creationism

I usually write my annual back to school post earlier than this, but I was distracted by various events. There are three themes here. 1) You are a science teacher and I have some stuff for you. 2) You have a student in a school and you want to support the school's science teacher. 3) You have a student-offspring or elsewise and are looking for a cool back to school gift. First, for themes 1 and 2, a mixture of traditional back to school blog posts and some items that may be useful and happen to be on sale at the moment so now's your chance. My For Teachers Page has posts providing some…

Righting America at the Creation Museum (Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context) is a strange book and I do not fully approve of it, even though I'm mentioned in it (not in a bad way). Here is the write-up of the book provided by the publisher: On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting…

I’m sure that most of you watched the Presidential debate on Monday night, just as I did. Over the years, these debates have always always painful for me to watch, given the candidates’ tendency to answer the question they want to answer rather than the question actually answered; to find ways to spew prepackaged talking points into answers, whether they’re related to the question or not; and, above all, to see how much spin they can get away with. Particularly annoying is when they pander to their base with particularly brain dead bon mots. Candidates from both parties do it, of course, but…

The oldest evidence for microbial life has been found in Greenland, with fossilized 3.7 billion year old stromatolites (layered bacterial colonies) found in the rocks. Here's what they look like: And here's the abstract of the paper: Biological activity is a major factor in Earth’s chemical cycles, including facilitating CO2 sequestration and providing climate feedbacks. Thus a key question in Earth’s evolution is when did life arise and impact hydrosphere–atmosphere–lithosphere chemical cycles? Until now, evidence for the oldest life on Earth focused on debated stable isotopic signatures of…

In response to Neil Shubin's recent paper on the subject, and Carl Zimmer's summary, the creationist Michael Denton criticizes evolutionary explanations for the vertebrate limb. It's a bizarre argument. First, here's the even shorter summary of the Shubin work. Ray-finned fish have, obviously enough, rays in their fins -- rigid bony struts that provide structure. These rays are formed dermally. That is, osteoblasts deposit bone on the surface of a connective tissue matrix to build the rods of bone that prop up the fin. It's called dermal bone because the classic example is the assembly of…

Believe it or not (and you probably won’t believe it), but I never intended to post today, as it’s a holiday, and I had to write my usual level post for my not-so-super-secret other blog. But then one of you had to send me this: I couldn’t resist at least a quick comment on this. That’s right. Kent Hovind, one of the world’s most famous young earth creationists and frauds (given that he went to jail for tax evasion) is marrying Marry Tocco, Michigan’s own most annoying antivaccinationist and someone about whom I’ve written several times, most recently in 2014. In the video, he goes on about…

This week, Nature has an article on the reconstruction of global tectonics during the past 200 million years. a–c, Maps are separated by 10 Myr. The shapes of the large plates do not change much, whereas the adjustment of the small plates evolves quickly. d, 90 Myr after the first snapshot (a), the distribution of the large plates and smaller plates has evolved substantially. In a–d, the top panels show the viscosity of the mantle (colour scale); the bottom panels show the different boundary types (coloured lines) and plate sizes (shading) within the boxed regions in the top panels (which…

Neil Shubin reports that Bible tracts have begun appearing in copies of his book, Your Inner Fish, in bookstores. He even has photographic evidence. This is remarkable news. We now know how bible tracts are made: they are degenerate forms descended from more complex and sophisticated texts, and they appear spontaneously when two pages, who love each other very much, are pressed together. They're kind of like coke cans that way, arising without human intervention. Oh, except that you'd have to be an idiot to think that. The thing is, we know how coke cans (and bible tracts) are made: these…

Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher) Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children. The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…

Solemn greetings, all. Today, as the more reverent among you know, is Paul Nelson Day. Today is the 12th annual feast day of St Nelson, patron saint of obtusity and procrastination, and we honor his contributions to science by…well, by not doing much of anything at all. You could make grandiose claims today and promise to make good on them tomorrow, a tomorrow that stretches out into a decade or more, I suppose, but that's too much work. Instead, maybe we should all just shrug and say we'll think about celebrating later. Oh, jeez, shrugging? I don't have time for that. How about if we don't…

One of the most common dodges used by Intelligent Design creationists is to use a vague definition of their subject so that critics have nothing specific too attack, and also so they can accuse anyone who disagrees with them of using a strawman argument. For example, they claim that organisms exhibit "specified complexity", which cannot have evolved and requires a designer. If someone rightly points out that their definition of complexity is nowhere close to what real complexity theorists use, they can say, "Ah, but I'm talking about specified complexity, which is something different," which…

