Blue Collar Scientist

A few weeks ago, when the news that creationist whackjobs were giving tours at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I thought I might post a little article here excogitating on how two-faced creationists are, and about how the people doing the tours are nothing more than dishonest cult-enforcers, and about how, despite this, the museum pretty much has its hands tied.

I didn’t, because I didn’t think I really had anything to add that hadn’t already been said (you’ll notice that my m.o. on this blog is to cover a newsy topic a day or two late, but with a surplus of dollars - i.e., with more research than the average blog is putting into it). So I gave it a pass.

However, I’ve now found the best blog entry every written about the topic, bar none. The post is by a DMNS volunteer who has dealt with these whackjobs in person.

(Oh, also, the author is fifteen years old. The main thing about blogging that I learn from this is that I’m doing it wrong.)

Cripes, stop reading my stuff, and get over there and read it, already.

Seriously.

Read it all.

The Institute for Creation Research has released an enemies list, apparently as a tribute to the deep paranoia of Nixonian politics they engage in. It contains some interesting tidbits. It is mostly the usual collection of misleading quote-mining lying by misquoting others, but a few points had me laughing.

For example, about Dawkins - their Enemy Number One - they say:

It is no wonder that Dawkins has elsewhere concluded that “life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” If this is what evolution offers, can there be any other result but despair?

Any other result but despair? Let us read from the Bible. Please open the good book to Ecclesiastes 11:8, and read along with me:

Indeed, if a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything that is to come will be futility.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but it seems pretty clear to me who is purveying despair, and it isn’t Richard Dawkins.

Under Eugenie Scott’s entry, they trot out the tired old lie that creationists have been retreading since the 1860’s:

[T]here has been no observable scientific evidence for macroevolution.

Of course there have been; at one web page alone, you can learn about no less than 29 observed instances of evolutionary speciation, complete with citations to the scientific literature. One wonders, if they are right in their claim that evolution is false, why they have to lie about the scientific findings on evolution all the time….

But that’s not really my point here. I want to return to the bible again. Please attend to Genesis 1:11:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit….

Sadly, the ICR doesn’t respect its own sources. If you read that, you surely noted that the bible does not say that god created plants. The text clearly states that plants were to be brought forth by the Earth. This is a clear example of biogenesis, the transition of inorganic material to advanced organic life.

And let us also look at 1 Corinthians 15:45:

So also it is written, “The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.

A strong endorsement of the naturalistic world view that science, and evolutionary theory, represents. Naturalism comes first; without it, the bible says you can’t have spiritualism.

They move on to PZ Myers, and lead with their chin ignorance:

Although many other evolutionists are active “evangelists” in the world today, P. Z. Myers deserves a mention because of his prolific presence in cyberspace, mainly through blogs on his website Pharyngula.

I was under the impression that Myers’ blog, Pharyngula, is at Scienceblogs. Shows you what I know.

They don’t really say anything in the Myers section about their beliefs, so there’s no way to consult the final authority (the Bible) on the truth of their claims. So, disappointed, I will simply have to bring this posting to a close.

Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Second Congressional District, spoke to a Nazi party celebrating Hitler’s 119th birthday. For video, go here.

Zirkle claims to be a devoted Christian. That’s his excuse for speaking at a Nazi event:

This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

Zirkle is, as is consistent with his “faith,” a supporter of intelligent design creationism. He thinks that people who home school their children so as to avoid good science education should be refunded a third of their property taxes:

Two of the issue that have been flaming the controversies over public education are the evolution/creation debate and indoctrinating kindergarteners that homosexual domestic partners constitute merely one more acceptable, alternative lifestyle. Our public schools should not be exploiting our elementary school children to become pawns in these highly emotional, divisive debates.

Under the 1st and 14th Amendments, Congress has authority under the due process clause to ensure that states are not depriving citizens of their religious free exercise. Therefore, in any district where public schools take either position on these two issues and force their opinions on public school children, I will propose legislation that will entitle parent(s) to a refund of the approximately 1/3 of their property taxes (or percentage of rent that derives from property taxes) that go the public schools so that the parent(s) can either home school or send their children to a private school.

Now, I’ve not heard of even a single biologist who supports the Nazi cause. But here’s an ID creationist, and such a respectable one¹ that he’s a congressional candidate, who is speaking right there in front of a picture of Hitler and next to a Nazi flag.

What does that say about Expelled’s message that biologists are Nazis?

