… or er something.

Sud­denly I feel a lot bet­ter about myself again. I mean, I might have under­es­tim­ated the diversity of an import­ant order of mam­mals, but at least I can tell the dif­fer­ence between a cat and an orange. This guy is either stu­pid enough that he can’t or stu­pid enough to think sci­ent­ists can’t. I’m not sure which would be worse.

In any case, PZ says everything that needs to be said.

Both Phil and Ed have linked to this story:

After the Sunday ser­vice in West­min­ster Chapel, where wor­ship­pers were exhor­ted to wage “the cul­ture war” in the World War II spirit of Sir Win­ston Churchill, cab­bie James McLean delivered his ver­dict on Charles Darwin’s the­ory of evolution.

“Evol­u­tion is a lie, and it’s being taught in schools as fact, and it’s lead­ing our kids in the wrong dir­ec­tion,” said McLean, chat­ting out­side the chapel. “But now people like Ken Ham are tear­ing evol­u­tion to pieces.”

They seem to think it’s funny, and I guess I can see why; they’ve been liv­ing with this level of idiocy for a long time. Per­son­ally, I find it depress­ing whenever it rears its head on this side of the Atlantic.

Apo­lo­gies for the lack of updates recently; I’ve been busy enjoy­ing a ver­it­able cor­nu­copia of symp­toms for the past couple of weeks, and haven’t really been up to writ­ing about much, even though there’s been plenty going on:

• The Texas Edu­ca­tion Agency has fired Chris Comer, a staff mem­ber of nine years, for send­ing an email announ­cing a talk by a Bar­bara For­rest, a prom­in­ent critic of ID. The inter­net has been buzz­ing, and For­rest her­self has writ­ten on how this proves her point that ID, rather than being a sci­entific pos­i­tion, is an attempt to force the reli­gious right’s agenda into the classroom (and the pub­lic con­scious­ness) through power-​​politics and out­right bul­ly­ing. Just remem­ber kids; it’s the Dar­win­ists who have a shady global con­spir­acy to sup­press the oppos­i­tion and get people fired just for sup­port­ing ID.

• The Brit­ish gov­ern­ment has given up all pre­tense at seek­ing con­sensus and is for­cing through legis­la­tion that will increase the time “sus­pec­ted ter­ror­ists” can be held without charge. If you’re a UK cit­izen, you can register your dis­pleas­ure by sign­ing this peti­tion. Please take the time; this is a hugely import­ant issue that bears dir­ectly on our most import­ant human rights.

• Some poor teacher was arres­ted, tried, jailed and then depor­ted for call­ing a Teddy Bear Muhammad. Local people took excep­tion to the fact that she wasn’t executed and took to the streets in protest. Gov­ern­ments the world over seem not to notice that whenever a group of people go bat­shit insane and start demand­ing inno­cent people are beheaded for some utterly trivial slight to their cul­ture, those people always seem to be Muslim. The Brit­ish pub­lic seems not to notice that the laws Gillian Gib­bons were arres­ted under bear a strik­ing resemb­lance to the laws our gov­ern­ment put in place a few years back with the express pur­pose of arrest­ing Muslims for mak­ing utterly trivial slights against our cul­ture.

That’s prob­ably enough for tonight. I should be back to a more reas­on­able posting-​​schedule now, so if I think of any­thing else I missed, I’ll sneak it into a future post.

While we’re on the sub­ject of deni­al­ists and cranks, this piece of paleo-​​crank-​​ology made me laugh. Ser­i­ously, how can these people still bear to stand up in pub­lic and say the same things they’ve always said? Don’t they real­ise they look like fools?

The UK gov­ern­ment has issued guidelines to sci­ence teach­ers, detail­ing what they should teach about ID and other forms of cre­ation­ism. The answer, thank­fully, is: “pretty much noth­ing.” Well, except pos­sibly to point out that it’s not sci­ence. Now all we need them to do is get rid of the faith schools, and we’ll be able to say we’re giv­ing (all) our kids a good sci­ence education.

Repor­ted in The Guard­ian, and linked from The Panda’s Thumb.

This is a really depress­ing thing to see. A lot of sci­ence blog­gers are being very crit­ical of the kids and their essays, but I can’t bring myself to look at it that way. To me it’s much worse than a few new essays full of lies; it’s a group of kids hav­ing their poten­tial stolen from them.

