Dawkins' Camp for Atheists

Richard Dawkins has started a summer camp for atheists, in which he will teach them, instead of evolution. Lois Rogers, in the Times Online, writes:

While their friends jet off to Spain or the Greek islands, the siblings will be hunting for imaginary unicorns in Somerset, while learning about moral philosophy. The Jagos, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, are among 24 children who will be taking part in Britain’s first summer camp for atheists.

The five-day retreat is being subsidised by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, and is intended to provide an alternative to faith-based summer camps normally run by the Scouts and Christian groups.

Crispian Jago, an IT consultant, is hoping the experience will enrich his two children. “I’m very keen on not indoctrinating them with religion or creeds,” he said this weekend. “I would rather equip them with the tools to learn how to think, not what to think.”

That last sentence is pretty amusing since some of the greatest thinkers of the last two thousand years were believers in God. Wait for creationist groups to pounce on this one. Fish? Barrel?

More on the Trip to the Creation Museum

This story in the News and Observer by Jeffrey McMurray about the trip to the Creation Museum by a group of palaeontologists is a bit longer than the last one. It also focuses more on what the scientists think about the place:

"The real purpose of the museum visit is to give some of my colleagues an opportunity to sense how they're being portrayed," said Arnold Miller, a professor of paleontology at the University of Cincinnati, which is hosting the conference. "They're being demonized, I feel, in this museum as people who are responsible for all the ills of society."

Miller and other paleontologists object to numerous other aspects of the museum they say imply science is doing more harm than good.

The story also interviews cell biologist David Menton who works for AIG:

David Menton, a cell biology professor and researcher with Answers In Genesis, which founded the museum, made no apologies for the fact that the museum's teachings are rooted in the Old Testament. He insists they rely on largely the same facts scientists use, just with a starting point millions of years later. Anything before that can't really be proven by science anyway, he says.

"I've spent enough of my professional life in science that I know science being compatible with religion is not the sort of thing that keeps scientists up at night," Menton said. "There's a lot of scientists out there that rather applaud that idea."

He defended the displays that argue people and dinosaurs are contemporaries, including one at the museum entrance that show two young girls playing in a field near a dinosaur.

"I'm not saying dinosaurs and man frequently hobnobbed," Menton said. "I live on Earth at the same time as grizzly bears, but if I could stay as far away from grizzly bears, that suits me fine."

This man is a cell biologist and he makes statements about the lack of science proving things? Of course it can't be proven, but when you have a mountain of evidence that points one direction, just saying that it cannot be proven is a weak excuse. The inanity of that last comment is amazing. It ignores two hundred years of geological discovery that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that dinosaurs and humans are separated in time by at least 50 million years. What does he make of all of the dinosaur fossils of animals that were sixty to seventy feet long? Or the fact that there were thousands of them on the landscape? The last line of the article pretty much sums it up:

"Faith is one thing," said Mark Terry, a high school science teacher from Seattle, "but when it comes to their science statements, they're completely off the wall."

Yup.


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New Radio Show by Jonathan Park

Just when you thought it was safe to put down the mallet, another mole pops up. A new series of radio dramas by Jonathan Park is designed to "disprove popular Darwinist myths." Remember what I said a bit back about people that use the term "Darwinist" and "Darwinism." They typically don't understand what they are talking about. The story, in Christian News Wire has this:

The best-selling Jonathan Park audio drama series follows young Jonathan and his paleontologist family on their adventures around the globe. In "Jonathan Park and the Journey Never Taken", the Polar Star Medallion mysteriously shows up at the Brenan Museum of Creation, quickly throwing the Creation Response Team into a memorable scavenger hunt. Cryptic clues lead their team to Sweden, Scotland, and beyond in search of a promised treasure. Along the way, they explore the true history of Charles Darwin and his colleagues and learn how these men helped perpetuate the myth of a universe created without a Creator.

The Jonathan Park site is here. Its message is clear from the beginning:

Come visit the exciting world of Jonathan Park! For years, the Jonathan Park Creation Adventure series has been equipping parents and children to defend biblical creation and against the lies of evolution. Now, at the start of a new year, there has never been a better time to begin the adventure with your own family.

For 18 dollars and 75 cents, I am almost curious enough...almost. One wonders what lies he is talking about.