Uh-oh. A television station in the Philippines recently aired a program on human evolution. I don't speak a word of Filipino*, so I can't judge directly, but skimming through it it seemed to show evidence and discuss reasonable dates and was definitely enthusiastically sciencey, so it seemed like a good thing to me. But the Philippines, like the United States, is one of those countries with a fanatically Christian component to their population, and you can guess how some people reacted. One commenter noted, Kung tayo ay galing sa unggoy bkit may unggoy pa hanggang ngayon? kht anong gawin ng…

The Smithsonian is sponsoring a traveling exhibit called Exploring Human Origins: What Does It Mean To Be Human?, which is going around the country to various libraries. By all accounts, it's an excellent exhibit, and they also promote good education: they offer workshops on human evolution to local teachers (they also offer tours to local clergy -- they're additionally sponsored by the Templeton Foundation). The exhibit is in Cottage Grove, Oregon right now. You've all seen Cottage Grove -- the big parade scene in Animal House was filmed there. But it's also a nice little town south of…

If you watch the Discovery Institute, you'll discover they're constantly playing games, trying to find that winning PR technique that will persuade the hapless ignorati. Some of them are effective, even if dishonest: "irreducible complexity" injected all kinds of misleading chaos into the brains of their followers, and "teach the controversy" was a potent slogan. They've been flailing about in recent years, trying to emphasize their pretense of scholarliness with tripe like West's efforts to use pseudohistory to blame Darwin for Hitler, or Meyer's farcical, long-winded distortions of modern…

Once more unto the breach in Perry Marshall's cranium, dear friends. He is once again trying to claim that he alone has the one true understanding of Barbara McClintock's work, and he keeps getting it wrong. It's just embarrassing to watch. He makes obvious statements like this: Damage is random. Repair is not. Well, duh. If the cell were to just go charging in and practice excision repair (a process that snips out a short piece of one strand of DNA and brings in polymerase to re-synthesize it) on random stretches of DNA, it would increase the frequency of errors. Polymerase proofreads as it…

This is weird. Perry Marshall has posted a complete transcript of our discussion on Unbelievable on his website. That's actually useful, since most of us can read faster than someone else can talk. What's weird is that he's annotated it with his rebuttals, after the fact. It's like -- and this has happened to me -- you give a student an exam, and they do poorly on it, and they come in to your office to argue for more points not by pointing out errors in the grading (that happens, too), but by explaining to you how their understanding of the material was vastly superior to yours, and that you'…

My conversation with Perry Marshall about "evolution 2.0" is now online on the radio show Unbelievable. Marshall is sales and marketing guy who has written a book titled Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, in which he claims to have worked out a reconciliation between science and religion based on arguments he had with his missionary/theologian brother, that hints at the quality of the science you'll find in it. He has a superficial view of a few biological processes, like DNA error repair and transposition, and has shoehorned them into his religious belief that…

Over on Twitter, I was startled by the assertion that many scientists convert from evolution to creationism, convinced by the evidence. https://twitter.com/Prophecy_YEC/status/680891955233079297 What was startling about it was that I'm getting used to mainly hearing from atheists calling me a mangina or such on that medium, so it was a break from the usual. On a lark I took a look at the video. It's Jerry Bergman. I've debated that loon. How anyone can be convinced by that babbling incompetent is a mystery -- I guess he just tells them what they want to hear. He has written a "book", he…

Nick Matzke has just published a very amusing analysis of American anti-evolution efforts. Evolutionary biology has all these tools that allow one to, for instance, assemble trees demonstrating lines of descent for molecular characters, which are ultimately just strings of letters. And what is a law but a string of letters? We can relatively easily map out patterns of similarities and differences, and catalog which bill was modeled after which other bill. So Matzke put together the history of creationist efforts to adapt their legal strategies. The analysis of dozens of bills introduced in…

I got a begging email from our good friends at the Center for Science & Culture. They're going to have to work a lot harder to persuade me. Dear PZ: Wait. Dear PZ? I'm having a tough time imagining any of those bozos addressing me as dear. But let us continue. Intelligent design is a common sense idea. Research has shown that children intuitively recognize design in the world around them. You and I make design inferences every day. It has taken a long time for the scientific community to catch up with the kids. But that day is coming. Intuitive and "common sense" assumptions are often…