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Wow. Just wow. You need to watch this to — ahem! — believe it. This guy, Steven Fielding, an Australian Parliamentarian, dodges, ducks, dips, dives and dodges so well he could be an American politician!
Did you notice anything about what he said? Like, how he never answered the actual question? I do have to wonder about his exact reasons for dodging Richard Dawkins’ questions about the age of the Earth. It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed by his own beliefs, knowing how old-fashioned, provincial, and downright wrong they must sound.
I am pleased to write that the creationist and generally anti-reality Don McLeroy has lost his bid for re-election to the Texas State Board of Education!
Yay!
The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also to actually – gasp again! — listen to educators when it comes to, y’know, educational topics. You may remember McLeroy is the goofball who infamously said, "Someone has to stand up to the experts!"
However, mitigating the good news somewhat are some things to consider:
1) McLeroy is still on the BoE for the next seven months before his term runs out. He can do a vast amount of damage to Texas schoolchildren’s education in that time.
2) Ratliff only won by a very narrow margin, meaning a whole lot of Texas citizens either didn’t know about McLeroy’s maniacal attempts at derailing the Lone Star State’s educational system, didn’t care, or actually supported him.
3) McLeroy and his crew of revisionist creationists have already done so much damage that it cannot be easily repaired. There is a cycle to the way standards and such are reviewed and updated in Texas, so it could be years before things are straightened out, if at all.
Still, this is good news, and so I won’t use the "Texas: Doomed" graphic. Instead, I’ll remind you not to rest:
Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Estes and the many others who emailed me about this. Originally posted on The Bad Astronomy Blog.
I’m excited to announce the release of my new book Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be (from Kids Can Press). Years in the making, this full-color, illustrated hardcover book based upon Junior Skeptic is available now!
(Also available from bricks & mortar booksellers throughout North America, and from Amazon.com)
The Project
Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be is a straight-ahead introduction to the fact of evolution, to its mechanisms, and to the misunderstandings that surround it. The book aims to explain how evolution works — and how we know for a fact that it happens. It is suitable for readers aged 8 – 13. Continue reading…
Every now and then I have to give a good creationist smack down. It’s like therapy for a skeptic, a catharsis or good colon cleansing (OK, maybe not the colon cleansing). Sure, they make the same fallacious arguments over and over again – but just like taking out the trash, you have to do it on a regular basis or the stink piles up. So here are a few house cleaning creationist rebuttals.
Transitional Fossils
This remains one of the most frustrating contentions (someone who is not charitable or afraid of being sued might say “lies”) of the creationists – that there are no transitional fossils. Meanwhile, there are countless beautiful transitional fossils telling a clear story of common descent. How can two sides have such a different opinion about what appears to be a factual claim – are there transitional fossils or not? Well, the fossils are there, and the scientific community is pretty solid on their interpretation. Creationists simply deny their existence as a naked assertion, or (the more industrious) trot out logical fallacies and their own personal ignorance of evolutionary theory in order to deny the transitional status of fossils.
Some readers may be familiar with the “Coso Artifact”, a 1920-era Champion spark plug found inside a chunk of rock. Young Earth Creationists have pointed to this as evidence against evolution. Skeptics, however, find no such proof in the artifact. When ferrous metals are buried in earth, they often rapidly form iron oxide concretions incorporating the surrounding sediment.
This is a chunk of pipe that my son found in Port Townsend, Washington last week. I presume it’s steel. Note how parts of it are completely eaten away, while other parts have ballooned to the point of filling the center of the pipe completely with just such a concretion. Continue reading…
For this week’s blog I’ll post two related video links, the first for an Australian television series called Compass, which interviewed me while I was in Sydney last summer, on “The Atheists.”