Creation Ministries UK Deceives Scientists

The BBC has a story on a film coming out shortly called The Voyage that Shook the World, about the life of Charles Darwin that has some scientists hopping mad:

Professor Peter Bowler, the author of a biography of Charles Darwin and many other books on the history of evolution, said he was interviewed for the The Voyage That Shook The World without realising that the film was being made by a Creationist group.

Professor Bowler, who has spent most of his academic career at Queen's University, Belfast, researching Darwinism, says he is unhappy to be appearing in what he regards as an "anti-Darwinian" film which offers an historically distorted portrait of Darwin. He claims that the film's narrative implies that Darwin's theory led him towards racism, whereas recent historical work by James Moore and Adrian Desmond shows that Darwin's scientific work was partly motivated by the naturalist's passionate opposition to racism.

The deception took the same form as that of Ben Stein's Expelled! and Bill Maher's Religulous:

Phil Bell, CEO of Creation Ministries UK, acknoweged that his organisation established a "front company" called Fathom Media, because they were concerned that experts such as Peter Bowler would not agree to take part in the film if they realised it was an "overtly Creationist" production. "At the end of the day," he said, "[when] people see 'Creationist', instantly the shutters go up and that would have shut us off from talking to the sort of experts, such as Professor Bowler, that we wanted to get to."

Gee, I can't imagine why that would be? Now here's the real kicker:

I asked Phil Bell if this method of securing an interview was "deceptive". He said: "Well, it could be called deceptive. But I think, at the end of the day, I would say that more people are concerned about how we've made a documentary, that's a world-class documentary, clearly with wonderful footage, with excellent interviews, and balanced open discussion."

In other words, it doesn't matter that he lied to people about why he was interviewing them, or that he lied about what the content of the film would be and therefore he feels justified in using deceptive tactics. How is God glorified in any of this??? How can it be a balanced, open discussion when the people doing the interviewing have a hidden agenda? This is exactly why creationists are vilified by scientists and why they will never get the legitimacy that they so long for and will never have.

Donald Prothero, in his introduction to the special transitional fossils issue of Evolution Education and Outreach puts it this way in his description of young earth creationists:

As discussed in my recent book (Prothero 2007), their tactics consisted of taking quotations out context (“quote mining”), citing old outdated sources or oversimplified trade books (and even children’s books), and misinterpreting what little bit of real science they did cite correctly. In no case was their “research” based on actual study and interpretation of real outcrops or fossils, since none of these creationist authors has any appropriate qualifications or training in paleontology or geology.

This just makes Christianity look deceptive and devious. We seek to show the truth of Christ to the world. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that young earth creationism is extremely harmful to the cause of Christ.

Hat tip to LGF.


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Zhoukoudian Site Being Re-excavated

The site of the original Zhoukoudian Homo erectus fossils discovered by Davidson Black and described in detail by Franz Weidenreich is being re-excavated due to possible collapse. The site ShowChina has the story (which loaded a tad funny Firefox). They write:

Paleoanthropologists will excavate 20 square meters along the western wall of Locality 1, said Gao Xing, deputy director and research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP), at a press conference here Wednesday.

Locality 1, where the first complete skull of "Peking Man" was found, used to be a 20-meter-wide, 140-meter-deep cave but the ceiling has collapsed.

The four-month excavation aims to protect the western wall fromthreats of collapse, he said. "We found a wide longitudinal crack from the top and rocks in the wall are loose. It could collapse in any moment. Once it collapses, it will cause serious damage to the relic deposit in the cave."

This section remained the most complete sequence of stratum settlement with rich relic deposits of great significance, he added.

Natural weathering caused the damage as the cave has long been exposed to air. But the excavations in the 1920s and 1930s did not properly protect the cave, Gao told Xinhua.

"Repair work cannot be done without a comprehensive excavation," he said.

This is excellent news and provides the opportunity to locate more Homo erectus remains within the cave. The lack of the original fossils is often seized on by creationists, who declare the remains a hoax because the originals cannot be found. This, despite the fact that Franz Weidenreich made excellent casts of the fossils and wrote up an extensive and detailed report on the remains.

Evolution is Faster in Warmer Climates

A New Zealand study has found that animals in warmer climates evolve faster than those in colder climates. The story, in TopNews, notes:

The idea that microevolution happens faster in warmer environments is not new. But, this is the first time the effect has been shown in mammals, which regulate their own body temperature.

“The result was unexpected,” said Len Gillman from Auckland University of Technology, who led the study.

