"Atheists" Are Mad at Creationists

According to an article making the rounds from the PRNewswire, "atheists" are hopping mad because of the giveaway of the version of On the Origins of Species with the special introduction that attacks evolutionary theory. The story notes:

Despite threats of "unilateral resistance," book burnings, and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins' public encouragement to students to rip out the Introduction, Comfort says his group has decided to continue giving away books.

"It's our aim to get this edition into the hands of students in every university in the United States, then Europe, and then the rest of the world," [Ray] Comfort said. "We have the manpower to do it because of our television program that is aired in 70 countries."

Comfort co-hosts an award-winning television program with actor Kirk Cameron.

"If the Introduction is as weak as atheists maintain, why would they rip it out because it would strengthen the case for evolution? But it does the opposite, and that's why they are so threatened," Comfort says. "Among other things, they don't want students to discover how Hitler used evolution as the catalyst for his 'final solution.'"

Well, this is just a thought but I am guessing they are ripping it out because it contains half-truths and misinformation. I am reminded of what Todd Wood said in the post that I quoted a few days ago:

I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)

Uncharitable but, in some cases, correct. Whether Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have been apprised of the facility of their position and the whopping amount of evidence for evolution is not clear. What is clear is that they have a whole lot invested in their ministry and little invested in learning the truth.

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Climategate, Meet IDgate!

A story by Barbara Hollingsworth in the Washington Examiner likens the current negative response to global warming scepticism to that of scientist trying to promote ID. She writes:

More than 800 Ph.D.-level scientists around the world are seriously considering ID to explain the origin of life, but you'd never know it. Most do so clandestinely for fear of being ostracized by their peers or even forced out of their academic positions.

Some have secretly contacted the Discovery Institute (www.discoverinstitute.org) after researching ID, Stephen C. Meyer, author of "Signature in the Cell" -- now in its fifth printing and one of Amazon.com's top 10 science titles -- recently told me over lunch.

Others, like Cold War dissidents making furtive contact with the West, arrange discreet meetings to discuss what "evolutionary biologists don't want to talk about, the origins of the information in the digital code of DNA necessary to produce life."

There is a fundamental flaw in this analogy: different climate models are testable and some have, indeed, been shown to support, on some level, a cooling trend. That is quite different from support for ID which exists in the form of negative evidence. Arguments for ID stem from trying to show the improbability of evolution to explain biodiversity. For example:

When former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe computed the chances that the four amino acids that form DNA could self-arrange themselves into just one functional protein, he found it was 1:10164 -- or less than the odds of finding one marked subatomic particle in the entire observable universe.

This suffers from the same logic that plagued Michael Behe in his recent books The Edge of Evolution and Darwin's Black Box. Namely, that all of the mutations that "self arranged" did so all at once. No model of early life assumes that and all of the available evidence suggests that this is exactly what did not happen. The mutations came about over time and individually.

The other problem with this idea is that it is a post hoc argument. That same logic could apply to any given event on any given day that includes a large group of people. What are the odds that all of the decisions that each person had made over the course of their lives led them to be at that same spot at the same time? The probabilities are infinitesimally small. Yet there they all are. I thought about that as I waited for Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins to take the stage at the Genesis concert I attended in 2007. There were almost 100 k people there, each with a lifetime of decisions behind them.

Then the wheels come completely off:

"The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection -- which is to say, minor changes within existing species," writes Discovery Institute senior fellow Jonathan Wells, who has two Ph.D.s from the University of California at Berkeley in molecular and cell biology. "Faced with such evidence, any other scientific theory would probably have been abandoned long ago. Judged by the normal criteria of empirical science, Darwinism is false."

And all credibility goes out the window. There is very good evidence for evolution in the fossil record (how many times do I have to say this?). If people like Wells don't want to believe in evolution, that is fine, but to say that the fossil record is an embarrassment to "Darwinian evolution" is flat-out false. It gets more false every year!

