Now I know what they mean by "Not even wrong"

Warning. Watching these videos might induce intellectual comatose.




I've listened to lots of anti-evolution propaganda, but this junk makes William Lane Craig and Kent Hovind look like Nobel laureates.

Either they are deliriously incompetent, or unapologetically dishonest. They repeat that there are absolutely no transitional fossils over and over again. And say with authority that modern scientific evidence continues to disprove the theory of evolution. Believers in the theory do so because they want to live their nihilistic lifestyles without the guilt of god holding them back.

My favourite quote comes 8:40 into episode 5, "It's really not about convincing your intellect. It's about setting aside your pride and listening to your conscience."

Yes, truth is about trusting your gut. Gosh, the earth sure seems like it's the centre of the universe because I'm staying still and the heavenly bodies are all moving around me. It's obvious to me so it must be true. I won't worry my silly little intellect over all that data of planetary orbits around the sun. I'll just follow my conscience, because it knows best.

Science is hard. No one ever said that the laws of the universe have to be easy for you to understand. No scientist ever claimed that comprehending the theory of evolution was as natural as breathing. It takes effort to understand this stuff BECAUSE much of it falls outside of our common-sense experiences.

Here's another ripe quote from the videos.

The truth is the Bible is full of scientific facts. And the so-called science of evolution is the one that over time has proven itself to be the one that simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Redundant grammar aside, nothing could be further from the truth. People do not find predictions in the Bible, they find postdictions. That is, quotes that can be interpreted to be consistent with something already known. Example, Esaiah 40:22 mentions the "circle of the earth", and some take that to mean that the earth is spherical. However, a circle is not a sphere. The quote is also consistent with a flat pancake earth. Any similarity the Bible has to science is strictly coincidental, or a result of post-hoc rationalization and quote mining. (BTW - Muslims make the same claim about the Quran... see the comments).

On the contrary, I really like Steven Novella's recent quote,

In fact the entire history of human knowledge (factual knowledge about how nature works) is one of cultural beliefs (largely superstition or philosophy-based or simply quirky cultural history) being systematically replaced by science-based ideas. When we started to take a rigorous systematic look at nature with methods that control for bias we found that almost everything we believed about the world was wrong.

Finally, the videos do a pretty horrendous job of taking quotes from real scientists out of context. Well, here's a quote I got from the videos, "Evolution... is... true."

Evolution and Beer, two of my favourite things

Now there's a beer for all you Darwinists,

The circular seal on the left says, "Created in 27 days, not 7". Here's what it says on the back label,

I bought it at a ski resort in Utah, near Salt Lake City.

Looking under the hood of intelligent design

Here is my next post on Skeptic North.

My wife knows me well

She knows me well enough to take a picture of this bumper-sticker for me.

I appreciate it when people advertise their scientific ignorance.  I try to keep my distance from drivers that believe a magical man is looking out for them.

Battle of the lists

The Dissent From Darwinism list is an attempt by the Discovery Institute to convince people that there is a real scientific controversy about whether or not evolution occurred. It's a list of scientists that "are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life." As of today, it has about 850 signatories.

Contrast that to Project Steve, the NCSE's answer to the Dissent from Darwinism list. It is a list of scientists who fully support the theory of evolution. But you can only sign it if your name is "Steve", "Stephen", "Stephanie", or some derivative thereof. As of Feb. 11, 2010, they have 1134 signatories.

Science should not be decided by popular vote. But this case goes to show how insignificant the controversy really is.

Flimflam inoculation 6: Conspiracy theories

9-11 truthers. UFO afficionados. Holocaust deniers. Anti-vaccinationists. And the poor, poor repressed intelligent design proponents. What do they all have in common?

Belief in a conspiracy.

Why are conspiracy theories so popular? For the answer, let's think about evidence. If you want to convince someone that your claim is true, you offer evidence. Evidence can take the form of experimental results, casual observations, logical deductions from agreed-upon facts, or any combination thereof. For example,

Claim: Air has mass.

