Ken Ham blames secularists for financial failures of the Ark Park

This story about two weeks old, but has been revived and supplemented by recent articles at Alternet,  The Raw Story, and The Friendly Atheist. The Ark Park (or rather “The Ark Experience”) apparently, isn’t the great success it was touted to be by Ken Ham and his organization Answers in Genesis. On the Answers in Genesis website. […]

Turkey orders secondary schools to stop teaching evolution

According to both the Guardian and The Independent, the Turkish government, with the approval of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has just stopped the teaching of evolution in secondary schools, saying that students in the ninth grade aren’t able to understand the idea. Although—according to a friend who teaches evolution in a Turkish university—evolution is often left […]

An anniversary for the Creation Museum

Reader Pliny the in Between tells me that the Creation Museum in Kentucky—the illegitimate offspring of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis—is ten years old today. And to celebrate, the artist has produced a cartoon (click to enlarge):  

Is creationism on the wane in America?

Every year or two since 1982, the Gallup Poll has surveyed Americans for their attitudes toward human evolution. (Note: it’s not evolution in general that’s surveyed by the question below, but human evolution. It’s entirely possible that more Americans would accept evolution in general if it’s construed as applying to all species except humans—in fact, that’s […]

Jonathan Wells’s new book attacking evolution

Sixteen years ago, Jonathan Wells, now a senior fellow at the creationist Discovery Institute, published an intelligent-design creationist book Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Of course they were a myth to him, but the book was dreadful and a totally misguided attack on evolution. I reviewed it for Nature (free link here), and said this: Wells’s […]

FFRF versus the Ark Park

In this video, which the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) says was filmed covertly, FFRF lawyer Andrew Seidel talks about how Answers In Genesis, Ken Ham’s organization, sworn to purvey lies about biology to children, has benefited from taxpayer subsidies. (As you may remember, the Ark Encounter has a supposedly life-sized version of Noah’s Ark which […]

Creationism bill introduced in Arkansas—again!

You’d think the state of Arkansas would have learned its lesson in the case of McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, a case decided in 1982 by the late U.S. District Court Judge William Overton. Ruling on Arkansas Act 590, the “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act”, which actually required the teaching of so-called […]

The fallacy of the creationist distinction between micro- and macroevolution

I’ve belabored this issue before, but there’s always a new crop of readers who might need a lesson. I’m talking about a common creationist trope: the claim that microevolution can occur, usually defined as “evolution within a species” or “evolution within a kind” (whatever a “kind” is), but that macroevolution—seen as a transition from one “kind” […]

Good news: South Dakota’s “teach the controversy” bill fails

On January 28 I reported that the South Dakota state Senate had approved one of those “teach all sides” bills used by creationists to sneak divinity into the science classroom, and to oppose evolution and global warming. The bill read like this: FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to protect the teaching of certain scientific information. BE […]

Discovery Institute: Materialist evolution = no love

If you can stomach the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” site, you’ll see David Klinghoffer’s lastest post, “What Darwinists don’t tell you: Valentine’s Day edition,” making a religiously motivated and badly misguided criticism of evolution. First, though, if you’ve followed the Intelligent Design (ID) issue, you’ll know that the founding manifesto for ID, the infamous “Wedge Document,” had as […]