These, to me, are the principle reasons that ID doesn't get taken seriously. The mathematical models don't address biological reality, they have no testable models, and nobody at the DI seems to know anything about the fossil record. Where is the science?

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Discovery Institute Sues California Science Center

The DI has sued the California Science Center charging suppression of public documents that show bias against the Intelligent Design viewpoint in its decision to cancel the showing of the film Darwin's Dilemma, on October 6 of this year. The story, from the PR Newswire, notes:

On November 2, 2009, the Center released 44 pages of documents claiming to have disclosed "all documents" and that "no documents have been withheld," apart from a few e-mail addresses that were redacted.

"California Science Center's claims are not true, and we know for a fact that e-mail communications exist, including communications with the Smithsonian Institution, that should have been disclosed in response to our public documents request but weren't, showing clear violation of California's Public Records Act," said Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute.

"The Center withheld public communications by decision makers who cancelled the contract with AFA," said Luskin. "We believe the reason the California Science Center withheld these public documents is simple: the e-mails show evidence of discrimination against the pro-intelligent design viewpoint."

Discovery Institute's lawsuit follows a separate lawsuit filed against the California Science Center by the AFA for cancelling its contract to show the pro-intelligent design video.

I am more than a little curious to see where this one goes.

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Hadrosaur Species Drop by a Third

Worse than a meteor impact is a scientists' correction. According to Science Daily, a reexamination of the diversity of hadrosaurs has revealed that much of the diversity thought to be species variability, is, in fact, nothing more than different growth stages of some hadrosaurs. The author writes:

These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study. The confusion is traced to their bizarre head ornaments, ranging from shields and domes to horns and spikes, which changed dramatically with age and sexual maturity, making the heads of youngsters look very different from those of adults.

There have been other discoveries as well:

Many paleontologists now realize that the elaborate head ornaments of dinosaurs, from the huge bony shield and three horns of Triceratops to the coxcomb-like head gear of some hadrosaurs, were not for combat, but served the same purpose as feathers in birds: to distinguish between species and indicate sexual maturity.

"Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth," Horner said, "which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care."

This is science at its best: self-correcting and constantly analyzing. As more information comes out of the fossil record, these sorts of changes will appear in the literature. This is not a problem for science but I am sure the creationists will pick up on it.

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On the Origin of Species For the Lay Person

The UC Newsroom's Iqbal Pittalwala has written an article on a new book that has been written by UC Riverside professor David Reznick that seeks to explain Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species in easily understandable language. The book is titled The Origin Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the Origin of Species and is available from Princeton University Press. The article quotes Reznick as saying:

"I have taught the Origin to more than a dozen classes, and felt that I had figured out why Darwin’s arguments were so hard to follow,” said Reznick, a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside. “His Victorian prose is a small part of the problem. The bigger part is that the book is rooted in the knowledge of science in 1859, which is quite different from today. To understand the book, it helps a great deal to understand the context in which the book was written and the audience that Darwin was addressing."

This will be a very timely release, given the distorted copy of On the Origins of Species that Kirk Cameron is handing out.

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A Conservative Walks Away

Those of you who lean to the right may be familiar with a blogger by the name of Charles Johnson. He writes the blog Little Green Footballs. For some time, Charles has been getting disenchanted with the GOP and the modern conservative movement—many times for valid reasons—and he finally called it quits. In a post titled Why I Parted Ways with the Right, he outlines exactly why he has done this. I don't agree with some of the things he says, and I think that he sometimes has singled out some truly stoooopid people as representative of this or that movement. You get those no matter where you go. He does point out some problems, though, one of which is "anti-science bad craziness."

This caught the attention of Sigmund, Carl and Alfred. Given that Charles has been such a prominent blogger on the right for some time, they commented on the change. They write:

You don’t have to believe in God to be a Republican. You don’t have to reject Darwin or dismiss global warming science to be a part of the GOP. What you have to be is open. What you are supposed to be is welcoming. The Right is supposed to be welcoming and fiercely defend the right of the individual to have their own beliefs, whatever they might be. Groupthink is supposed to be anathema to the Right!

