It's all in the wrist

As the science has become more sophisticated, the creationists have had to resort to their own sort of sophistication to fight it.  Witness (if you don't mind doing repeated headdesks) Answers in Genesis's recent "paper," "On the Origin of Human Mitochondrial DNA Differences, New Generation Time Data Both Suggest a Unified Young-Earth Creation Model and Challenge the Evolutionary Out-of-Africa Model."  (If you would understandably prefer not to risk valuable brain cells, and also give AIG further hits on their hit tracker, the gist is that if you pick and choose, you can use mtDNA data to show that some human haplogroups can be traced back to a common ancestor about 6,000 years ago.  Therefore Adam and Eve, apparently.  How they explain the fact that you can use the precisely same method to show that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor between 6 and 7 million years ago, I have no idea.)

Likewise, as the evolutionists have become better at using media to give access to their information, the creationists have done the same.  So it's not surprising that the young-earth crowd has taken to splashy publicity blitzes to spread their message, like Ray "Mr. Banana" Comfort's dubious strategy of giving out his new book Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before America Will Have an Atheist President along with Subway gift cards at Reason Rally 2016, costing him $25,000.

Myself, I have no problem with this.  Can you imagine what will happen when Comfort and his crew hand out his book and the gift cards at an event where 99% of the attendees are secular rationalists?  My guess is that they'll accept, chuck the book, and go get a nice foot-long sub with the works at Ray's expense.

Equally sketchy is an order by an evangelical group for over a hundred thousand silicone wristbands that say "DEBUNK EVOLUTION" in large unfriendly letters.  The owner of Rapid Wristbands, Fiyyaz Pirani, couldn't refuse; for one thing, it was a hefty order and represented a lot of money to his company.  For another, he didn't want to do the same thing that the Christian cake bakers did, which is to refuse to serve someone on ideological grounds.

So what did he do?

He accepted the order, and when the fundamentalist ministry who ordered the wristbands paid up, he donated the whole shebang (an amount of over $4,000) to the National Center for Science Education.

"I’m thrilled to donate to a cause I really believe in," Pirani said.  "NCSE has labored for years to keep creationism out of the public schools, and I’m pleased that my company’s donation will help it continue its valuable work."

So I only have one thing to say to the ministry that ordered the wristbands:

As marketing strategy backfires go, this ranks right up there with Mitsubishi's decision to name their car model the "Pajero," neglecting the fact that "Pajero" means "wanker" in Spanish.

As far as NCSE goes, they (of course) happily accepted the donation, and were far more mature than I would have been had I been their spokesperson.  Explaining, probably, why I will never be their spokesperson.  "We admire RapidWristband.com’s way of responding to unwelcome orders," said Ann Reid, NCSE’s executive director.  "It’s more ethical than refusing to fulfill them—and more constructive."

Not to mention about a thousand times more hilarious.

So that's our news for today from the folks who (in Sam Harris's trenchant words) believe that the Earth was created a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.  Myself, I love it when things work out this way.  Poetic justice is always a better option than getting combative.  Not only is it more effective, it stings a hell of a lot worse.

Science vs. indoctrination

Indoctrinate (v.) -- to teach someone to accept fully the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group, in an uncritical fashion; to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle.

Objective (adj.) -- based on facts rather than on feelings or opinions.

There.  I thought I'd get a couple of definitions out of the way right at the outset.  It's not that I think my readers are in any particular need of refreshing their memories on the meanings; it's more that I want to be completely clear about how asinine Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin is being.

My reason for saying this is that, yet again, we are seeing an attack on the teaching of evolution in science classrooms, this time by a lawmaker who not only has no apparent understanding of science, but could use a refresher on how to use the Concise Oxford.  He has introduced a bill into the Missouri House of Representatives that would mandate that schools notify parents if evolution is being taught in biology classrooms -- and allow parents to take their children out of those classes while the topic is being covered, with no grade penalty or loss of credit.

"Our schools basically mandate that we teach one side," Brattin said, in an interview with Kansas City's KCTV News.  "It is an indoctrination because it is not an objective approach.  It’s an absolute infringement on people’s beliefs.  What’s being taught is just as much faith and, you know, just as much pulled out of the air as, say, any religion."

Okay, let me get this straight, Rep. Brattin.  We have, on the one hand, teachers using a curriculum that is based on the work of countless scientists, is supported by every scrap of hard evidence that there is, and has the support of damn near 100% of working biologists.  On the other hand, we have the creation myth of a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders, who also thought that bats were birds (Leviticus 11:19) and that god created day and night before he created the sun (Genesis 1:5-14), and teaches a worldview that is only still around because it's hammered into children's heads incessantly along with the message that questioning the logic of the whole thing is equivalent to listening to Satan.

And the biologists are the ones who are guilty of indoctrination, and of not being objective?

Predictably, scientists are outraged at Brattin's bill.  Glenn Branch, of the National Center for Science Education, said, "The bill would eviscerate the teaching of biology in Missouri.  Evolution inextricably pervades the biological sciences; it therefore pervades, or at any rate ought to pervade, biology education at the K–12 level.  There simply is no alternative to learning about it; there is no substitute activity."

No.  No, there isn't.  Evolution is the founding principle of biology, the idea by which (along with genetics) all of the rest of the science is understood.  Just as chemistry is not comprehensible without atomic theory, and physics is not comprehensible without the concept of forces and energy, biology becomes a meaningless jumble of vocabulary and terminology without the unifying model of evolution through natural selection.  Allowing students to "opt out" of learning about evolution is denying them the opportunity to find out how science actually works -- in essence, allowing them to remain ignorant.  That Brattin thinks the evolutionary model is "faith" and "pulled out of the air" shows that he has no real understanding of the science of biology.

Nor, apparently, does he have all that solid a grasp of the English language.  Religion relies on indoctrination, and a faith-based, subjective approach; science is the opposite.  Scientific principles stand or fall solely on the evidence supporting them.  Calling science indoctrination is as ridiculous as... as...

... as thinking that the sky was solid and made of glass (Job 37:18).