“We have previously found a similar result for plant species and other groups have seen it in marine animals. But, since these are ‘ectotherms’ - their body temperature is controlled directly by the environment - everyone assumed that the effect was caused by climate altering their metabolic rate,” he added.

Scientists believe that this link between temperature and metabolic rate means that, in warmer climates, the germ cells that eventually develop into sperm and eggs divide more frequently.

In colder climates, there is more of a necessity to conserve heat, which uses more constitutional resources.

35 000 Year-Old Flute Found

Yahoo News is reporting that a flute has been discovered in Germany that is c. 35 ky old:

A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.

Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute was 35,000 years old.

"It's unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world," Conard told The Associated Press this week. His findings were published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Other archaeologists agreed with Conard's assessment.

Suspicion is that it was crafted by modern humans due to associated archaeological remains, although both Neandertals and moderns were on the landscape at the same time. One is reminded of the Neandertal flute hoax perpetrated by Discover Magazine in 1998 that, unfortunately, the ICR took seriously. A clue should have been that the discoverer's name was Todkopf, which is "dead head" in German.

Gave Up

I gave up trying to listen to the Ken Ham broadcast. The stream rebuffered every twenty seconds or so, making it impossible to keep the train of thought. Oh well.

Brain Evolution in Early Primates

Work by University of Florida vertebrate palaeontologists Mary Silcox and Jonathan Bloch suggest that the early primate brain may not have evolved in quite the way we think it did. The story, in Science Daily, has this to say:

"Most explanations on the evolution of primate brains are based on data from living primates," said lead author Mary Silcox, an anthropologist at the University of Winnipeg and research associate at UF's Florida Museum of Natural History. "There have been all these inferences about what the brains of the earliest primates would look like, and it turns out that most of those inferences are wrong."

Researchers used CT scans to take more than 1,200 cross-sectional X-ray images of the skull, which were combined into a 3-D model of the brain.

"A large and complex brain has long been regarded as one of the major steps that sets primates apart from the rest of mammals," said Florida Museum vertebrate paleontologist and study co-author Jonathan Bloch. "At our very humble beginnings, we weren't so special. That happened over tens of millions of years."

It is generally thought that the plesiadapiformes were not true primates but perhaps led to them. These earliest primates relied much more on sense of smell than later primates did.

Scientists Take a Trip to the Creation Museum

The Cincinnati Enquirer has a story on a junket to the Creation Museum by a group of 80 palaeontogists. The story, by Cliff Peale notes:

For the 80 paleontologists, taking a break from their convention at the University of Cincinnati to tour the museum, some were skeptical, some were amused, some were offended.

But they all seemed interested to see the museum, built to tell a Creationist view of the origins of man and to rebut the theory of evolution that many of the scientists hold dear.

“I think it’s a very professional outfit and they put on a good show,” said Jason Rosenhouse, a math professor at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., and manager of a blog on evolution. “If you can sort of suspend disbelief, you can see why people get caught up in it.

“I hate the fact that this exists,” he added. “But given that it exists, I can see why people would find it compelling.”

Its all in the presentation. According to all accounts, the museum is very well presented. Too bad its all wrong.

Creation Museum Webcast

The Creation Museum will host a webcast tonight at 8:00. The site address is:

http://live.creationmuseum.org//?utm_source=creation-museum-creation-evolution&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=state-of-the-nation-09

Peppered Moth is Changing Color Again

James Tozer of iOL Science reports that the peppered moths that gained so much notoriety as being one of the premier examples of natural selection are changing color again. He writes:

"We have seen these moths making a big swing back to their original colour," said Richard Fox, of Dorset-based Butterfly Conservation, who is project manager of Garden Moths Count 2009.

"It has been happening for decades as air pollution is cleaned up and with the demise of heavy industry in the big cities.

"The moths have been responding to this and the numbers of black and white moths will vary across the county.

"In Dorset it is very rare to see the moth in its dark form, but in industrial cities 150 years ago they were almost all black and that's where we will notice the greatest changes now."

The peppered moth, Biston betularia, was originally white with speckles, which allowed it to rest on lichen-covered trees and walls without being spotted by birds.

Michael Majerus recently did a renewed study on the moths,in 1997, concluding that the evidence was not as solid as was originally reported. Stung by the fact that creationists seized on this as evidence that "Darwinists" were lying about the evidence, he set about doing a more detailed study and, in the process, corroborated the evidence that the variations in the coloring in the moth are subject to selection. It seems they still are.

