The Evolution of the Face: A Letter to Some Readers in Tennessee

From here.

The Island of Fossil Viruses

Rare Look at Darwin and First Dinosaur Hunters

Even less room on the Ark? ;

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It started with an interview accorded by the great man to the Guardian religious correspondent Riazat Butt on 20 or 21 December at an undisclosed location in the suburbs of Istanbul: the gated development where Oktar hangs out in a heavily guarded flat furnished (to judge from the accompanying photo) rather like Gracelands. Ms. Butt plainly did her best to be sympathetic, but Oktar still emerges from the interview as not only just about as daft as a mortal creature can be, but also decidedly sinister and surrounded by menacing acolytes. As to the intellectual level of his remarks, one quote will suffice: 

“There is not one single fossil showing that humans evolved. For example, a 100-million-year-old crocodile, it didn’t transform into a professor after a while.” 

The subsequent blog extended over an entire week and although it was quite entertaining and even a bit enlightening over the first three days or so - the Christmas holiday here so people had time on their hands - later on degenerated into the usual personal slanging match between three or four obsessives. As for the pro-Oktar contributors, the tone of their remarks is pretty well summed up by the first post, from one Melis: 

This is a great interview! Mr. Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) is a very well known author in Turkey. He has been the means to make people realize this lie of evolution or graduation throughout our country; as well as all around the world. Now, not only adults but school children are also not believing that human beings have any connection with apes. Just looking at a few fossils and seeing that the animals and plants have not changed for hundreds of millions of years is enough to see this fact. I hope the world will realize this truth as soon as possible, it is surely to their own benefit. I thank him for displaying his entire books free of charge at his website. 

and by (almost) the last, from muguette: 

It is obvious that the correspondent named Riazat Butt did not make this interview after a through research about the author. If she did, she’d probably not write such a subjective article and make any comments as we see in the last paragraph. First of all a person like her should respect people fulfilling their religious obligations. But may be we should excuse her because of her Hindu background, knowing not enough about Islam. THat is surely what befalls to a Muslim. 

So nothing unfamiliar here: Muslim variants of the standard Christian Creationist arguments that (i) it’s true because I say it is and (ii) people who criticise Creationism are disqualified from doing so by the fact of their not being bible-believing Christians. What was quite interesting however - and not a little disturbing - was the intervention after a day or so of posters like scientifique who appeared not to be Oktar henchmen but scientifically literate Turks studying in France who’d apparently stumbled across the debate rather than having been put up to taking part in it. ElliottCB, gpwayne, myself and a host of other bloggers tried to enter into some sort of rational debate with these people, and for a while it looked as though we might be getting somewhere. But in the end Turkish patriotism seems to have triumphed and they left in a huff saying that we were all being beastly to this great Turkish thinker. 

Of Christian anti-evolution contributors there was only one, roomwithaview, who turns up regularly on other Guardian blogs and seems to have wider mental issues. 

All rather depressing really, to see so many stone-deaf people with LOUD VOICES. But several of us did point out gently that Muslim small-c creationists and Christian big-C ones make uncomfortable bedfellows, because not only do our fundies believe that all Muslims are going to Hell when they die, they don’t even agree on the “science” such as the age of the Earth. I hope that a little of this information managed to sink in. 

The only new element in any of this was the Turkish slant. The Turkish students’ society at our local university seems to contain a number of rather disturbing people, to go by the blood-curdling threats they leave on toilet walls, and although so far as I’m aware they haven’t signed up yet for Adnan Oktar, if they did then they might be very militant supporters indeed. Part of Oktar’s pitch, after all, is the same as theirs: that there is a hierarchy among humans with Turks at the top and Jews, Greeks, Armenians and other riff-raff at the bottom.

Scientists fool bacteria into killing themselves to survive

PHOTO IN THE NEWS: Potty-Mouth Amphibian Had Weird Bite

Ancient Insect Hails From Sunken Island

The Discovery Institute in the US provided the materials sent to every UK school by the ironically labelled UK creationist group “Truth in Science”.  Their spokesman Casey Luskin is efficiently dissected when he tries to resurrected the already discredited argument from creationists call “irreducible complexity”.

