Category Archives: Intelligent design

A New Major Award!

Posted on by

The National Center for Science Education has announced their ‘creation’ of a new annual  award, the “Upchucky”, to be “bestowed on the most noisome creationist of the year”.  I love it! And they certainly have a nominee rich environment which they can select from.

The contenders for the first annual Upchucky were:

  1. Recently deposed Texas board of education chairperson Don McLeroy; “for his longstanding efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in the Lone Star state”.
  2. Creationist buffoon Ray Comfort (aka Banana Man) of Living Waters Ministries; “for his distribution of copies of the Origin disfigured with his own creationist introduction”.
  3. The possibly over-caffeinated intelligent design creationist Casey Luskin of the Disco toot’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture; “for his logorrheic zeal in reciting the “intelligent design” talking points du jour“ (“logorrheic”, that’s good, I’ll have to remember that one).
  4. And finally a group nomination for Arabic news channel Al Jazeera; “for its wildly misleading coverage of Ardipithecus ramidus“.

And the Upchucky goes to…

The virulently ignorant Don “Somebody’s got to stand up to experts” McLeroy! [pre-recorded applause].

I’m sure it was a tough decision for the judges but when one considers that he was someone with actual authority over what was taught in public schools I think he was the best choice of this line up.

Bravo NCSE!

[Hat-tip to Thoughts in a Haystack]

Intelligent design creationism playing the racism card… again

Posted on by

Andrew Sibley, who I recently used as an example of the two faces of intelligent design creationism, has gone on another ‘Darwin was a racist/evolution leads to racism’, tear over on Uncommon Descent, basing his comments this time largely on an article (“What’s wrong with Darwinism?“) by another character by the name of Tony Campolo on a site called Christian Today. I was going to rip into Campolo’s piece given it contains outright falsehoods about Darwin, but my colleague Jason Rosenhouse has done an excellent job of doing so already over on Evolutionblog, so time saved.

However since Mr. Sibley has my attention once again I want to address his contribution to this steaming pile:

Campolo acknowledges that Darwin was a product of his time, and clearly Darwin did not invent racism with some of his relations for instance taking an interest in abolishing the slave trade. Darwin too in his early life questioned slavery, but what happened to lead him to embrace ideas where Africans and Aborigines were considered closer to apes than Caucasians? Instead, a plain reading of the Bible teaches that all mankind are related and are of common ancestry.

Darwin “questioned slavery”, “in his early life”, really? Well, now that we’ve had the ‘good facts‘ version let’s look at the actual facts.

Read on»

The two faces of intelligent design creationism

Posted on by

Over at Uncommon Descent they are taking advantage of the brouhaha over the New York Post’s ‘gunned-down chimp’ cartoon (which many have taken as a racist slur against President Obama) to take their own pot-shots at evolution and in the process they have served up another example of the two faces of intelligent design.

This particular snark (“Is this Darwin’s legacy?”) is brought to us by UK weather-guy/meteorologist Andrew Sibley:

Read on»

Biologist bitch slaps (figuratively) intelligent design creationist

Posted on by
Prof. Ken Miller

Prof. Ken Miller

Brown University biologist and Dover ID trial witness Ken Miller pwns ID creationist Casey Luskin in a guest posting on Carl Zimmer’s blog The Loom.

Tis a thing of beauty.

Addendum

Miller is showing no mercy. The above was just part one! Here are parts two and three.

New Library Aquisitions

Posted on by

The wife made the mistake of insisting on going to a used bookstore last weekend. The result is that my library has grown a bit larger (and my wallet a bit thinner). For those not familiar the entire contents of the Britain Research Library can be found on my personal web site at the previous link.

Anstey, Robert L. & Chase, Terry L. (1979) Environments Through Time: A laboratory manual in historical geology (2nd Edition), Burgess Publishing Company, VI +140

Brockman, John (Editor) (2006) Intelligent Thought: Science versus the intelligent design movement, Vintage Books, XIII + 256

Cherfas, Jeremy (1982) Darwin Up To Date (A New Scientists Guide), IPC Magazines Ltd, 72

Desmond, Adrian J. (1975) The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, The Dial Press/James Wade, 238

Skybreak, Ardea (2006) The Science of Evolution and The Myth of Creationism: Knowing what’s real and why it matters, Insight Press, VIII + 338

Von Koenigswald, G. H. R. (1962) The Evolution of Man, The University of Michigan Press, 148

Watson, James D. et al (1983) Recombinant DNA: A short course, Scientific American Books, XIII + 260

White, Michael & Gribbin, John (1995) Darwin: A life in science, Dutton, IX + 322

