Consider the source

The usual suspects of Intelligent Design creationism came out with a book a while ago honoring the patriarch of the movement, that sneaky rascal Phillip Johnson. They had to shop around for someone to puke up some happy blurbs about the book; Duke Cunningham demanded too much money, Charles Manson had some standards, and Roy Cohn was both gay and dead, so they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel of sleazy criminals and came up with Chuck Colson. I have no idea how much he was paid, but they didn’t get their money’s worth.

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Watch these!

This morning, I’m off to the Unitarian Church of Willmar to talk about creationism. I’ll be back later, but ’til then, you kiddies can watch some TV. Flea has David Rakoff, if you want to laugh at the inanity of the right wing, while Crooks and Liars hosts the latest Olbermann, if you’re more in the mood for tragedy, in this case the unraveling of the Constitution.

Battle-what?

Uh-oh. Apparently, there was some TV premiere that I missed last night that I’m seeing discussed all over the Intarwubs. I’d let it slide, but Scott McLemee said this:

Looking back, it was probably Tim Burke’s recommendation that made me give the remake a try. He called himself “probably the last geek out there to discover Battlestar Galactica” but actually, no, a few of us were left to follow in his wake.

Yep, that’s me, one of the last geeks to see this thing. I saw one episode a year or so ago…and I wasn’t impressed (it would take a fair amount of dazzle to overcome the hurdle put up by the ghastly original incarnation of the program), and I’ve just never made the effort to follow through on it.

So convince me.

Deepak Chopra does it again

Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I’ve tussled with his weird arguments before, and now he’s flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his profound ignorance of biology, in something titled The Trouble With Genes. Chopra is a doctor, supposedly, but every time I read something by him that touches on biology, he sounds as ignorant as your average creationist. He also writes incredibly poorly, bumbling his way forward with a succession of unlikely and indefensible claims. This latest article is one in which I think he’s trying to criticize the very idea of genes, but it’s more like he’s criticizing his own lack of knowledge.

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Help FCS out

Florida Citizens for Science is asking for your contributions to a rebuttal they’re working on. The organization got an op-ed published decrying the recent ID BS at the Sundome, and the local newspapers have published a series of replies that are stupefying in their ignorance. This should be easy.

One writer simply lies:

The scientific evidence for intelligent design would fill several editions of this newspaper. The scientific evidence for macroevolution, the formation of a new species by random mutation and natural selection (Darwinism), would not fill the period at the end of this sentence. The missing links are still missing.

Wow. Simultaneously claiming that there is no evidence for evolution while Intelligent Design creationism has lots is absurd: ID is not science, and the body of ID literature is negligible. There isn’t any published research on ID; these people tend to publish extended tracts, lacking any evidence.

That was the high mark of this series of letters. Here’s one that drools out one of the oldest canards in the book:

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is exactly what the name implies – a theory that has yet to be proven and will never be proven.

The writer doesn’t know what the word theory means, and has no glimmering of the volume of
evidence for evolution.

Finally, the newspaper published a whole column on the subject from someone named Guy Fisher, who doesn’t have a clue and merely parrots a list of scientists endorsing the existence of a controversy about evolution. It’s rank quote mining. For instance, he quotes fragments from SJ Gould, Colin Patterson, and Eugenie Scott to give the impression that they have or had serious disagreements with evolution, tosses in some crackpottery from Fred Hoyle, and then scrapes the bottom of the barrel with some guy named Louis Boundoure, the wingnut economist Paul Craig Roberts, and the Discovery Institute. It’s all common dishonesty.

Leave a comment at Florida Citizens for Science if you want to give them more ideas. It looks to me, though, that Florida creationists are a particularly stupid breed.