These are good kids. They’re bright, intel­li­gent, lit­er­ate and motiv­ated. As teen­agers, they’re already plan­ning and mak­ing pro­vi­sion for their col­lege edu­ca­tion. In short, they’re exactly the sort of kids we, as a spe­cies, want to be pro­du­cing. But their chance of real achieve­ment in life has been drastic­ally reduced because they’ve been sys­tem­at­ic­ally lied to, to the point that they’re simply unable to main­tain a world-​​view that’s in-​​line with real­ity. This con­test will just be the latest example for most of them, but it’s instruct­ive; they’re being rewar­ded, con­grat­u­lated and made to feel spe­cial and import­ant and clever for regur­git­at­ing the same spiel they’ve been fed since they were born. With this sort of pos­it­ive re-​​enforcement for believ­ing lies, how are any of these kids going to develop the abil­ity to think critically?

We have no way of know­ing what would have become of these win­ners if they hadn’t been con­di­tioned to believe, but what I can say with some cer­tainty is that now, because of the way they’ve been raised, they will all have a much harder time mak­ing any­thing of them­selves. And that’s why I can’t bring myself to cri­ti­cise them; they weren’t born cre­ation­ists and they never asked to be brain­washed — it just happened to them, and they’re try­ing to make the best of them­selves with the tools they have available.

The essays are dross though.

Both PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins have been scammed into giv­ing inter­views for a cre­ation­ist pro­pa­ganda movie. When they were approached, the movie was appar­ently titled Cross­roads, and had the fol­low­ing synopsis

It’s been the cent­ral ques­tion of human­ity through­out the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859 Charles Dar­win provided the answer in his land­mark book, “The Ori­gin of Spe­cies.” In the cen­tury and a half since, bio­lo­gists, geo­lo­gists, phys­i­cists, astro­nomers and philo­soph­ers have con­trib­uted a vast amount of research and data in sup­port of Darwin’s idea. And yet, mil­lions of Chris­ti­ans, Muslims, Jews and other people of faith believe in a lit­eral inter­pret­a­tion that humans were craf­ted by the hand of God. This con­flict between sci­ence and reli­gion has unleashed pas­sions in school board meet­ings, courtrooms and town halls across Amer­ica and beyond.

Now that the movie is ready for release we dis­cover that it’s actu­ally titled Expelled: No Intel­li­gence Allowed and that it’s the usual reli­gious attack on sci­ence, com­bined with the now famil­iar claim that the only reason any­one believes in “Dar­win­ism” is that there’s some secret police force root­ing out the dis­sent­ers and ruin­ing their careers before they can speak out:

Unlike some other doc­u­ment­ary films, Expelled doesn’t just talk to people rep­res­ent­ing one side of the story. The film con­fronts sci­ent­ists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delu­sion, influ­en­tial bio­lo­gist and athe­ist blog­ger PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott, head of the National Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion. The cre­at­ors of Expelled crossed the globe over a two-​​year period, inter­view­ing scores of sci­ent­ists, doc­tors, philo­soph­ers and pub­lic lead­ers. The res­ult is a start­ling rev­el­a­tion that free­dom of thought and free­dom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-​​funded high schools, uni­ver­sit­ies and research institutions.

What’s the bet­ting that their claim to not just rep­res­ent one side of the story isn’t entirely accur­ate? The way they got inter­views with at least two of their enemies doesn’t exactly demon­strate a com­mit­ment to the truth.

PZ expresses sur­prise that they felt the need to lie to him to get the inter­view; after all, he’s not exactly known for being shy about arguing with the faith­ful. I’m temp­ted to sug­gest that the cre­ation­ists, and espe­cially their well oiled PR machine, have got so used to lying whenever sci­ence is so much as men­tioned, that they just for­got there was any other way to com­mu­nic­ate. Actu­ally, though, I sus­pect they had good reas­ons to lie. PZ might have been will­ing to show up if he’d known the real reason for the inter­view, but he’d also have been much less will­ing to be led in the inter­view, much more on his guard and much less likely to acci­dent­ally say some­thing that could be used to make him look bad. But quite aside from that, I just don’t think PZ was their main event. It’s no insult to the man — reg­u­lar read­ers will know I have noth­ing but respect for him — but to the cre­ation­ists he’s a bonus item; they were after Dawkins, who’s well known for not debat­ing, or giv­ing inter­views to creationists.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what the movie’s like; I doubt it’ll get a cinema release in the UK, but I’m sure I’ll man­age to track it down some­how. I don’t hold out any hope that any of the sci­ent­ists’ inter­views will have been used com­plete, and the under­hand method they used to to get them doesn’t allow me to believe that even the spirit of what they said will be left intact, but it might at least be good com­edy to see just how ter­ribly their words have been twisted.

