Category Archives: Religion

Intelligent design creationism playing the racism card… again

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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.

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U.N. attack on freedom of speech

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As reported on the Lou Dobbs program (with an interview of Christopher Hitchens) the United Nations is trying to pass a binding resolution to encourange member states to ban criticisms of religion (especially Islam). As far as I’m concerned the U.N. can stick any such resolution up their collective asses.

Do we really need to listen to lectures from this collection of tin-pot dictatorships (who think nothing of committing untold numbers of  human rights violations  against their own peoples) about the ‘horrors’ of possibly causing offense to  someones delicate religious sensibilities?

It’s even worse than listening to Bush prattle on about defending freedom and liberty while holding people indefinitely without trial (torturing many of them) and wiretapping his fellow citizens without benefit of warrant (just to scratch the surface).

Original video removed from YouTube.

[Via Pharyngula, though unlike P.Z. I don’t find Dobbs to be “odious” even if I  don’t agree with him on everything.]

The two faces of intelligent design creationism

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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:

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A little pictorial sleight of hand

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This is something of a followup on my previous post on bird hips and the place of the sauropods in the dinosaur family tree.

In that post I linked to an image of the dinosaur family tree I had found on the creationwiki web site:

After a commenter (Moth Eyes) noted, in so many words, how it was odd that a creationist might label this illustration a “family tree” given that they don’t believe there is such a thing. This led me to look at where creationwiki might have gotten this illustration.

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Four and twenty sauropods baked in a pie…

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We find still more creationist ignorance about basic zoological facts, this time from Dr. David Menton of Answers in Genesis.

AiG recently republished on their website a Menton piece from last year attacking the evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

Often my first instinct when I run across these things is to launch onto a point by point refutation but I am going to restrain myself this time and simply highlight one rather obvious error in Dr. Menton’s article that in my opinion should cast doubt on anything else he has to say on the subject (especially since he claims to be an anatomist).

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“Creedocide”, very funny

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CREEDOCIDE from Bradford Johansen on Vimeo.

[Via Pharyngula]

Vow of Chastity Raffle

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117323_FEMALE_CHASTITY_BELT_jpge0c4e3755c80cc379d7a5eb922979ad7To make (not much of) a living I work as a small printing press operator and as you might imagine I’ve printed all sorts of things over the years. Last year we had some raffle tickets come through the shop that amused me (I just found a copy of the tickets I had saved while straightening up my office)

The tickets were for a “Vow of Chastity Raffle Extravaganza“.

This “extravaganza” was put on by a local Christian ministry (no surprise there) to “celebrate” their “vows of celibacy”. Now I find this sort of thing to be rather odd myself and a tad amusing in and of itself, however what was  really funny, at least to me, was one of the things listed as a possible prize to be won in the raffle:

A queen sized bed (in a bag).

Is giving someone who is trying to remain celibate a portable bed really a good idea?

…

Well I thought it was funny.

Intermediate fossils and the pre-Darwin (creationist) geologists

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RBH left a comment to a previous posting that inspired me to put some material together to address his (or anyone’s) reservations on the subject of intermediate fossil forms and the pre-Darwin (creationist) geologists.

Another really helpful post, Troy. Thanks!

Thanks RB!

Addendum

I realized during my discussions with RBH in the comments to this post that my main point behind writing about this subject might not be transparent to the average reader who doesn’t eat, sleep, and breath the creation/evolution debate. So I add this preface to give the reader a context for why I am going on at length about early 19th century geologists.

My point in all this is less about understanding the often vague and sometimes even contradictory views of the pre-Darwin scientists (as worthy as that subject of study is) and more about countering the arguments from modern antievolutionists that intermediate fossils do not exist and that those paleontologists who claim that they do, do so only because they are reading their “evolutionary beliefs” into the evidence.

If the pre-Darwin creationist geologists saw intermediates this tends, strongly I think, to falsify that argument. The same applies to the overall pattern of the fossil record and the geologic column that illustrates it (which is also frequently claimed by antievolutionists to be a evolutionary invention).

RBH: I do have one reservation. You wrote

The changing pattern of the fossil record and the existence of intermediate fossil forms was recognized by scientists (who were creationists) long before Darwin brought evolutionary theory into the scientific mainstream.

The changing pattern in the fossil record was surely observed; Cuvier in France and Owen in England — both eminent comparative anatomists in the first half of the 19th century — were very clear on that.

Indeed, Cuvier, Owen and just about every other geologist/paleontologist in the world at the time.

RBH: But Owen opposed Darwin’s hypothesis of species transmutation and common ancestry specifically because he did not see transitional/intermediate forms in the fossil record to which he had access.

I can’t speak much about Cuvier, but Owen is a little difficult to pigeon-hole into modern categories (perhaps a theistic evolutionist of sorts). He did oppose Darwin, particularly Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection but seemed to have been open to the idea of some sort of secondary causation for living things (as opposed to their direct creation by God).

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Biologist bitch slaps (figuratively) intelligent design creationist

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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.

‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!

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Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, just can’t seem to stop himself from saying ignorant things. And saying them about things for which there is no reason to be ignorant about even for a young earth creationist.

In the October issue of Acts & Facts, in yet another of a seemingly endless  parade of snarks about the Cambrian radiation (Morris 2008a) he throws out this little nugget about the famous mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale fossil locality:

Morris: In 1940, fossils of amazing clarity and diversity were found in Canada’s Burgess Shale. The extremely fine-grained shale preserved intricate details of previously unknown invertebrates.

The problem is the Burgess Shale was discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909 and quarried for fossils for decades before 1940. And as far as I know nothing significant regarding the Burgess Shale happened in 1940 either. But why get this wrong? Never mind bothering to crack a book on the subject, if Morris had bothered to Google the Burgess Shale the very first thing to pop up would have been the Wikipedia entry on the fossil locality which in a matter of seconds would have given him the correct date for its discovery.

It’s like he’s not even pretending to care about getting even the most basic and noncontroversial facts straight.

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