It’s remarkable. Comfort gets something right.

The contention between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Bible’s account of creation is extremely significant. This is because if evolution is true, the Bible is a fallacy.

I know, it’s unbelievable. Comfort’s remarks usually set the bar for stupidity, so it’s astounding to find two sentences in his usual babble that actually make sense — yes, it is a significant conflict, and yes, the Bible is fallacious.

It would be nice if we could just stop there, allow the poor man a moment of glory, and leave him to bask self-contentendly in the belief that he is educable, but we can’t. That’s because his next paragraph departs from that brief high-water mark to plunge into the abyss of obtuse inanity.

If you have webcams, turn them on now. I’d like to record the multitudes sitting before my blog, jaws gaping like fish, followed by peals of laughter. This one is for the creationist record books.

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).” Ask A Scientist, Biology Archive, http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99927.htm.)

Wait, what? Darwin “theorized” no such thing. Humans reproduce sexually, as do all primates, as do all mammals, as do most vertebrates, as do a great many animals. There was no period where males and females evolved separately. The nice quote from Ask a Scientist refers to single-celled organisms — no human being has ever reproduced by splitting in half. We evolved from precursor populations containing both males and females.

This is often the most difficult thing about trying to argue with creationists. You get discombobulated by their most profound misconceptions, and you really do have to be prepared to start the discussion with the simplest, dumbest basics — it’s like trying to have a serious conversation about biology with a preschooler, although usually the preschoolers are far more open-minded and willing to learn. And these are the people who feel qualified to set the high school science curriculum.

We have a couple of comments from people who phoned the Cincinnati Zoo that suggest that the shameful pairing of the zoo with the Creation Museum is going to be revoked. I suspect that this was a case of an overzealous person in the marketing department grabbing an opportunity that sounded like good financial sense, without considering its implications to the educational and research mission of the zoo, and that the higher-ups with a bigger picture of their goals are a bit horrified, and are rapidly correcting the problem.

It has been verified: zap, the combo tickets on the zoo’s ticketing site have been eradicated. The Creation Museum is still promoting them, though…let’s hope they shamefacedly erase that page soon.

Any of you who wrote to the zoo — it might be nice if you send a follow-up commending them for their swift action.

Hah! The Creation Museum link has now gone dead. Our triumph is complete.

The story made the Cincinnati Enquirer:

A promotional deal between the Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum was scuttled Monday after the zoo received dozens of angry calls and emails about the partnership.

The promotion was billed as “Two Great Attractions, One Great Deal” and offered a package deal on tickets for the zoo’s annual Festival of Lights and a museum event called Bethlehem’s Blessings.

The deal appeared on web sites for both institutions Friday, but it was pulled by the zoo Monday morning after complaints about the partnership started pouring in.

Most of the protests echoed the same theme: the Creation Museum promotes a religious point of view that conflicts with the zoo’s scientific mission. The museum promotes a strict interpretation of the biblical version of how life began, and it suggests that dinosaurs and man once lived side by side.

The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and the Creation Museum have made a joint marketing agreement and are selling “combo tickets” to get into both attractions for one price.

The Cincinnati Zoo is promoting an anti-science, anti-education con job run by ignorant creationists.

Unbelievable.

Here’s a little bit about the Cincinnati Zoo. I’ve highlighted a few key words and phrases.

Part of the public school system in Cincinnati since 1975, the Zoo hosts a four-year college prepatory program – Zoo Academy. The Cincinnati Zoo is proud to serve as the leading non-formal science educator in Southwest Ohio. Over 300,000 students participate in the Zoo’s educational programs annually.

The Zoo has long been successful at captive breeding, starting with trumpeter swans and sea lions back in the 1880s. The Lindner Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) was founded in 1986 to strengthen the tradition. The research conducted here has made the Cincinnati Zoo an international leader in the protection and propagation of endangered animals and plants around the world.

Rated by peer zoological parks as one of the best zoos in the nation, the Cincinnati Zoo continues to set the standard for conservation, education and preservation of wild animals and wild spaces. Over 1.2 million people visit the Zoo annually. The Zoo features more than 500 animal and 3,000 plant species, making it one of the largest Zoo collections in the country.

I believe the Cincinnati Zoo has betrayed its mission and its trust in a disgraceful way, by aligning themselves with a creationist institution that is a laughing stock to the rest of the world, and a mark of shame to the United States. I urge everyone to contact the zoo; write to their education and marketing and public relations departments in particular and point out the conflict between what they are doing and what their goal as an educational and research institution ought to be.

While you’re at it, it might be even more effective to contact the newsroom at the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati weekly, City Beat. Let’s raise a stink and give these guys the bad PR they deserve.

Look! It’s a liberal Christian going toe-to-toe with a conservative Christian creationist! They should have sold tickets.

Harun Yahya is soliciting entries in an essay contest to disprove evolution. The prize is 100,000 Turkish lira, about $63,000 or 50,000 euros. All you have to do is write a 30-60 page essay parroting creationist nonsense, and maybe you could win!

They have a list of suggested topics that make it clear that this is going to be judged by the ignorant in favor of the stupid — it’s like a series of entries from the index of creationist claims that, as is common, simply ignore the evidence against them, or worse, make up ‘facts’ that are wrong.

Time for us all to give up. We’ve been defeated by Harun Yahya.

A fierce opponent of Darwinism, Yahya takes the credit for defeating the theory of evolution. “First, we offered Darwinists around the world 100 million fossils, which prove that this world came into being as a result of God’s creationism and not because of evolution. Second, Darwin wrote in his books that people have to find transitional forms to prove the theory of evolution, but nobody has been able to find a single transitional form. Third, Darwinists claim that the first cell came into being as a coincidence. But it is impossible for even a single protein to be formed by chance. Fourth, we have proved that the skulls that were displayed as evidence of evolution are fake. Darwinism cannot explain how we can see or hear or sense with the support of our brain.”

Polls conducted by newspapers in Germany, France, Switzerland and Denmark showed that 85-90 percent of Europeans no longer believed in the theory of evolution.

Wait, maybe we don’t have to surrender. 1) Yahya doesn’t have that many fossils; he has a book in which he plagiarized photos of fossils, and ignored any that represent non-extant forms. 2) We have lots of transitional forms, Yahya just closes his eyes to them. 3) The first cell was the product of chemical evolution, not coincidence. 4) The majority of the hominin skulls we know of are definitely genuine; the few fakes, like Piltdown, were exposed by scientists. 5) I don’t even understand what he’s trying to say with that comment about senses; Yahya is a gibbering moron.

That last sentence is contrived of imaginary statistics. Was Baghdad Bob representative of Islamic journalism or something?

That ID blog, Uncommon Descent, had a slight shakeup in their management recently. If you had the faint idealistic hope that their comment policy might have become a bit less intolerant, forget it: they’re still deleting dissent.

At Owlmirror’s suggestion, this is a new thread to cope with the flaming wrongness of this recent creationist pimple, Teno Groppi, on the Entropy and evolution thread (which is now closed, by the way). This happens, now and then: some obtuse and confident creationist, made even more stubborn by an abysmal ignorance, shows up and starts babbling. So of course people rebut him, but he completely ignores everything that he’s told, which means more people jump in to hammer on him, and because he’s too stupid to recognize what’s going on, he babbles more. And then the thread expands in an endless game of whack-a-mole.

You can keep playing right here. The old thread was just getting too long.