I think my favorite type of creationist is the Omphalists, who make no attempt to deny the physical evidence or argue that there isn't a conflict between the apparent origin of the universe and what's written in the bible. All physical evidence is consistent with the bible because God wanted it to appear that way for whatever ineffable reasons he ( Read more... )

When religious people say they oppose evolution it almost always seems like they don't understand what they're disagreeing with. Evolution is just variation and natural selection. Did Noah have many children? Were they different from each other? That's variation. Did some of those children become more successful than others? That's natural ( Read more... )

Richard Dawkins was on Bill O'Reilly recently and the tenor of the conversation was pretty much what you'd imagine it to be. O'Reilly's position is that he's "throwing in with Jesus rather than you guys because you guys can't tell me how it all got here ... until you guys figure that out I'm sticking with judeo-christian philosophy" and that he " ( Read more... )

Recently PZ Myers took a group of atheist/agnostics to the Creation Museum to learn about museum creationism*. I was not with them, but I actually learned something. I had assumed that the creationist view is that God created all the animals exactly as they are, that Noah put most of the animals into the ark, and the animals that didn't make it ( ( Read more... )

It's Charles Darwin's birthday today - he is 200 years old. And it's Abraham Lincoln's birthday today - he is 200 years old as well. Why are so many peple celebrating "Darwin Day" but "Lincoln Day" not so much ( Read more... )

A friend's college bio professor said something the other day that I'm still thinking about. "We have more more evidence for evolution than we do World War II. I'm still waiting for the World War II deniers to show up." This sounds a little incredible and perhaps inflamatory but I'd like to take a stab at explaining ( Read more... )

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A bit of trivia: Charles Darwin didn't invent the theory of evolution from whole cloth. The idea was at least roughed out by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who published this idea 63 years before Darwin in "Zoonomia" (1796) in the section titled "Of Generation", in which he laid out several ideas including what would eventually become known as ( Read more... )

Various creationist / intelligent design groups have been trying to cast doubt on evolution by circulating Dissent from Darwin, a list of scientists who question the principle of mutation and natural selection.

To both counter and parody their list, the NCSF has been compiling Project Steve, a list of scientists (named Steve or Stephanie) who ( Read more... )

Twice in the last two weeks, smart people have told me that evolution cannot explain the structure and variation of the natural world because evolution is "random", "chance", or created by "accident", and that complex structure cannot spontaneously arise from random disorder. I think this is not only a pretty common misconception but is the most ( Read more... )