When did belief in God and Creationism become the litmus test of what it means to be a conservative or a Republican? In pandering to the religious right, the GOP has built a great wall they foolishly believe will isolate from the onslaught of progress.

This is so smack on the money it is almost prescient. The anti-science wave of the current conservative movement will sink them. Whatever you might think of your average liberal's politics, they are, as a group, pretty dang well educated. They know that creationism is junk science and that Intelligent Design isn't science at all. And they will hammer this home until it makes the GOP bleed. And science is booming!

Understanding of organ transplant and repair is now progressing by leaps and bounds with the help of evolutionary medicine. Understanding of how viruses respond to selection forces and how they affect populations differentially is possible with the understanding of evolutionary theory and the interaction of genetics and the environment. Quantum Mechanics allows us to understand the structure of basic particles and their role in the formation of the universe. The Large Hadron Collider works because of this understanding. New oil-discovering tools work because of our palaeontological and geological understanding of where the deposits of oil are which, in turn, is based on our understanding that the geological record is a picture of 3.5 billion years of life on the earth. Palaeoclimatic reconstructions of the earth have allowed us to understand how climate changes over time and how to recognize those changes before they happen. This understanding has led to the current debate on global warming and climate change.

Not one of these advancements would be possible if
creationism was taught in the public schools.

Not one.

I am proudly a Christian, and proudly an evolutionist. How am I going to vote in the next general election? Who knows. Ask me in three years.

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Russians Reject Evolution in Numbers Similar to U.S.

Meanwhile, over in Russia, Interfax-Religion reports that over 40% of Russians polled support creationism. The author writes:

In particular, Darwin's evolution theory is supported by 55% of residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, 54% of atheists, and 45% of highly educated respondents, while creationism by 50% of rural residents, 48% of people believing in God, and 50% of undereducated people.

The poll has shown that most Russians do not absolutely share either the creationism or Darwin's evolution theory postulates. As many as 63% of those polled acknowledge Darwin's idea of permanent development of the living world and natural selection and 71% are convinced that the Earth's age is at least several billion years.

At the same time, 48% of Russians are inclined to believe that man was created by God, 49% that the world was originally perfect and has become more chaotic with time, and 62% that all major changes on the Earth have been caused by global disasters, one of them being the Deluge.

The poll has not been posted online at the site yet and I am more than a bit curious how the questions were constructed and what the sample size was. I will try to follow up on this. On the surface, it is very disheartening since it seems that, despite an acceptance of an old earth, many of those polled just can't get past the concept of biological evolution. I know little of the Russian educational system so I am not sure where the breakdown is. Nor do I know what the extent of creationism "importing" is going on.

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Royal Society Supports Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools

The Royal Society issued a short press release supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools in England. It reads:

"We are delighted to see evolution explicitly included in the primary curriculum. One of the most remarkable achievements of science over the last two hundred years has been to show how humans and all other organisms on the Earth arose through the process of evolution. Learning about evolution can be an extraordinary, exciting and inspiring experience for children. Teachers should aim to explain why evolution by natural selection is the only known way of understanding all the available evidence. In order to assist them, the Royal Society will be sending all teacher training colleges a booklet on evolution to provide information and advice to all new teachers."

No surprise there.

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Todd Wood and the Problem of Cognitive Dissonance

Todd Wood is a creationist, and has a blog where he comments on science and religion. He seems to have grasped the meaning of evolutionary theory, though. Consequently, a few months back, he rattled more than a few cages by writing the following:

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.