Orac has a more complete takedown.

1. I use the term loosely. [↩]

Mark Mathis is one of the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. He was recently interviewed by Jay Davis of Real Detroit Weekly, and if there was really any doubt about it, this establishes pretty well that Mathis is stupid beyond belief.

I confront Mathis with this point [that intelligent design creationism is untestable], and he counters that evolutionary theory is also untestable. This is patently untrue — to give just one example, scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new species from an old one.

When I point this out, he interrupts me immediately: “Whoa! Wait a minute! Please send me whatever material you have that demonstrates that we can observe speciation because I have not seen anything. I’ve never heard anyone even claim that!”

Is he serious? He’s just produced a film about evolution, and he’s never heard of the fact that speciation has been observed and thoroughly documented in the scientific literature? I’m stunned. I send him peer-reviewed research confirming this fact via e-mail, and he later responds, “This isn’t an important argument for me.”

The interview goes on, with Mathis lying some more about evolution:

“You can’t apply falsifiability to Darwinian evolution. How is it falsifiable?”

I respond by quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”

And it goes on:

Mathis pauses before saying, “If you want to get into the science…” He then trails off and mutters something irrelevant before finally confessing, “Look. You can get into the intricacies of the science on both sides. And I am not qualified.” On that point, we can both agree.

The interview then moves on to the subject of the famous night when Mathis summoned armed security guards to prevent PZ Myers from seeing the film (while not recognizing his companion, Richard Dawkins, and hence letting him in):

No producer who releases a film called Expelled would actually expel an individual who appears in his film from seeing that film. Right?

Mathis laughs before offering two reasons why he told the security guard at the screening not to let Myers in. First, Mathis says, “He has viciously attacked me personally and attacked the film.” Just to clarify, Myers did not break into Mr. Mathis’ house in a drunken rage with a bowie knife—he has simply been critical of Mathis’ arguments.

The second reason? Mathis assumed that the incident would engender “some additional attention” for the film. I’m not joking. He actually called that a reason.

“He was not invited to the screening,” Mathis says. “I don’t have time to read P.Z. Myers’ oral diarrhea.”

“But the screening wasn’t done by invite, was it?” I ask.

“It’s still our screening. I’m still the producer on site. And I still have the ability to say, ‘I didn’t invite you. And you’re not coming.’” Mathis repeats, “I denied him entrance to a film that he was not invited to.”

“But just to clarify, others who weren’t invited were allowed in, right?”

“Done by discretion! Done by discretion!” In case you’re wondering, this means yes. It seems safe to say that discretion is something that Mark Mathis lacks entirely. I let him scream for one more minute.

“We have the option of ex… uh, of kicking, uh, of not allowing P.Z. Myers to come to the film he wasn’t invited to. Okay? Who cares?!”

Ok, that last quote? That’s not even intelligible speech.

I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s exactly what we’re accustomed to getting from creationists.

Hat tip to Joe. Just Joe, again, who apparently reads Pharyngula more often than I do.

Over at The Loom, science writer extraordinaire Carl Zimmer writes about some recent experiments on E. coli:

Scientists randomly rewired the network of genes that control much of the microbe’s activity and found that it generally just kept humming along.

Wow. And here I always thought that the genome was sensitive to changes, and that wholesale re-arrangement would seriously mess things up for an organism.

Turns out that was a little corner of my thinking that had been contaminated by silly creationist claims:

This conclusion also flies in the face of the popular misconception among opponents of the evolutionary theory, who believe that the genetic code is irreducibly complex…. Engineered devices are generally designed to work just above the point of failure, so that any tampering with their construction will result in catastrophe…. But nature does not have that option. To survive … organisms must be able to tolerate random mutations, deletions and recombination events.

In other words, here we have yet another prediction of intelligent design creationism which has been blown apart by scientific experiment.

I encourage reading the whole thing - very instructive.

Back at the end of last month, I posted briefly on victims of creationist persecution, suggesting that I might work on finding sources and additional details for some of the cases I posted about.

Well, I never did, because I’m lazy, and because I’m approaching the deadline of a major software development and deployment project, accompanied by a trip to astronomical observatories, at the end of April - there has simply been no time. However, prominent Boston-area skeptic Blake Stacey took up the task, and has done yeoman work completing it.

So please head on over to Science after Sunclipse for the full story of ten people who have been harassed, threatened, assaulted fired, or killed by creationists who were upset that they were teaching or promoting evolutionary theory.