A couple of extracts (but please go read the whole thing);

Casey seems to forget — or to ignore — the fact that Behe has never even attempted to do any scientific research to show that he is right. He ignores the fact that ID’s critics have produced a boatload of research showing Behe to be wrong while Behe himself has done no research on the system that might support Luskin. As a result, his attempts at rehabilitating the clotting cascade as an “icon” of ID are a complete failure.  So, for the umpteenth time, let’s go through this again.

. . .

Why is it OK to give high school readers an argument about the irreducible complexity of the entire cascade that you know to be false (as Luskin admits), just as long as you modify that argument in another book?  Luskin seems to have forgotten that the Dover trial was about an issue much more important than the fate of ID…. It was about what should be taught to high school science students.  And, in that respect, the arguments in Pandas were the ones that really mattered.  And those arguments, as my friend Casey Luskin has implicitly admitted in his first web posting, were completely wrong.  Too bad he didn’t spin that message at the trial.

. . .

So, what are we left with?  Nothing more than a vain attempt to pretend that ID’s collapse in the Dover case was the result of misrepresentation and deception.  For Mr. Luskin and his employers at the Discovery Institute, the generation of sound and fury continues, but in scientific terms, their continuing noise signifies nothing more than the utter emptiness of their failed ideas.

Dinosaur Dads Took Care of Nest

‘Hobbit’ Fossils Represent A New Species, Concludes Anthropologist

Life’s founding organism kept its cool, researchers say

A couple of extracts;

The documentary links such scientists to Nazis. The reaction was what one would expect.

“We wanted to generate anger,” Ruloff said.

“We always knew we’d get extreme anger on the one side and extreme support on the other. We also think we got extreme interest in the middle.”

Even though evangelical leaders such as Focus on the Family’s James Dobson cheered Expelled for accusing the scientific establishment of shunning researchers who believe “intelligent design” is inherent in the universe; most film critics went ballistic after the documentary’s April 18 release.

I believe there are some reasonable arguments in Expelled. But the documentary hits extremely hard with its message. It has caused bitter polarization.

Throughout our conversation, I probed Ruloff about whether Expelled did more harm than good for the cause of forging more creative links between science and spirituality.

For instance, the website Rotten Tomatoes, which tallies up movie reviews across North America, reported that only 10 per cent of reviewers ranked Expelled positively.

Rotten Tomatoes’ “consensus” of critics’ opinion on Expelled was that it is, “Full of patronizing, poorly structured arguments … a cynical political stunt in the guise of a documentary.”

That compares to the 83 per cent of all critics who rated positively Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 911.

The New York Times’ film critic called Expelled “the sleaziest documentary of all time.”

Jeannette Matsoukis wrote: “Blithely ignoring the vital distinction between social and scientific Darwinism, the film links evolution theory to fascism (as well as abortion, euthanasia and eugenics), shamelessly invoking the Holocaust with black-and-white film of Nazi gas chambers and mass graves.”

Ruloff seemed to revel in being dismissed by the mainstream. Despite his financial wealth, he sees himself as a cultural outsider. On this idyllic island near Vancouver, where he and his family have lived for 13 years, Ruloff described the delight Expelled’s filmmakers had in capitalizing on the hostile review in The New York Times and elsewhere.

. . .

In an interview this summer with the National Post newspaper, Stein is quoted saying it was Ruloff who initially “got in touch with me and said he wanted to do something about Darwinism and how it leads to social Darwinism, which leads to Nazism and the Holocaust.”

But Ruloff said it was actually Stein. Because of his Jewish heritage, Ruloff said, Stein came up with the idea of linking scientific Darwinism to the concentration camps. “It was always Ben Stein. He was fascinated with the underlying scenarios for mass-scale eugenics.”

Whatever the case, Ruloff does not hide that he “absolutely” agrees with many points Expelled makes linking Darwinism to abortion and eugenics and death camps. Darwinism does so, he said, because it does not accept “the sanctity of life.”

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