And from the dark side:

Latham, Antony (2005) The Naked Emperor: Darwinism exposed, Janus Publishing Company, VI + 257

ORFan genes and intelligent design

Posted on by

“When you said “ORFan”, did you mean “ORFan” – a gene unique to one species that appear to have no relatives in other species, or “OFTen”, frequently?” *

In a previous post about a Expelled Q & A event held at Biola University, I mentioned that Paul Nelson (of the Discovery Institute), who chaired the event, had said something about “orphan genes” in our after event discussions (I now know it is ‘ORFan’ rather than ‘orphan’) . Well he brought them up again in the comments section of that post and now Ian Musgrave has written up a good post on ORFans over at Pandas Thumb in response. Take a look.

[ * My apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan …and Musgrave.]


The Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism” list examined

Posted on by

In my review of the so called “Leaders Guide” (part 1 and 2) put out by the producers of the movie Expelled I addressed its reference to the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism” list.

L.G. More than 700 scientists have signed this statement!

A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism

“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” (p.12)

To which I responded: “Yes they have a list of scientists, and many of them are the usual creationist suspects. Still others are scientists whose field of study is not particularly relevant to the subject of evolutionary theory. More importantly they constitute a tiny fraction of the global scientific community.”

Read on»

Evolution, racism and the Klan

Posted on by

With the movie Expelled resurrecting the shopworn creationist guilt by association argument that since Nazis and other racists have used [perversions of] evolutionary theory to rationalize their racism, then there must be something inherently wrong with evolution, I thought it might be enlightening to take a look at some of America’s home grown haters, like the Ku Klux Klan.

Given the ‘irrefutable evidence’ linking evolutionary theory to racism and antisemitism surely Klan groups must inevitably be hotbeds of evolutionists right? Well, let’s take a look at what one prominent Klan group, “The Knights Party” has to say about the subject on their web site:

We DO NOT believe in evolution. We believe that God created each race as we see it today and that NO race evolved from any animal.

When we barred the school house door to God, traditional Christian teaching, prayer and Bible reading, and opened the school house door to sexual perversion, condoms, evolution, and abortion counseling, we robbed our kids of their moral foundation.

Adam and Eve were not the progenitors of all races. Isn’t it amusing how on one hand the modern church fights against the idea of evolution and than on the other hand wants us to believe that all races evolved from one source.

[…] Now within the last hundred and fifty years a very dangerous idea began circulating in the Church – again brought on by Jewish fables which said that the Black race was the children of Ham who was cursed. I am sure you have heard this; that the whole world was under a flood and only 8 people survived. This causes problems because the church must then explain how all of the other races came into being. So they latch on to the idea that the three sons carried the genes from Adam and Eve which all of a sudden caused the three sons’ offspring to become the different races. We see the church teaching evolution again.

Yep, a bunch of materialistic “Darwinists” right there. How is it that we didn’t hear about this group in Expelled?

I feel like I need to go take a long shower now.

Expelled Q & A at Biola University

Posted on by

This last Monday (April 28th) I attended a Q & A forum on intelligent design (ID) creationism and the movie Expelled held at Biola University (La Mirada, CA) which I saw advertised over on Uncommon Descent by Paul Nelson (who told me he has my blog bookmarked; hi Paul):

…If you’ve got a burning question or two about the Expelled controversies. Darwin-to-Hitler, doesn’t Sternberg still have his Smithsonian position, the Pepperdine students were extras, the cell animation is plagiarized, Dawkins and P.Z. Myers and all the rest were tricked into granting interviews, Darwin’s Descent of Man was quote-mined, why didn’t Ben Stein just use Google Maps to find the Discovery Institute, ID is religious ’cause Expelled admits it, Yoko Ono is suing…whatevah.

Bring Your Questions for Profs. John Bloom, Mike Keas and Paul Nelson

Joining me to monitor the goings on were my friends Don Frack and Cal. State Fullerton Professor Jim Hofmann. Besides ourselves and the three panel members there were perhaps 20 other people in attendance.

Read on»

And the award for most hysterical antievolutionist nonsense of the week goes to…

Posted on by

This bit of wackiness which comes from a site called California Catholic Daily (which is odd since most Catholics don’t have a problem with evolution):

Now that Darwinists rule academia, they will brook no contradiction, and they will happily commit employment assassination even against tenured professors who dare even to mention intelligent design. The Darwinists even have their own Gestapo in the National Center for Science Education led by a modern day Heinrich Himmler named Eugenie Scott.

The NCSE is like the Gestapo and Genie Scott is comparable to Himmler, really?

Read on»