Nevertheless, Jindal still has “a separation of church and state problem here,” reenforced Maddow. “… The governor has been sold to us as a fiscal conservative, a social moralist and an enemy of government waste. You know, none out of three ain’t all that bad, is it?”
We weren’t intending to make a big thing of it, but we should have known that as soon as we offered to link to pro-evolution bloggers, the links would start pouring in through the hatches. Here’s the most current list, just to give ‘em all big plugs for standing up for science in their own ways. (Note: you can always find pro-evolution bloggers—if not always conservatives—at ScienceBlogs too.)
Noblesse Oblige » Which Controversy? Discovery Institute vs Science
Daimnation!: Darwin’s next fight
The Atheist Conservative : If I saw an angel or if man was made of brass
Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin
Well That’s Just Dandy....: I Don’t Know Why This Is So Hard To Understand....
sisu: ‘Why can’t we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia?’
skepticlawyer » My Enemy’s Honour
Copious Dissent - Understanding Evolution Matters
Public Secrets: One more thing...
Rite Wing TechnoPagan: creationism
When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise.I haven't posted anything on the creationist Expelled movie, mostly because the whole thing bores me really. The movie presents no new arguments (no surprise); and that creationists can be a bunch of deceitful, amoral hypocrites is century-old, arguably millennia-old, news.
And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”All of the arguments made in Expelled are debunked here, should you want to take a look. I find it telling that my local theater only showed it for a week. Bring it home, Derbyshire...
Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!
After earning his divinity degree he founded a Southern Baptist church in South Dakota before pursuing a career in science and teaching.I've heard that before, in the ID/creationist field. And:
Unlike some other major climate data sets, the satellite data are constantly being refined and adjusted as new discoveries are made in the relatively new science of remote sensing. Notable adjustments were made to compensate for the effects of orbital drift and orbital decay, and most recently to correct an arithmetic error. Christy and Spencer use intercalibration between instruments on different satellites to adjust for instrument bias, then try to validate their data by comparing it to data gathered by weather balloons and surface stations.That's apples and oranges, and it doesn't fly in my book. Sorry, but the more I read about these guys and their work (more than I cared), the less I'm inclined to accept them as serious scientists. And I checked up on this Wikipedia claim, and it's valid (again, long reading on my part). Poor, poor, poor science. Granted, I just have a Master's degree in an unrelated field, but the problems are there for all to see.
Michael Behe, the biochemist who started the whole Intelligent Design thing with his book Darwin's Black Box, has a new book out. In it, he uses mathematical models to show how "Darwinism" can't produce certain biomolecular binding sites.
