The Week appears to be a garden-variety news magazine without an obvious agenda, but it’s recently published a number of very silly articles on religion and creationism. One of the silliest appeared about a week ago, and is called “In defense of creationists,” by Michael Brendan Dougherty. Of course after reading this kind of incoherent […]
NOTE BY JAC: I still am baffled by the Pew’s finding that Republicans seem to have become more creationist between 2009 and 2013, for the Gallup Poll shows the 20% disparity already in 2008. In that poll, the percentage of young-earth creationists was 60% among Republicans, 38% among Democrats, and 40% among Independents. The gap […]
by Greg Mayer I posted on Wednesday about the new Pew poll on evolution acceptance, focusing on the divergence between the Pew results and those from 2012′s Gallup poll of the same issue. In both polls it is possible to divide respondents into three classes that can be thought of as those that accept “naturalistic […]
UPDATE by JAC: Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognition Project of Yale Law School has further analyzed this survey and finds some problems with it: some data are missing in both the summary and the full report, and this makes it impossible to determine whether the pro-creationist tendencies of Republicans reflects a shift in ideology […]
If you’ve followed the Texas Textbook Kerfuffle (see my post here), you’ll know that the Texas School Board approved all of the high-school biology textbooks submitted to them except for one: Ken Miller and Joe Levine’s best-selling and evolution-heavy Biology, published by Pearson. That one was held up by a creationist reviewer who demanded all sorts […]
I was surprised—and distressed—to see a blatantly creationist article appear in a student newspaper at a decent university. The school is North Carolina State University (NCSU), the paper is The Technician, the article is “How to argue against evolutionists,” and the author is Nicky Vaught, who is the Deputy Features Editor of the paper. At […]
This has already been covered by several “bloggers,” so I’ll be brief, because the entire story is told by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. If you haven’t been in Ulan Bator for a year or so, you’llknow that Ken Ham is supplementing the Creation Museum with a new theme park called “The Ark Encounter.” It […]
by Greg Mayer Paul Waldman, writing about the perennial attempts to keep science out of Texas schools, perceptively asks, “What about the textbook companies?” …how can the people who work at a publisher in good conscience agree to write a biology textbook that treats evolution as a wild, unsupported idea? What if the Texas Board […]
(Perhaps the plural is “ignorami”?) As you may know, the Texas State Board of Education is holding hearings this week for new biology textbooks. This is always a farce, enlivened not only by the testimony of religious creationists (an obvious tautology), some of who approach frothing lunacy in their testimony, but also by the sympathetic […]
In a “Room for debate” feature in yesterday’s New York Times, seven scholars and public figures weigh in on the question, “Should creationism be controversial?” It’s dispiriting because it’s a complete waste of space. No points are made that haven’t been made before, and the debate is largely about how we can deal with the […]
