the atheists won a clean sweep! It’s brilliant marketing, reaching deep into the very community that will most fiercely mock his message.

Thanks to all of your helpful clicking, I have just received this message from Eric Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism:

Congratulations, you logged the most clicks to CreationMinute.com and won an Apple iPod Touch complements of Creation Science Evangelism.

Good work, gang! I hope it’s full of creationist videos. I’ll have to bring it with me on my trip to the Creation “Museum” in August (I’ll fill you in on more details on that development later, when they’ve firmed up a bit more.)