Pinkoski again: How stupid can creationism get?

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

I’ve been having some fun with a bizarrely didactic creationist comic book by one Jim Pinkoski that purports to explain all the flaws in evolutionary biology. What it really is is the most astounding collection of bad creationist arguments I’ve ever seen gathered in one place. I’ve been trying to slog through rebuttals, but unfortunately, it’s like every word and phrase is so far off kilter that it’s going to take me forever to get through it. One putative “problem” that I’ve already dealt with is that we only use 10% of our brains, and so scientists are stupid and untrustworthy, but here’s another one: evolution requires that everything be extraordinarily brilliant. Or in comic book speak,

Evolutionists are saying that “teeny-tiny” life forms somehow willed themselves to “evolve,” which means that we must credit
MICROBES
with being smarter than Albert Einstein!!!

[Read more…]

Pinkoski Part 1: Danged know-it-alls

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

I promised to show you some more of Pinkoski’s A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution, so here we go.

Pinkoski’s book is actually reasonably representative of the majority opinion held by creationists; the arguments in this book aren’t what you see openly presented by most of the Intelligent Design creationists, but do reflect what you’ll see in most of your small town church meetings and your big city mega-church revivals. Informed Christians are, of course, a bit embarrassed by the foolishness and don’t endorse this stuff, but unfortunately the kind of nonsense peddled by Gish and Hovind and Ham and Pinkoski is exactly what drives the creationist activists to get out and poison our public schools.

Which brings up a problem…if these are the people we want to persuade, we face a near-impossible task. Pinkoski’s book is 56 pages long, and every page contains a shocking array of falsehoods and outright stupid crap. There’s no point in pussy-footing around it; creationism in all of its forms is nothing but ignorance, misconceptions, dishonesty, credulity, and sloppy logic. I don’t think it helps the cause of reason to be gentle with fools, nor should we be trying to persuade creationist activists—all we can do is dissuade, by showing others the bankruptcy of their position.

And wow, but is A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution an example of a foolish position.

[Read more…]

Why is it called biblical literalism?

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

i-07dd0d1e6047d41531134b9b406ef5dc-evil_angels_attack_the_ark.jpg

How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!

Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah’s Ark, and announces that ‘THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A “MYTH”…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!‘ It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?

[Read more…]

Exotic roadkill

Penguins on the freeway—that must have been an interesting sight. A truck overturned in Texas, releasing the animals, and several were taken out by passing cars.

The good news is that there was also an octopus in the truck, and it came through the accident unharmed. I’d kind of like to know the details of that one.

CNN is also reporting some roadkill in Connecticut. I never cared for the sanctimonious git so I’m less concerned about that one.

Christian Calculus?

Zeno has this quote from an acolyte of D. James Kennedy, Dr. Paul Jehle, and I have to shake my head in disbelief.

I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian….

I asked a question to my calculus professor: “What makes this course distinctly Christian?” He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before…

He said, “Okay, I’m a Christian you’re a Christian.”

I said, “That’s not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular university. Are we using the same text? Yes. Are you teaching it the same way? Yes. Then why is this called a Christian college and that one a non-Christian college?”

So the fact that taking a derivative isn’t accompanied by a few hallelujahs mean it isn’t Christian? Would it help if they wrote out “dχ / d†”? Maybe he needed to take this course, a calculus with bible verses, instead.

Or just maybe, that mathematics stuff is hellbound anyway.

The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.

St Augustine

So what’s a professing Christian doing going to school as a math major, hmmm?

Regulatory evolution of the Hox1 gene

i-3eee93bdfc76513bf11752241591339d-double_mutant_mouse.jpg

I’ve been getting swamped with links to this hot article, “Evolution reversed in mice,” including one from my brother (hi, Mike!). It really is excellent and provocative and interesting work from Tvrdik and Capecchi, but the news slant is simply weird—they didn’t take “a mouse back in time,” nor did they “reverse evolution.” They restored the regulatory state of one of the Hox genes to a condition like that found half a billion years ago, and got a viable mouse; it gives us information about the specializations that occurred in these genes after their duplication early in chordate history. I am rather amused at the photos the news stories are all running of a mutant mouse, as if it has become a primeval creature. It’s two similar genes out of a few tens of thousands, operating in a modern mammal! The ancestral state the authors are studying would have been present in a fish in the Cambrian.

I can see where what they’ve actually accomplished is difficult to explain to a readership that doesn’t even know what the Hox genes are. I’ve written an overview of Hox genes previously, so if you want to bone up real quick, go ahead; otherwise, though, I’ll summarize the basics and tell you what the experiment really did.

[Read more…]

Minnesota’s pet wacko

What do you do with a local politician who claims that public education is her #1 issue, while accepting money from supporters of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State? That’s our Michele Bachmann, claiming to be a supporter of education while endorsed by people who say this:

I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.

Take a look at the people who favor completely gutting public school education at the Separation of School and State site, too: D. James Kennedy, Tim LaHaye, Tom Monaghan—it’s like a chorus line of the freaky religious right. And our little Michele fits right in with them.