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 […]

Natural history museum in Jerusalem covers exhibit on evolution to avoid offending ultra-Orthodox Jews

UPDATE: A kind reader sent me the email for the Natural History Museum, muzteva@gmail.com, and if you want to write to them about this, feel free. Here’s my email: ********* To whom it may concern: As an evolutionary biologist of Jewish ancestry, I am deeply offended at your practice of covering up the human evolution exhibit lest […]

Edinburgh Coursera lecture equating evolution and creationism as equally “faith based” vanishes from the web, but the science-bashing continues

Three days ago I put up a post showing a short lecture by philosopher S. Orestis Palermos that was part of a University of Edinburgh Coursera course on Science and Philosophy. His lecture basically equated evolutionary biology with creationism, dismissing both as “pseudoscience”. (The course was also sponsored by—to its eternal shame—the John Templeton Foundation.) […]

A relatively new anti-creationist book

It’s a slow news day here at WEIT, and my brain is equally slow. Let me just call your attention to a new review of an anticreationist book by Darren Naish at his Sci Am site Tetrapod Zoology. The review is new but the book has aged a bit: it’s the 15-month-old God’s Word or Human Reason?: An […]

The University of Edinburgh and the John Templeton Foundation royally screw up evolution and science (and tell arrant lies) in an online course

Reader Simon sent me this video, which is a short (8-minute) lecture that’s apparently part of an online Coursera course on Science and Philosophy sponsored by the University of Edinburgh, the EIDYN Research Center run by Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy, and the John Templeton Foundation. The presenter of this talk on creationism and evolutionary biology, S. […]

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt disses evolution, espouses theocracy, doubts whether carbon dioxide causes global warming, asserts that God gave us the right to have all guns

Politico has just revealed that Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), espoused some pretty bizarre and goddy views on an Oklahoma radio show in 2005. Granted, that’s 13 years ago, but have his views changed? Given his faith, probably not, and they were posted on his campaign website when he ran […]