I say these things not because I'm crazy or because I've "converted" to evolution. I say these things because they are true. I'm motivated this morning by reading yet another clueless, well-meaning person pompously declaring that evolution is a failure. People who say that are either unacquainted with the inner workings of science or unacquainted with the evidence for evolution. (Technically, they could also be deluded or lying, but that seems rather uncharitable to say. Oops.)

To quote Slim Pickens: "What in the Wide World of Sports is a-Goin' on here??" For those of us that have a background in evolutionary theory and palaeontology, the usual creationist arguments present little in the way of difficulty and can be dispensed with quite easily. Todd Wood, clearly, has an unusual creationist position. He claims that he really is a creationist and really does believe in the YEC model. He writes in another post:

I believe that God created everything that you see in six consecutive days around 6000 years ago.
I believe that Adam and Eve were the very first humans and were directly created by God.
I believe Adam and Eve sinned, and that sin brought death, carnivory, disease, and suffering into the world.
I believe that people really lived to be 900+ years back then.
I believe that there was a truly global Flood that inundated the entire planet.
I believe that humans and land animals were preserved on an Ark (approximately 450 feet long for those keeping score).

A reader wrote the following about him:

For a while I kind of felt sorry for Wood as I read his posts and what he was trying to do with the science, and kind of respected him for his honesty.However, what I see as the real problem is that if he, as someone who really understands the evidence, can still reject it, then what chance do we have of convincing unqualified creationists who don't understand the evidence and just believe what they are told by AIG and ICR?

Very little, it seems, because it is a faith position and those that hold it think that if they accept the findings of modern science, the jig is up and there really is no God, after all. It is this thin line between science and faith that results in a false dichotomy: One can accept evolution as the truth (in a scientific sense) and be an atheist or one can reject evolution, no matter how much explanatory power it has and believe in God.

The problem is that by embracing the YEC model and all of its warts, he is not just saying he accepts that evolution is good science but doesn't believe it, he is saying that all of modern science is good but his faith demands that he reject all of it. This makes him no more enlightened than your average creationist. In a sense, because he knows the evidence that your average creationist doesn't, his position is perhaps even more pathetic.

It raises an interesting theological question as well, one that is applicable to all creationists, enlightened or not. If the God of the universe is the same God that created the heavens and the earth and who created a universe that is knowable, and if we reject the clear evidence that the heavens and the earth teach us, are we not rejecting God's testimony about his creation?

Furthermore, given that the traditional and historical interpretation of the scriptures that cover the creation of the universe— the Primeval History—has not been literal but rather symbolic, and therefore, the modern (1930s) YEC model is not an orthodox interpretation, does this constitute heresy? I am not quite willing to go that far and am inclined to think of it as a radical misinterpretation of scripture. Ask me tomorrow, though. The more I see people lie and be willing to distort the evidence for the purpose of the YEC model, the more I am inclined to think of it as heresy. Someone needs to talk me out of this perspective.

It is obvious from reading Todd Wood's blog that he is a very articulate, intelligent and well-thought individual who has thought long and hard about some of these issues. He addresses the science as though he believes it, which is truly strange, given what he actually believes. I think that probably I need to read more to really get a sense of how deep the cognitive dissonance runs. I keep coming back to the same problem, though: the rocks don't lie.

Hat tip to Ben

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The History of Natural Selection

James Costa writes an article for BioScience in which he traces the history of how Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace made the conclusions necessary to devise the theory of natural selection. While a bit of a long read, the article is quite illuminating. For instance, Costa writes this:

The light shed by evolutionary theory today on even more “classes of facts” than Darwin could have imagined is an excellent starting point in educating students and the general public about this remarkable science. In doing so, we might profitably take a page from Darwin’s playbook and teach Darwin with Darwin himself (Costa 2003). The most readily appreciated argument in support of the reality of species change is the very one that convinced the young Darwin: the expansive explanatory power of the concept, tying together seemingly disparate fields. Most of Darwin’s contemporaries saw how compellingly his theory unified biogeography, paleontology, embryology, instinct, and other fields. Modern students are in a position to appreciate a far more expansive unification, encompassing new disciplines unknown to Darwin—the fruits of more than a century of research since the Origin’s final edition.

