Since I highlighted a new creationist blog yesterday (by the way, the author is now saying it was all a joke), let’s mention a new good guy today: Answers in Genesis BUSTED! The author is trying to expose the deceptions of various creationist claims. Good luck at that: they’re excreting the garbage faster than anyone can shovel it.
This kind of silliness happens with tedious frequency. I get email notifications that I’ve been signed up to receive tripe from conservative or religious or creationist jerks.
You are now signed up to receive Ann Coulter’s weekly column, Newt Gingrich’s Winning the Future newsletter, and Robert Novak’s Evans-Novak Political Report. On Fridays you’ll also receive the Weekly Wrap-Up, containing the top stories of the week from HumanEvents.com.
You shouldn’t bother. Most of my email gets shunted through three layers of spam traps, and that kind of spam just gets blown away at first notice. It does mean that some legitimate communications get taken out behind the chemical sheds, too, but the spam dies swiftly and hard nowadays. You can stop wasting your time now.
Want to see some real science? An article in the NY Times summarizes research in the evolution of glucocorticoid receptors. This is really cool stuff, where the investigators do step-by-step changes in the protein structure to determine the likely sequence of evolutionary changes — it really does describe the path of evolutionary history for a set of proteins at the level of amino acids.
Now, if you want to see some junk science, Michael Behe flounders disgracefully to try and dismiss the work. This is a genuine embarrassment: Behe is a biochemist who has done legitimate work in protein structure, and this kind of research ought to be right up his alley, where he could make an informed analysis. Instead, it’s ugly and sad. A sensible creationist would simply admit that sure, here’s one case of the evolution of a receptor that is solidly made, but hey, look, over there — here are all these other proteins that haven’t been analyzed to the same level of detail. It would be pathetic and avoiding the issue, but Behe has a different and worse strategy: he denies the work shows anything at all. Because the researchers intentionally inserted mutations into the gene, they can’t argue that natural processes of mutation could have done the same thing. But of course we do know — point mutations happen all the time.
Behe continues his long slide into tendentious irrelevance and lunatic obsessions. Jason Rosenhouse digs into this step in Behe’s descent into unreason in much more detail.
And he’s so getting spanked for this. He suggests that perhaps Texas isn’t doomed after all, because a significant majority of the Texas Board of Education has come out saying that they don’t want to remove evolution from the curriculum, and they don’t want to include Intelligent Design.
Look into this one, everyone: the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), another attempt to coordinate efforts to improve public outreach and science education. They have some worthy goals:
- Building the COPUS network – Underpinning the COPUS effort is a growing network of organizations and individuals who share a common goal: engaging sectors of the public in science and increasing their appreciation and understanding of the scientific enterprise. Find out more about participating in the COPUS Network.
- Developing state-level benchmark science-indicator reports on the importance of science to the U.S. economy and standard-of-living
- Supporting a national effort to promote the public understanding of science in a year-long celebration: Year of Science 2009 (also available: Year of Science 2009 fact sheet [PDF])
- Integrating efforts with the Understanding Science website project currently under development at the University of California, Berkeley
If you’re involved with any kind of scientific outreach organization, register with them — they’ve got a long list of science groups. I particularly like the fact that they’re herding together a grassroots effort to celebrate a Year of Science in 2009, the Darwin bicentennial year, since there doesn’t seem to be any national leadership on the issue otherwise.
Oh, gosh … this Expelled movie is going to be ghastly. Check out this interview with Walt Ruloff, the executive producer. Ruloff’s credentials on this issue are that — get ready for it — he was a software engineer. We get a good feel for the tack the movie is going to take: biologists don’t ask interesting and productive questions, they are defined by the Darwinist orthodoxy, and they actively suppress any questioning. It is, of course, a lie from word one.
Hollywood is officially bankrupt. Free of all new ideas. Worthless recyclers without an imagination. Why?
They’re remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the best science fiction movies of all time.
And just to make it that much worse, who is the star? Keanu F. Reeves.
Fortunately, I still have my precious DVD of the original.
I knew the creationists were obtuse, but this is going a little far. Denyse O’Leary is twittering about all these paranoid suspicions that Richard Dawkins or I are planning to sue to block the release of that silly creationist movie, Expelled, in a post titled Darwinist threat to sue pro-ID filmmakers? Friend of the studio thinks they have no case. It’s a bit bizarre. Neither of us have even made any faint noises to that effect. In my post on the subject, I wondered who funded it, why it was being favored by the DI since it was endorsing the religious nature of ID, and why they had to be dishonest in asking for the interview — and concluded by saying I was looking forward to seeing it and shredding its arguments. How is that to be interpreted as a threat to sue to prevent the release of the movie?
Furthermore, I made a rather unambiguous clarification in the comments:
Let me clarify something. I’m not going to sue. I have no interest in suing.
Is there a way to say that more plainly? Because it’s obviously too convoluted and difficult for a creationist to comprehend.
So let me reiterate once again for the stupid, the deluded, the conspiracy nuts, and the illiterate hacks (i.e., Denyse): not even in my private conversations with Dawkins and Eugenie Scott about this movie has anyone even brought up the possibility of suing or somehow interfering with the release. It’s not the way our brains work, perhaps sometimes to our detriment. My interest is in seeing the movie so I can give the transparently bad ideas behind it an enthusiastic ripping.
Now though, here’s the really ironic part. First comment on O’Leary’s bogus accusations:
They can’t help it. It is part of the natural authoritarian bent of athiests. They can’t win the battle of ideas so their only hope is to silence opposing ideas by legal action.
Not only is the argument patently false, but you have to notice that O’Leary also gloated over the Pivar lawsuit, in which she’s pleased that her pal Stuart is suing me to compel my silence.
These kooks are all about the projection, aren’t they?
It probably is: it has just the right amount of ingrown festering obsessiveness. We’ve all heard of old earth creationism (creationists who agree the Earth is billions of years old, and make arguments about the “days” of the bible representing long ages) and young earth creationism (the bible is strictly and literally true, and the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in precisely 6 24-hour days). Here’s a new one called Biblical Reality:
This "Old Earth" brand of creationism puts forth the view that combines a seven 24-hr day week of original creation (Exodus 20:11), with a separate “six 12-hr days of revelation” given to Moses (Genesis 1:2 – 2:3). The pseudo discrepancy between the “sixth day” in Genesis chapter one and in chapter two is explained as chapter two being the beginning of modern mankind (Adam & Eve), and chapter one as being an earlier species of prehistoric mankind in an earlier restoration period, more than 60 million years ago.
Got that? There are two creation accounts in the bible, so he’s going to reconcile them by saying there were two literal creation events, each about a week long, separated by a 60 million year gap. So it’s a kind of hybrid YEC/OEC contrivance.
I don’t think we should worry about it too much. It probably has a following of one.
