Stephen Colbert reports on how “Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly has been unfairly maligned over his comments regarding the origin of the tides:
Hi-frelling-lareous! And you can’t explain that.
So that there is no miscommunication, in the event that something happens to the YouTube version here is the official Colbert Nation video. The relevant bit starts at about 2:30.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
YouTuber QualiaSoup has produced a very nice, concise, refutation of the “irreducible complexity” argument used by intelligent design creationists against evolution; check it out:
Ah yes, surely if there ever was a perfect example of the handy work of a benevolent intelligent designer it must be parasitic wasps.
Warning: You may not want to watch this prior to eating if you are squeamish at all.
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lintelligent designerd made them all.
[Via Pharyngula]
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:
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]
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.
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:
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.
“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
[ * My apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan …and Musgrave.]
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.”
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.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 