… 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.

<p>While we’re on the subject of denialists and cranks, this piece of <a href=”http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html”>paleo-crank-ology</a> 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?</p>

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.