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.

If you haven’t heard - and really, if you are learning of this here, you really should read some other blogs - the makers of Expelled, a propaganda movie claiming that science professors kick intelligent design creationists out of classes, lectures, and discussions of evolution in order to censor debate, have kicked a science professor out of a screening of their movie in oder to censor debate.

Repeat after me: HYPOCRITES!

What’s truly baffling about this is that they kicked out PZ Myers, but they let his guest in. His guest? Richard Dawkins. You know, the virulently anti-intelligent design guy who even wrote a book called The God Delusion. Nobody could write fiction this good.

Repeat after me: DUMBASSES!

The movie also apparently claims that frail bespectacled science professors sitting in their offices and writing letters to one another were responsible for the murder of six million Jews in Nazi Germany.

Repeat after me: Deplorably disrespectful of the millions of people alive today who lost family as a result of a genocidal Christian dictator and his devout henchmen. These intelligent design creationists are just uncivilized for suggesting such a thing.

Greg Laden, from whom I’ve lifted the images, has a running mini-carnival of posts about this. If you haven’t heard the story, it should be enough to convince you that (a) intelligent design creationists are radical religious extremists, and (b) religious extremism is inherently silly, at least when it isn’t deadly.

Intelligent Design Creationists have said for some time that bats pose a problem for evolutionary theory.

Things are even tougher for the evolutionist with the knowledge that the ‘oldest known’ complete fossils of bats … show indications of a fully-developed echolocation system.

Evolutionary theory predicts that in such cases, transitional forms did exist, and are possibly waiting to be discovered in the fossil record. And today, Carl Zimmer reports on his blog about a newly discovered bat fossil.

The ear bones in its head don’t have the distinctive shape found in living bats that echolocate, suggesting that it had to rely on sight and sound to catch prey–insects, judging from its teeth. Flight evolved first in bats … and echolocation only came later.

Oh. That must really suck to be an intelligent design creationist who thinks that bats popped out of nowhere with echolocation fully developed, then.

It turns out this bat fossil is the most primitive bat ever found, and it has several other transitional attributes:

1. Evolutionary theory predicts that early bats would have body proportions similar to that of the walking mammals from which bats evolved. This fossil has shorter arms, and longer legs, than modern bats. Prediction fulfilled!
2. Almost all modern bats have only a single claw. Evolutionary theory predicts that early bats should have a full compliment of claws, and that bats who lived in between these times should show a gradual loss of claws. Many bat fossils are single-clawed with vestigial claws on other fingers, thus fulfilling the prediction as far as was able. But this bat completes things - it has claws on all five fingers, just like evolution predicts.
3. Evolutionary theory predicts that as a lineage evolves flight, early fliers will be less strong, less powerful flyers than later ones. Some evolutionary biologists have also hypothesized that powered flight most likely evolved from early gliding. Most modern bats fly with a full-time power stroke, flapping their wings continually during flight. But this fossil’s wings suggest that it alternated between flapping and gliding. Prediction fulfilled!

This is just a summary - go read Carl’s story. It’s outstanding, and it has pictures.

The BCS does a lot of public speaking about science. It’s mostly astronomy, and some physics, but I emphasize the scientific method and how we know what we know, and that opens up the dialog with the audience to just about any scientific subject. Because so many whackjobs hate science in general, and evolution in particular, a lot of the give-and-take involves evolution.

Over the last six months or so, the under-20 crowd seems to be parroting the meme that Hitler practiced Darwinism, therefore Darwinism is bad. (Nevermind that a lot of evolutionary theory these days is non-Darwinian.) I’m guessing that there is some creationist propaganda mill that is priming these foot soldiers with the talking points, because everyone who brings the topic up says pretty much the same thing.

I’m working up a mini-program in response to these kinds of claims, and collecting pertinent quotations of Hitler’s to show the sources of his ideas. Via Bay of Fundy, here’s the latest addition to my collection:

At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

That’s from Hitler’s Zweites Buch, which wasn’t published until 1961. What this quotation helps establish is twofold - first, that eugenics was practiced long before Darwin’s time, and second, that a significant source of Hitler’s ideas on the subject derive from ancient Greece.

More as the program takes shape….