Indeed, it is the unification that makes the theory so powerful. It is an excellent article, with much insight into how the theory came to be and why it is so important.

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There is Deeper Meaning Here

The Age is reporting that a rare, first printing of Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species has been found in a collection of books used as reading material in a bathroom. The author writes:

The book, which was first printed in 1859, was bought by a family for just a few shillings in a shop about 40 years ago, Christie's auction house said.

The family has since kept the work on a bookcase in the guest lavatory at their home in the Oxford area, it said.

The book will go under the hammer in London on Tuesday, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of the father of the theory of evolution's famous work.

The book, about 1,250 copies of which were first printed, is expected to fetch STG60,000 ($A108,254).

Well, at least they were reading it.

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Dayton, Tennessee: Ground Zero

Allen Abel, of Canwest News Service has written an article about the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Such is the media climate surrounding the anniversary of the publishing of On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin, which came out 150 years ago, tomorrow. The article is more of a description of how the town and university that bear the name of William Jennings Bryan respond to the theory. He writes:

Across town, on the Bryan College campus, I meet the prelate of laboratory anti-Darwinism. Todd Charles Wood is a ``young-Earth creationist,'' strict Biblical literalist and holder of a doctorate in biochemistry from Thomas Jefferson's own University of Virginia. He acknowledges that there are difficulties involved in proving that Darwin and his disciples - the list would include virtually every reputable scientist since 1859 - are incorrect.

The interview with Wood continues, in which the following exchange is quoted:

Wood concedes that ``theories are needed'' in the pursuit of a rigorous creationist biology. He cites a number of perplexities that such a theory would have to explain: feathered dinosaurs; fossil whales with both teeth and baleen; the fact that human beings share 99 per cent of their genome with the chimpanzee.

``That may be the big one,'' says Wood.

``The theory is already written,'' I suggest, holding up a copy of The Origin of Species.

``Why would God create anthrax?'' the scholar wonders out loud.

``Why would God create Darwin?'' I reply.

``I don't have a theory from which to work,'' Wood admits. ``Once Darwin hit on natural selection, he had a theory with which to work. Evolution is well- supported. It is not bogus. It is not a failure. It is not in crisis. I just happen to think it's wrong.''

These are the words of a scientist? He has no evidence to demonstrate that evolution is wrong, he just thinks it is? Perhaps the most damning statement here is the lack of theory that creationists work from. It is the same lack of theory that plagues Intelligent Design.

Small-town America.

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How Did the Mammoths Die Off?

The Los Angeles Times has an article by John Johnson Jr. about why the woolly mammoths died out. He writes:

To track the population of large herbivores, scientists analyzed the pollen, charcoal and fungus in ancient sediments beneath Appleman Lake, a 35-foot-deep body of water left behind when the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago. The research focused on the amounts of the fungus Sporormiella present in the sediments, according to Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a co-author of the paper appearing in today's issue of the journal Science.

Because the fungus is commonly found in the dung of large plant-eaters, its prevalence in the fossil record should be a direct measure of population density, Gill said. The research team found that the decline of the large mammals started about 14,800 years ago -- and was virtually complete a thousand years later.

"About 13.8 thousand years ago, the number of [fungus] spores drops dramatically," Gill said.

In the end, a total of 34 types of large animal disappeared.

This, it is said, refutes the current hypothesis that a bolide of some kind was responsible, leaving humans the likely culprit.

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More on H. floresiensis from the Independent.

Here is an article from the Independent that sheds more light on the whole speciation question:

Professor [William ]Jungers suggested that the hobbit had evolved from a more primitive ancestral human species with a similar body plan, rather than belonging to an evolutionary branch-line of H. sapiens that had regressed to a more primitive form. "It is difficult to believe an evolutionary change would lead to less economical movement," Professor Jungers said. "It makes little sense that this species re-evolved shorter thighs and legs because long hind limbs improve bipedal walking. We suspect that these are primitive retentions instead," he said.