Word­press, the pop­u­lar blog­ging site, has been blocked by the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment, fol­low­ing alleg­a­tions of defam­a­tion by one Adnan Oktar, who is a well-​​known Islam­ist cre­ation­ist, who’s recently been in the blog spot­light (blog­light?) for a mass-​​mailing cam­paign of tens of thou­sands of cop­ies of his latest book, The Atlas of Cre­ation to uni­ver­sit­ies, schools and research insti­tutes through­out the west­ern world.

While he was just another cre­ation­ist crank mail­ing out books and try­ing to con­vert people, I wasn’t that inter­ested; it’s not that dif­fer­ent from The Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute or their UK equi­val­ent, Truth in Sci­ence. But this latest devel­op­ment gave me cause to look into him a bit more thor­oughly, and it’s much worse than I thought. This is someone with enough sway in his home coun­try to get an entire site banned based on a couple of art­icles, who’s so cer­tain of his deluded ideas that he’s pre­pared to orches­trate a cam­paign of mis­in­form­a­tion, har­ass­ment and threats against any­one with oppos­ing views. From Wikipedia:

In early 1998, Adnan Oktar and the BAV launched a cam­paign against Dar­win­ism. Thou­sands of free cop­ies of Adnan Oktar’s book, The Evol­u­tion Deceit, and the book­lets based on this book were dis­trib­uted within Turkey.

BAV [Found­a­tion for Sci­entific Research — Oktar’s mouth­piece organ­isa­tion] also spear­headed an effort to attack Turk­ish aca­dem­ics who taught evol­u­tion­ary the­ory. A num­ber of aca­dem­ics were har­assed, threatened and slandered in fli­ers that labelled them “com­mun­ists, sep­ar­at­ists and Maoists” for teach­ing evolution.[19][20] In 1999, six of the pro­fess­ors won a civil court case against BAV for defam­a­tion and were awar­ded $6,000 each.

The court decided that “a severe and unjust attack was per­pet­rated on the plaintiffs’ per­sonal rights, by list­ing the names of the sci­ent­ists defend­ing the the­ory of evol­u­tion and describ­ing them as com­mun­ists and sep­ar­at­ists on the fly­ers dis­trib­uted by the found­a­tion.” [20] Pro­fessor Ümit Sayın summed up the effect of BAV’s cam­paign when, in 2005, he said: In 1998, I was able to motiv­ate six mem­bers of the Turk­ish Academy of Sci­ences to speak out against the cre­ation­ist move­ment. Today, it’s impossible to motiv­ate any­one. They’re afraid they’ll be attacked by the rad­ical Islam­ists and the BAV.

In just seven years he’s gone from being pre­ven­ted from per­se­cut­ing people, to being able to shut down web­sites that host pages crit­ical of him, he’s mailed out thou­sands of cop­ies of a book of lies, and in his own coun­try people are too afraid of him to speak out in favour of evol­u­tion; how is it that hardly any­one in the west has heard of this man?

This has been all over prety much every sci­ence (or oth­er­wise) blog on the net today, but it’s just too funny not to repro­duce again:

To shock the Dar­win­ists out of their denial of the over­whelm­ing evid­ence in Greek art for the real­ity of Gen­esis events, the author urges Cre­ation­ists to refer to evol­u­tion­ists as what they ima­gine they are – “Slime-​​Snake-​​Monkey-​​People.” Mr. John­son, who holds a gen­eral sci­ence degree from West Point, also sug­gests that since Slime-​​Snake-​​Monkey-​​People insist they evolved over mil­lions of years through a count­less series of ran­dom muta­tions, Chris­ti­ans should also refer to them as “mutants.”

To me, this sounds like the sort of insult I was sub­jec­ted to as a seven year old, and as PZ points out, it’s not exactly accur­ate, either. Ah well; I guess if you can’t be right, you can at least enjoy sling­ing names around.

Phil has linked to an inter­est­ing new pro­ject. The Cre­ation Museum looks like a bit of a dump; I wouldn’t waste my time or money, but this place… well, it might be worth plan­ning a whole trip to the States.

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