Evidence: Blow on paper, and the paper moves because of the transfer of momentum. Air is attracted to earth by gravity. Air is made up of various molecules that, themselves, have mass.

Seems simple enough. What could possibly take that scientific process off the rails? Well, a problem arises when someone makes claims that are impossible to prove false, called "unfalsifiable" claims. For example, consider the claim that "the two towers of the World Trade Center collapsed as a result of a secret government anti-terrorism propaganda campaign". With regard to evidence, there are 3 possibilities.

Case 1: Evidence in support of claim

(ie. fire from planes was not hot enough to melt beams)

This is the kind of evidence that could actually be useful, and warrant further investigation. However, a handful of strong evidence is better than an ocean of weak evidence. In the context of conspiracy theories, this often takes the form of "anomaly hunting", looking for anything that seems at all inconsistent with the mundane explanation.

Case 2: Evidence contradicting the claim
(ie. beams are weakened by high temperatures, even if they don't melt)

This is the kind of evidence that SHOULD put the claim to rest. But this is where conspiracy theories go off the deep end... by stating that the evidence was made up by those involved in the conspiracy. This approach is unfalsifiable because it allows the conspiracy theorist to dismiss any evidence that contradicts their theory. The only way around this is to generate evidence yourself. However, that will only work for YOU; telling others will result in you being denounced as a co-conspirator.

Case 3: No evidence in support of the claim

This is where conspiracy theories really REALLY go off the deep end... by claiming that the absence of evidence is due to a big cover-up. Think of how many times you've heard "Government cover-up", "classified", and "they don't want you to know". This explanation for lack of evidence is also unfalsifiable, since the absence of evidence is, by definition, evidence for it.

That's not to say that conspiracies can't happen. They can. The problem is that people get carried away with them because (1) they are unfalsifiable, and (2) they can be used to promote any agenda. And who doesn't like a juicy story now and again?

[From intelligent-falling.blogspot.com]

Flimflam inoculation 3: Argument from ignorance

From the pamphlet entitled "Creation or Evolution" published by the United Church of God,

These discoveries reveal that the simplest living cell is so intricate and complex in its design that even the possibility of this coming into existence accidentally is unthinkable.

Unthinkable? Maybe to you.

What the author is saying is that if they can't figure it out, then no one can. That's a pretty bold statement, don't you think? Are they the world expert on everything? Nope.

The fact that you don't understand something does not give you permission to conclude that it is false. This irrational flatulence is common, and often called "argument from ignorance".

[From intelligent-falling.blogspot.com]

Good News

"Good News" is the title of the free magazine subscription I'm receiving from the United Church of God. The good news is that every couple months I'll receive a magazine with lots of anti-scientific propaganda for me to debunk. For example, the one I got yesterday is subtitled "Creation or Evolution: Which Is More Believable?" That depends, of course, on how you view the world.

Here are some juicy nuggets from the latest installment.

In an article entitled "The Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Debate" (an interview with Dr. Jonathan Wells, one of the senior "scientists" at the creationist propaganda machine The Discovery Institute), Dr. Wells claims that "no one has ever observed the origin of a new species... by variation and selection". That's a bit like saying that no one ever observed continents crashing into each other because of plate tectonics. It tends to happen too slowly for a single person to notice.

Another article, "How Darwin's Theory Changed the World", tries to paint the picture that the theory of evolution has eroded society into anarchy and unbridled self-indulgence. On the topic of sex... "In the minds of many, sex is solely for pleasure, and children are an inconvenience." Actually, the theory of evolution is the first and only natural explanation for sex. Saying that we have sex because God told us to is like saying that we have speed limits because the government imposed them. There is a deeper purpose behind speed limits, and there is a deeper reality behind the phenomenon of sex. But religion won't find it. Science and the theory of evolution are needed to fully understand it.