Read the whole thing.

Homo floresiensis: Not Homo

Peter Brown, the discoverer of the "Hobbit" (don't know about you but I just hate that name) is now arguing that the species does not belong in the genus Homo. In an article by Cheryl Jones for the Australian, she writes:

In a paper accepted for publication in an upcoming special Homo floresiensis edition of the Journal of Human Evolution, Brown and colleague Tomoko Maeda, also of UNE, say the hobbits' lineage left Africa "possibly before the evolution of the genus Homo". (The root of the human family tree stretches back about two million years to Homo habilis, or Handy Man, in Africa.)

Brown says assigning the Flores hominin to a different genus would worry some scholars. "They will think it somehow marginalises Homo floresiensis; that it's a clear statement that it is not a member of our genus, and it's extinct, so we don't have to worry about it any more," he says. "That's nonsense, because it's part of the broader evolutionary story of our species."

I am reminded of the late Grover Kranz arguing that australopithecines could be found in Indonesia or Don Tyler's Meganthropus argument. Brown's argument also, as the article notes, addresses the two warring camps in later human palaeoanthropology—the Out-of-Africa camp and the Multiregional Evolution camp. The first group advocates largely a replacement model of modern human origins, while the latter, as the name implies, suggests that modern humans originated in different areas of the Old World through a complex interaction of regional gene flow and evolution. The size of the populations and the gene flow between them kept speciation from occurring.

Read the whole thing.

Crocodiles From Hell

Yahoo News has a story originating from Agence France Press about new crocodile fossils that have been discovered in the Sahara Desert. The author notes:

The fossils of five hitherto unknown bizarre-looking crocodiles which roamed the world 100 million years ago have been unearthed in the Sahara desert, US scientists revealed Thursday.

The five now extinct species -- dubbed BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc because of their strange appearances -- were ancestors of the modern-day reptiles and evolved at the same time as dinosaurs.

"These species open a window on a croc world completely foreign to what was living on northern continents," said National Geographic explorer-in-residence Paul Sereno.

Funny names aside, these were evidently no animals to be taken lightly. The story continues:

Significantly, Sereno's team found the five oddball crocs had long legs allowing them to walk upright like mammals rather than slither with their bellies to the ground.

That gave them speed during hunting and when they fled from danger to seek refuge in the water.

Another piece of the puzzle.

You Can Never Go Back Home

ScienceDaily has a report of research from the University of Oregon in which it has been shown that evolution is a one-way trip. The author writes:

The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein's structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor's primordial form.

This seems to indicate that once evolution in a species has proceeded down a particular path, it doesn't go back. Once upon a time, the ancestors of humans had four premolars (bicuspids, if you are a dentist). We now have two because the first two have been lost along the way. I remember my advisor Fred Smith remarking once upon a time that once a trait has been lost evolutionarily, it never comes back. A species might follow a different path than the one it originally took to get to a similar place, however. This explains why whales and icthyosaurs don't look the same, even though they are both exploiting an aquatic niche. Read the whole thing.

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Muslims Rejecting Evolution

Ruth Gledhill, the religion correspondent for the Times Online writes an article examining current Muslim attitudes toward evolution. She writes:

Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, told the conference, being held in Egypt by the British Council, that in too many places students and academics believed they had to make a “binary choice” between evolution and creationism, rather than understanding that one could believe both in God and in Darwin’s theory.

Such is the understanding of many Christians today in the United States and Europe. This is largely promoted by both militant atheists and militant creationists. She continues:

Addressing the conference in Alexandria, organised for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, he said that concerns among Muslims about evolution were being fuelled by Christian creationists. People in Muslim countries would find creationist theses on the internet and, not realising that these were on the fringes of scientific debate, assume that creationism had scientific credibility in the West.