Then head over to Bug Girl’s blog for some additional cases of creationists threatening scientists with violence, and this post on the Kanawha Texboook incident, in which Christians led by a local reverend burned down elementary schools, planted bombs in school busses, and shot at people because they were upset over a recommended reading list for schoolchildren.

And as you do this, think about this for a moment: It is the creationists who shrilly insist that only through their god can anyone have any morality. Yet they are the ones burning elementary schools down, killing their enemies, getting them fired from their jobs, and threatening them with violence when they don’t get their way. This is wrong. If you are reading this, you are learning about the wrong-ness of all this behavior from a scientist; it isn’t coming out of the bible and I don’t claim any particular religious inspiration for this realization. What we have here, folks, is the moral and ethical result of my simple, straightforward, evolved sense of altruism: it is wrong to resort to violence against people you simply disagree with.

And also consider that the creationists - the same ones who resort to harassment, threats, and violence - have made allegations that scientists are the ones making the threats and getting people fired. But of course, that isn’t true - and it makes perfect sense: why would we be surprised that the kind of people who would set fire to an elementary school when they don’t get their way would shrink from lying?

My pal over at Dinosaurs and the Bible: A Creationist’s Fairy Tale is hosting an Expelled carnival, including posts from around the blogosphere offering tons of reading about this Nazi propaganda movie¹. It is up as of a few minutes ago - go check out To Hell with Expelled!

And thanks for getting my submissions in even though I sent them in way late!

1. Er, wait - did that come out right? Hmm. Not sure I care. [↩]

I’ve said a number of times here that Christian creationists, whether ID or otherwise, who deny science are religious extremists. At various times, I’ve pointed out Ken Miller, the Clergy Letter Project (which has 11,000 religious leaders affirming evolution), and other examples to support my claim that creationists are minority radicals.

(Of course one reason that I promote this meme over and over is to marginalize creationists and assist any split that may develop between them and more mainstream religionists. But don’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want to be accused of doing framing wrong, or anything.)

Today there’s another example of how radical creationism is a fringe view. Reasons To Believe is an non-denominational Christian think tank, and they take Christian apologetics pretty seriously. They are also among the more thoughtful such groups. Some time back, they posted some tentative comments on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which opens today:

Many people have asked Reasons to Believe (RTB) to make a statement about the movie. For the sake of integrity, we cannot offer an assessment until our scholar team has had a chance to view the movie.

RTB views the scientific enterprise as a vital component of carrying out one of God’s first recorded commands to Adam and Eve. Without the understanding derived from scientific investigation, it would be impossible to take care of this home God provided for us.

I’m quoting selectively. They have some questionable material up there, but on the whole these are reasonable people that you could talk to. They understand their own shortcomings, and they understand the value of science.

Now some of the Reasons To Believe leaders have seen the movie, and sources say they have released this statement:

After previewing the promotional materials provided by the movie’s marketers, we were concerned that the movie took an adversarial approach to the scientific community. A number of RTB scholars and staff attended a prerelease screening in Los Angeles recently and confirmed that EXPELLED definitely does take such an approach…. EXPELLED implicitly argues that the scientific community deems certain questions off-limits, particularly any question about the legitimacy of neo-Darwinian evolution. The movie further argues that academia, the media, and the courts all conspire as “thought police” to oppress any and all dissent from the party line.

Clearly some oppression and discrimination have occurred, but the experience of RTB scholars and many of their contacts refutes the movie’s premise that the scientific community systemically and unilaterally fosters these injustices.

They end with a policy decision:

Therefore, we ask all chapter members and volunteers to refrain from endorsing EXPELLED in any official way.

Reaction to this has been favorable:

Kudos to them. This is outstanding.

And again:

indeed. this is an excellent response!

is this on the web anywhere? I would like to direct others to read this.

And yet again:

Yes. It is posted prominently on the front page of the RTB site at www.reasons.org.

I am very proud of them for this response.

I could go on - the favorable reaction to Reasons To Believe’s stance against the movie continues.

The point of all this? Expelled isn’t even appealing to all of its expected core audience. Expelled is so extremist that it has split their demographic.

Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.

And they want us to think it is evolutionary biologists that persecute religious extremists….

Chris Comer’s story is not new, of course, but this video is part of the newly-unveiled website on Expelled, sponsored by the NCSE.