David Klinghoffer and the Evil of Evolution

David Klinghoffer has a post in which he recounts a radio program that he did in which one of the callers asked, apparently in his best preacher-style voice:

"David, would you not saaaay that Darwinism is a lie, from its top to its bottom, sprung straight from the pit of Hell!?"

Rather than answer the question directly, which he should have done, Klinghoffer, who has written some truly amazing drivel about evolution, equivocates. He writes:

There was sort of an awkward pause. I'm a pretty mild and soft-spoken kind of person. I didn't want to disagree with him, but I couldn't quite echo his sentiment, neither the style nor the substance. "Well," I offered, "that's not exactly the way I would put, though I like your formulation! What I would say is that it's a delusion with, um, some very negative social consequences." I felt bad about having to disappoint him.

A delusion? Thousands of scientists working around the world, putting together the pieces of the past and Klinghoffer, without a shred of scientific training, calls it a delusion? As far as the negative social consequences, society had no trouble creating mischief long before Charles Darwin came along. Klinghoffer is both a bad biologist and a bad historian. And what is it about the caller's formulation that Klinghoffer liked? Does he really think Darwinism comes from Hell? Amazing.

Hat tip to LGF.


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And Here's a Gift For You: The Charles Darwin Bible!

When the NEA has its annual education convention, they will receive a special gift at the door: the Charles Darwin Bible. Quoth the story, from Earned Media,

The NEA Creation Science Educators Caucus has been attending the convention for 14 years. According to Ramsek, "Every year there is a theme reflected on our 20-foot banner at our booth, and a primary resource that we give out for free. In past years we've plastered statements like 'Refuting Evolution,' 'Evolution is Science Fraud,' and 'Evolution Fuels Racism' on this banner. But we are most excited for this year's outreach because we believe it will be the most Christ-exalting year ever, with that Name above every other name featured on our large banner. It boldly states 'For by Jesus Christ all things were created.' This summer also marks the first time that we've given out the Word of God itself through The Charles Darwin Bible."

No wonder Christians look like idiots to the NEA, which comprises the largest voting block in the Democratic National Convention. Every one of those "banner" ideas has been rebutted time and time again. No, evolution hasn't been refuted. No, it isn't scientific fraud, and no, it doesn't fuel racism. As John Derbyshire said:

I’ll also say that I write the following with some reluctance. It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.

The bad thing is that people associate these groups with ID groups as well and they know full well what is going on in the statehouses of Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, New Mexico, Kentucky and other states that have "academic freedom" bills either up for vote or being proposed. Sadly, the people standing at the booths have little to no knowledge of what it is they are handing out, let alone how scientifically bankrupt the whole YEC movement is.

Christianity has so much to offer the world through the salvation of Jesus Christ and instead of offering that kind of help to people coming in the door, these people attempt to take down a theory that has been shown to be scientifically sound for over 150 years? Michael Dowd is right, this really is "flat earth" religion.


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More on the Human-Orang Connexion

Here is a much longer article from Eurekalert! on the idea that humans are more closely related to orang-utans than to chimpanzees. They write:

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, professor of anthropology in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences and president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and John Grehan, director of science at the Buffalo Museum, conducted a detailed analysis of the physical features of living and fossil apes that suggested humans, orangutans, and early apes belong to a group separate from chimpanzees and gorillas. They then constructed a scenario for how the human-orangutan common ancestor migrated between Southeast Asia—where modern orangutans are from—and other parts of the world and evolved into now-extinct apes and early humans. The study provides further evidence of the human-orangutan connection that Schwartz first proposed in his book The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins, Revised and Updated (Westview Press, 2005).

Schwartz and Grehan scrutinized the hundreds of physical characteristics often cited as evidence of evolutionary relationships among humans and other great apes—chimps, gorillas, and orangutans—and selected 63 that could be verified as unique within this group (i.e., they do not appear in other primates). Of these features, the analysis found that humans shared 28 unique physical characteristics with orangutans, compared to only two features with chimpanzees, seven with gorillas, and seven with all three apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). Gorillas and chimpanzees shared 11 unique characteristics.