I think it is a well done show, fair and balanced, so to speak, but I do find the premise rather interesting in as much as they purport to be studying “us” like we’re some mysterious species recently discovered on a remote island. From the voice over: “What do they believe? And are they all the same?” Picture David Attenborough hanging from a cliff face, “and here, if you look closely, you’ll see amongst the vast forest of believers the rare spotted atheist, whose diet remains a mystery but whose mating habits produce far fewer offspring than believers, and so they nest precariously on face cliffs such as this one so as not to be devoured by their carnivorous neighbors…”
Here’s the show summary:
Compass talks to atheists of different stripes.Eminent philosopher John Gray; science writer and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer; historian and writer Inga Clendinnen and Australia’s best known atheist Phillip Adams, all explore the philosophical and practical consequences of being an atheist.
How does their atheism shape their attitudes to science and the big questions of our time such as war and global warming? Is conflict between atheists and believers inevitable and necessary? Or, is this debate generating more heat than light?
Last night, April 28, 2009, I debated Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana from Reasons to Believe (RTB), an evangelical Christian organization whose mission it is to give people “reasons to believe” beyond the usual faith-based reasons. In this case, it is to scour the annals of scientific discovery in search of findings that seem to gel well with biblical passages; and even if they don’t seem to fit, these gentlemen are adroit at massaging both the research and the scriptures such that in the end they will fit come hell or high water.
I blogged about my previous debate with the RTB boys before, so I won’t repeat their arguments and my rebuttals here, but this was most definitely a larger venue and audience — the basketball arena at the University of Texas at Austin with over 3,000 in attendance — so I made sure that my presentation was especially poignant and lively (first and foremost, I believe, a public speaker must be interesting, have something to say, and say it in a manner that gets people to pay attention and remember). For example, I nailed Ross right off the bat on his claim that the RTB “day-age” model of creation is correct when he said that the use of the Hebrew word “yom” in Genesis means “epoch” (and therefore no matter what scientists discover about the age of the origins of life, the Earth, and the universe, they can say “see, our model predicted that correctly”). Continue reading…
On April 2, 2009 I was the keynote speaker for the University of California at San Diego Biological Science Symposium, giving my talk on “Why Darwin Matters” based on my book of that title. Earlier that day I awarded the winners of the “Why Darwin Matters” contest, in which students submitted entries on different ways to express their answer to the implied question in my book title. The winning entry was a fun rap song entitled Holla Atcha Boy Charlie Darwin, by “Missing Link Mel” and “HMS Beagle-licious Brian,” which you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHJVBbOii9M
Unbeknownst to me, in attendance (among the 900+ students and teachers) was famed “expelled” creationist Caroline Crocker, featured in the Ben Stein film Expelled as having been, well, expelled for simply mentioning Intelligent Design in her college course on cell biology at George Mason University. (You can read about what really happened to Crocker here: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-04-23.html). I would like to comment on her review of my talk, which you can read in full here:
Crocker says she was “disappointed” in my talk primarily because I discussed religion and especially because I used humor. In my experience, I find that humorlessness is a trait endemic to quacks and pseudoscientists, who take themselves and their unproven ideas far too seriously. Continue reading…
I visited the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, run by Answers in Genesis, the young-earth creationist organization run by Ken Ham, an Old Testament looking figure if ever there was one. I will be writing more about my experience in my monthly column in Scientific American (May 2009), but the highlight (also discussed in the column) was my interview with Dr. Georgia Purdom, the museum’s “research scientist” who explained what type of research one can do at a young-earth creationist organization, and why she thinks Francis Collins is wrong in his evolutionary understanding of the human genome.
A listened wrote recently to inform me that 980 KKMS, a Minneapolis-St. Paul based Christian radio station, brought on Dr. Jonathan Wells from the Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading proponent of Biblical Young Earth fundamentalism. They played several segments of my 2007 Skeptoid podcast How to Argue with a Creationist for Dr. Wells, and had him respond to it point by point. The web page is here and the free MP3 file is here. Continue reading…
A listened wrote recently to inform me that 980 KKMS, a Minneapolis-St. Paul based Christian radio station, brought on Dr. Jonathan Wells from the Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading proponent of Biblical Young Earth fundamentalism. They played several segments of my 2007 Skeptoid podcast