One more... in the same article they state "Anything and everything can be justified once you take God out of the picture." Sorry, but you've got it backwards. First of all, "anything and everything" HAS been happening since the dawn of time, so clearly God wasn't able to stop it. Furthermore, science is not in the business of offering justification for things. Science is a way to learn about how the world works, and cannot be used to make right-versus-wrong judgements. That's more of religion's territory. For example, the Bible contains a number of references to genocide. And what do we make of religions that contradict each other? They might justify YOUR extermination. Doncha kinda wish we were all on the same page in the book of reality?

[From intelligent-falling.blogspot.com]

Q2C - Day 4

I took my mom to a talk entitled "Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species", by Sean B. Carroll. He's an evo-devo expert (evolutionary developmental biology) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He's also a good speaker.

(The talk was filmed, but is not yet available online. I'll update this post when it appears.)

Prof. Carroll talked about some of the details leading up to the discovery of the theory of evolution, outlining the contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and - of course - Charles Darwin. In particular, Darwin seems to have known about the theory in the 1830s, but took his time publishing because he thought the theory would be repugnant to his colleagues and family. However, Wallace independently discovered the theory, and started to publish it. That pushed Darwin to finally publish his own version in 1859, in a book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. After that, Bates chimed in with an exquisite example of natural selection: mimicry.

Do NOT be confused by the new edition of On the Origin of Species. The ludicrous creationist Ray Comfort is remarketing the book, but with his own warped introduction.

---

The video is online now. My mom and I appear about 18 minutes into the video.

Unintentionally ironic

Though it makes me gag, I sometimes listen to the podcast "Intelligent Design The Future". Grammar hiccups aside, this podcast is simply a propaganda tool of the Discovery Institute. Their function... to help those who can't consolidate their religion with the theory of evolution, supplying fodder to suspend their disbelief long enough to die a believer. They combine muddy thinking with interviews of "scientists", philosophers, medical doctors -- anyone with perceived authority -- and agree that the theory of evolution is flawed, so the universe must be designed by God.

On the episode of Sept. 25, 2009, Bruce Chapman interviews "skeptic" David Berlinski. They proceed to pat each other on the back, congratulating themselves for being on the winning team. Then they whine about how creationists ID proponents are being bullied by the Darwinists. Berlinski likens it to the crumble of the geocentric worldview. The dominant worldview used to be that the earth was the centre of the universe, geocentrism. But people like Kepler and Gallileo proposed that the sun was the centre of our solar system, a view called heliocentrism. These poor scientists were victimized for their dissenting opinions. In Berlinski's analogy,

geocentrism	=	dominant evil bully	=	theory of evolution
heliocentrism	=	marginalized noble truth	=	intelligent design

His analogy is based on good versus evil. The evil geocentrists eventually lost the fight to the noble heliocentrists because the evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea that planets revolve around the sun. Thus, Berlinski's analogy concludes that evolution is evil, and ID is good.

But let me frame the analogy in a different way, based historical beliefs versus evidence. At the time, geocentrism was the historical view, but it gave way to heliocentrism because of the evidence. Intelligent design (a.k.a. creationism) was the historical view, but it gave way to the theory of evolution because of the evidence. In my analogy,

geocentrism	=	outdated historical view	=	intelligent design (creationism)
heliocentrism	=	view supported by evidence	=	evolution

The irony... Berlinksi's use of the analogy actually does shed some light on what's going on. In the podcast, he reminds us that Gallileo was persecuted by the CHURCH for his dissenting opinions. The take-home message: religion will do whatever it can to stifle dissension, even if it means denying evidence.

It's clearly designed... or not

Proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) claim that we can infer design. That is, they split the world into two categories of objects: those that were designed by something intelligent, and those that were not. And they claim that we can tell the difference.

Well, was this designed or not? ...



It's the famous neanderthal bone flute. Some say that a neanderthal created it purposefully for making music (intelligent cause). Others say that the holes were made by the teeth of a hungry animal (non-intelligent cause).

If it's as easy and clear-cut as IDers claim, then why is there so much controversy?