Teleogical views predict not just creationism, but conspiracy theories

I’ll be brief here because the paper itself, just published in Current Biology (reference below, access free, pdf here) is short: just over a page of text. After finding evidence in a small survey (N = 157) that teleology  (“the tendency to ascribe function and final cause to nonintentional natural facts and events”) was significantly […]

Tel Aviv’s new natural history museum (built to look like Noah’s Ark) deliberately omits mentioning evolution

I’ve previously written about two natural history museums in Israel that either didn’t mention evolution or covered up the evolution exhibits with curtains when school groups of creationist Haredis (hyper-orthodox Jews) were visiting (see here and here). The two were the Museum of Natural History and the Biblical Museum of Natural History, both in Jerusalem. […]

A creationist makes the dumbest criticism of evolution ever

Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty! (Is that ableist?)  A creationist comment came in on the video I posted showing lions drinking from a South African waterhole. I mentioned this in passing: “Look at the spots on the babies and young adults: the remnants of an ancestral pattern that disappears in adults.” […]

Eric Hedin, prohibited from teaching intelligent design at Ball State, retires and moves to a Christian university

About five years ago (can it have been that long?), I wrote a bunch of posts about Eric Hedin, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Ball State University (BSU) who was an advocate of intelligent design. My beef with the guy was that his honors course, “The Boundaries of Science”, included a lot […]

Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya) arrested in Turkey

The last thing I would have expected would be for the Turkish government to arrest Adnan Oktar, who, as a creationist, writes under the name of Harun Yahya.  After all, Erdogan’s neo-Islamist government has stopped teaching evolution in secondary schools, most likely because it contravenes Qur’anic doctrine. Oktar was the author of the three-volume, lavishly […]

Creationism and Coyne-dissing at The Daily Caller

It’s never wise for a serious conservative website to throw in its lot with creationism. Evolution is so well established—and my book gives only a small part of the evidence—that you just appear ignorant to question it—that is, unless you have some serious scientific knowledge and questions. And even then, I can’t imagine any evidence […]

Evolution largely omitted and diluted from Arizona’s new education standards

Arizona has revised its educational standards for the first time in 15 years: these guidelines cover kindergarten through grade 12 (age about 18), and they’ve watered down the evolution standards, deleting several mentions of the “e-word” and severely qualifying others. You can see the reports below, at The Hill (click on screenshot), at the Arizona […]

Falling for the most common misconception about evolution, a Catholic asserts that a doctor can’t be an atheist

If you ask an evolutionary biologist what the most common public misconception about evolution by natural selection is, you’re likely to get this response: “It’s the false assumption that evolution is an accidental process and that its results are purely due to chance.” The scientific answer to this misconception, of course, is that evolution by […]

Pushback from Israeli museums who don’t like my stand on censoring evolution exhibits

As I noted the other day, I had strong objections to a practice at Jerusalem’s Natural History Museum described in the Times of Israel (click on screenshot below). When the Haredi schoolchildren (ultra-Orthodox Jews) visit, the Museum, which is funded by Israeli taxpayers, covers up its evolution exhibit, as evolution is contrary to their religious beliefs and would […]

David Berlinski makes a pompous fool of himself again about science and evolution

I’m not sure how David Berlinski manages to make a living, but he does live in Paris, which ain’t cheap. Although he’s a Senior Fellow with the ID Creationist Discovery Institute, that can’t pay much, and his science books, including A Tour of the Calculus (1995), The Advent of the Algorithm (2000), Newton’s Gift (2000), and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of […]