Schwartz and Grehan then examined 56 features uniquely shared among modern humans, fossil hominids—ancestral humans such as Australopithecus—and fossil apes. They found that orangutans shared eight features with early humans and Australopithecus and seven with Australopithecus alone. The occurrence of orangutan features in Australopithecus contradicts the expectation generated by DNA analysis that ancestral humans should have chimpanzee similarities, Schwartz and Grehan write. Chimpanzees and gorillas were found to share only those features found in all great apes.

Schwartz and Grehan pooled humans, orangutans, and the fossil apes into a new group called "dental hominoids," named for their similarly thick-enameled teeth. They labeled chimpanzees and gorillas as African apes and wrote in Biogeography that although they are a sister group of dental hominoids, "the African apes are not only less closely related to humans than are orangutans, but also less closely related to humans than are many" fossil apes.

As they, themselves acknowledge, the earliest hominid material is in Africa, which is where chimpanzees are and where orangs are not. They suggest that there was a migration between 12-13 mya of hominoids between east Asia and Africa before there was a separation of the different groups that eventually became chimpanzees and orang-utans. Peter Andrews seems to like the idea. I wonder how many others will sign on?

Orangs Our Closest Ancestors?

There is a short story out of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Jeffrey Schwartz and John Grehan have discovered that chimpanzees may not be our closest relative but that, rather, it is the orang. The article is short but has this to say:

They conducted a detailed analysis of the physical features of living and fossil apes that suggested humans, orangutans, and early apes belong to a group separate from chimpanzees and gorillas.

According to a news release, the researchers reject as "problematic" the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, "which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence."

I am guessing this will make some very large waves.

Hollywood and Prehistory

Canwest has an article on the fascination for "caveman" films in Hollywood. They write:

As humans, we seem eternally obsessed with two things: our own origins, and furry bikinis on svelte cavebabes.

In other words, caveman movies are as old as Hollywood. D.W. Griffiths created one in 1912 called Genesis, and sparked so many imitators that Charlie Chaplin had satirized the genre by 1914 with His Prehistoric Past. Talk about prehistory.

As this summer has proved, the genre still has legs - think of Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost (a sort of caveman sub-genre film), and Year One, which opened Friday.

They they proceed to list the best characters of the last hundred years of film. My favorite is still 1 million years B.C. just for the pure, unintended humor.

The John Freshwater Case: He Doesn't Have One

Steve Goble, writing for the Mansfield News Journal writes that John Freshwater, the fired biology teacher has a case of little merit. Freshwater maintains he was terminated because he had a Bible on his desk and that violated school policy. That is apparently where it breaks down:

Once discussion moves away from the Bible, Freshwater's case wobbles like a Weeble -- and then falls down. Freshwater is accused of teaching non-scientific, religion-fueled creationism instead of science. On this score, the teacher's lawsuit should fail.

Basically, he is accused of undermining legitimate science -- evolution theory -- and pressing make-believe "science" based on Scripture.

Freshwater's lawyers may press an "academic freedom" argument, insisting teachers must be able to discuss a wide range of ideas in order to do their jobs. The argument sounds impressive, loaded with yummy fair-play goodness and seems like a common-sense idea -- until you consider that those who support teaching creationism in public schools want the academic freedom to teach the equivalent of five plus five equals nineteen.

If, indeed, the court can be persuaded that he was teaching creationism, it will be another ruling like Dover, which was narrowly decided. About that, Steve writes:

The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy was thus unconstitutional. The intelligent design and creationism proponents had their chance to make a scientific case, and they flopped.

Freshwater's insistence that his free speech and religion rights are violated just because he doesn't get to teach his religious views in a public school -- supported with public funds -- deserves to flop, too. He has a right to believe whatever he wants and preach whatever he wants on his own time. On the public's time, and with the public's pay, he is supposed to teach science.

The courts now have another chance to make that perfectly clear

This case might not be so narrowly rendered.


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A Nifty Spoof Over at SFGate

Here is a great graphic from SFGate's Bad Reporter.



The headline pretty much speaks for itself.

Neandertal Fossil Found in the North Sea

A skull fragment that was retrieved from the North Sea is believed to that of a Neandertal adult male. The story, from UPI continues:

The 60,000-year-old Neanderthal is the first confirmed specimen to be found undersea anywhere in the world, the BBC reported Monday. The fossil was found by Luc Anthonis, a private collector from Belgium, among animal remains and stone artifacts recovered several miles off the coast of the Netherlands in 2001.

Well, this certainly confirms traffic between the British Isles and the mainland, which we pretty much knew was going on anyway, based on previous remains in England.