They have delusional crazy towns in the Arab world, too

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?

SIWOTI Syndrome Open Thread

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.

Casey Luskin writes a revealing letter

A while back, two ladies visited the Discovery Institute, and wrote about their experiences afterwards. They admittedly did so under false pretenses, acting as if they were fellow travelers in creationism, but they did get interesting and amusing responses from the inhabitants.

They tried to do it again. They wrote a letter and were entirely upfront about their motives this time, and asked to have a real conversation about Intelligent Design creationism.

Casey Luskin wrote back. It would have been entirely understandable if he’d simply turned them down, but no … instead, he writes a long letter in which he stirs himself to defend the DI in a rambling reply that offers fascinating insight into how these people see themselves. Number one: they are civil. That seems to be all that matters. Never mind that they are calling almost every biologist in the world corrupt and deceitful; ignore the fact that they are a propaganda organization trying to poison the educational system of our country; it is entirely irrelevant that they are ignorant of biology yet want to dictate how all of science should be taught; they think they are being very, very nice. And Casey Luskin, of course, has been nothing but sweetness and generosity, a poor soul who has been rebuffed by the “Darwinist community”, and who gets called mean names.

Then he makes demands. He’s willing to meet and talk if:

  1. The ladies apologize for their previous attitudes towards the DI.

  2. They edit all of their past posts about their visit to the DI to add a disclaimer, saying that they were sorry, that they were naughty, and urging everyone else to be nice to the DI.

  3. They make a new series of blog posts that call all those other “Darwinist” blogs on the carpet.

  4. They cease saying mean things about all creationists henceforth.

Awww, doesn’t that sound exactly like someone who wants to kiss and make up? Although I’m actually thinking the whole thing makes him sound like a whiny, pretentious pipsqueak.

Ooops, there I go again. I just violated the “culture of civility” in which Casey takes such peculiarly unself-aware pride. I am chastened, and need to revise my approach, I think. I therefore offer to get together and discuss reconciliation with the creationists if:

  1. Casey Luskin immediately apologizes for the Institute’s meddling in school boards around the country.

  2. They edit all of their PR pieces at Evolution News & Views to include a disclaimer, saying that they were sorry, they really don’t know what they’re talking about, and they ought not to be peddling such nonsense.

  3. They make a new series of blog posts at EN&V that tell all the ID blogs that they shouldn’t be pushing propaganda anymore, and that their ought to be some actual science done for ID before they make further demands to change the culture to suit their ideology.

  4. They cease saying stupid things about biology henceforth.

I think that’s fair.

He’ll probably turn me down. That’s OK. The poor guy has just added to his own mythos with an obliviously pathetic email that adds pitiful whiner to his accomplishments as a credentialist toady and scientific ignoramus; maybe he’ll learn his lesson, and realize that sometimes he needs to shut up, crawl into a corner, and lick his wounds.

(By the way, the two ladies will be on the Skepticality podcast in a week or two. I’ll have to catch that one for sure.)

The battle rages on in Texas

The Texas State Board of Education is holding hearings right now on their science standards, and by all reports it is an embarrassment to the state: on the one side, we have the educated teachers and scientists, and on the other, a coterie of ignorant ideologues. Martin has been attending the meetings (it doesn’t sound like much fun), and he cuts to the heart of the creationist strategy:

This cannot be understated: Just as the anti-gay contingent of the Christian right sells its opposition to gay marriage as a “defense” of “traditional” marriage that can in no way be compared to opposition to interracial marriage or anything of that sort, so too are the creationists now abandoning the overt, lawsuit-bait language of “intelligent design” for “academic freedom” language that makes them seem like the ones encouraging students to use their minds to think about and evaluate ideas that are presented to them in class on their merits. Conversely, the pro-science side wants to shut this kind of inquiry down, and just require students to be obedient little sponges soaking up whatever the textbooks say.

Why this is a misrepresentation and gross misunderstanding of the opposition to such terms as “strengths and weaknesses” was, to his credit, appropriately explained by Texas Citizens for Science spokesman Steve Schafersman.

I suppose you could argue that “strengths and weaknesses” is a smart slogan to deploy when the evolution side has all the strengths, and the creationist side has nothing but weaknesses. It’s a way to pretend that they’ve earned a place in the curriculum, because the bad science is currently underrepresented…if you think the role of science education is to toss every failed idea in history at students.

98%

A survey of scientists in Texas reveals that the vast majority reject all versions of creationism — only 2% give it any respect at all. This is in Texas, the state with Don McLeroy, creationist dentist, running the educational show. There is some dissonance there.

What about that 2%? The survey explains those:

What can we say about the small minority of Texas science faculty (2%) who evidence some measure of support for intelligent design/creationism? (For purposes of this analysis, intelligent design/creationist supporters are all respondents who indicated either “Modern evolutionary biology is right about the common ancestry of all extant organisms, but it is necessary to supplement it by invoking periodic intervention by an intelligent designer” or “Modern evolutionary biology is mostly wrong. Life arose through multiple creation events by an intelligent designer, although evolution by natural selection played a limited role.”)

The educational profile of this group is revealing. Ten supporters of intelligent design/creationism responded to the question, “Have you taught a course that included a substantial block of material on human evolution?”. Of the ten, seven persons replied “no,” as compared to three who replied “yes.” So we readily see that most intelligent design supporters identified in this survey do not teach courses that address evolution. Even more strikingly, no person in the subsample of those supporting intelligent design reported teaching graduate students about human evolution within the past five years. (Another way of phrasing this last point is to say that there was no person out of the total sample of 464 respondents who said they both supported intelligent design and had taught graduate students within the past five years.) We are therefore safe in concluding that the already thin support for teaching intelligent design vanishes to essentially zero when looking at established Texas biology and biological anthropology faculty who teach at the graduate level.

Heh. Bill Dembski = “essentially zero”.

Pro forma announcement of a pointless change elsewhere

What I suspect is the most popular Intelligent Design site on the net (which is not saying much at all), uncommondescent.com, is getting a bit of a shake-up. Bill Dembski is stepping away from it, DaveScot is no longer a moderator, they’re adding paypal donation buttons…well, OK. I’m feeling ho-hum about it all. Once upon a time, I’d check in weekly to see what flavor of nonsense they were promoting, but increasingly I’ve found that I simply don’t care what the kooks were saying. It’s become a nice self-constructed ghetto for the irrelevant lunatics, with the virtue that I can easily ignore them. The changes will, I think, make them even more boring.

Another ID debate

Here’s a fun account of a four-way debate on Intelligent Design in Fort Worth, Texas. Actually, it sounds like it was more of a two-way, with Lawrence Krauss, who is very, very good, speaking on the side of science, against David Berlinski, who is very, very supercilious (that word always comes up when Berlinski’s name is mentioned) speaking on the side of … well, it’s not clear. He doesn’t really have any pro-ID arguments, but mainly seems to be on the side of cashing checks from the Discovery Institute.

You know the debate went well when creationists have temper tantrums afterwards.

Descended from a monkey?

She’ll be back: watch this mob of blinkered Republicans gush over Sarah Palin, especially Pat Buchanan, who makes up ‘facts’ as he goes along. The Republicans are accused of being a party that celebrates ignorance, Buchanan is asked if he accepts evolution, and he blithely confirms the accusation by repeating the notorious query of Soapy Sam Wilberforce.

I’ve heard a few times now the idea that the Republican Party has become the Know-Nothing Party. It’s entirely true.