“It is a serious problem,” he said. “It would be like going to my students and telling them the planets are not related to the stars, there is no relationship between them and gravitational pull or radiation, and they were all created on one day. We would not dream of describing the cosmos in such a ridiculous manner ... We cannot allow people to go into the 21st century with no understanding of science.”

He would not think of it and yet that is exactly what young earth creationists believe—without a shred of evidence to support it. Groups like the ICR that strive for scientific credibility have used the Internet as a tool to spread the creationist message.

The one thing that I teach my students in Information Literacy is that the Internet is a double-edged sword. It is great for finding all kinds of information that you would, ordinarily have to go to print resources to find but, because there is no editing or accountability, anybody can publish anything they want on the Internet without the slightest bit of academic integrity. Less-suspecting individuals will then take this information and incorporate it into their thought structure without realizing that it has no academic merit. That is why this blog (and many others) exists—to combat that in some small way. That I have to try to counter the lack of academic integrity of many other Christians is more than a little troubling.

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Steve Dutch Is Mad

Steve Dutch, professor of natural and applied sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, has written a column for the Green Bay Press Gazette in which he scolds Christian organizations for deception when attacking evolution:

The lies told by opponents of evolution are practically endless.

There are no intermediate fossil forms between major groups? A lie.

Methods for dating rocks are unreliable and give contradictory results? A lie.

Many scientists are beginning to doubt evolution? A lie.

These are not mere differences of opinion; they are deliberate misrepresentations or outright denials of published facts.

I have read more anti-evolution literature than just about anyone in this area, and I have done something most other readers have not — check it against real science. I can tell you flatly it is all junk.

Duane Gish? Ken Ham? Answers in Genesis? Discovery Institute? Philip Johnson? Michael Behe? Junk, all of it, with not a shred of scientific value.

I am often reminded of Ken Ham's smug response to scientists that confront him with data. He simply responds that we both have the same data, we just interpret it differently. The catch is that he does so without any scientific testing, rendering his conclusions scientifically invalid.

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Dennis Sewell and the Abuse of Darwinism

Someone else has noticed Dennis Sewell's book. Simon Underdown of the Guardian writes a review that is not too kind. First, he corrects a misunderstanding:

For evolutionary scientists there is no such thing as "Darwinism". Instead we have a scientific theory that, in combination with Mendel's work, provides the modern or neo-Darwinian synthesis, which explains the development of life on Earth. Although this is a rather succinct definition it effectively sets the limits of the usefulness of Darwin's theory. However, in the last 150 years, there have been many attempts to take Darwin's idea and apply it outside of the context for which it was developed, hence the influence of social "Darwinism" on concepts such as eugenics and a more recent Darwinian nihilism that absolves the individual of any moral or social responsibility.

As I wrote in post a bit back, these have ranged from the tragic starvation of the Sans Cullots in Soviet Russia in the 1930s under Stalin to the Holocaust under Hitler. That there is not a shred of evidence to support either position is immaterial. Darwin was evil and Hitler was evil, therefore the two must be related in some way. Underdown also castigates Sewell for his acceptance of these extrapolations:

This inherent danger of using Darwin's theory outside of its biological context has lead to attempts to portray Darwin as the de facto cause of 20th century genocide: see, for example, Andre Pichot's book The Pure Society. There is a fallacy at the core of this line of thinking – can scientists really be held responsible for what is done with their ideas when they are misunderstood and corrupted by groups such as the Nazis? I would argue that they cannot: the actions of criminals do not need such highbrow justification and trying to do so merely lends a pseudo-scientific veneer the actions of the Third Reich.

This analysis, which is correct, also doesn't mention the fact that long before Darwin came on the scene, genocide and slavery were alive and well. If you need a primer of men behaving badly, try reading the later chapters of Genesis.

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