The ignorance on display at Conservapedia regarding Richard Lenski’s paper finally got to me, so I decided to try posting to the talk page of their “Flaws in Richard Lenski Study” article to see how long it would take to get banned.  And I don’t mean banned for blatant trolling, mind you, but merely for disagreeing with Andy Schlafly.  It actually took a bit longer than I thought, 8 days, but I did try really hard to remain cordial with the douchebags.  It began innocently enough, simply trying to engage the eggplants on some of their more egregious deficiencies.  But it quickly became apparent that Andy Schlafly and his goons aren’t at all interested in actually discussing anything.  Andy is particularly bad, and his tactic is to ignore all substantive criticism, either by not replying or stubbornly restating his original point as if no counterpoint had ever been offered.

The most disconcerting thing, however, is the tendency of the Conservapedia faithful, Andy included, to eschew argumentation altogether and instead assure their adversaries that their objections will we allayed if they just “open their minds”.  For example, one user told me, “You need to open your mind to the truth.”  This was immediately followed by a comment from Andy Schlafly stating that “People who do open their minds are amazed by the insights and happiness it brings.”  Another Conservapedia detractor was urged to “…open your mind more to other ways of thinking and you’ll see the truth for what it is.”  This is what passes for rigorous debate at Conservapedia. Read the rest of this entry »

As I noted in my previous post, creationists have been working hard to spin the recent PNAS paper by Richard Lenski and coworkers on historical contigency in evolution.  And for good reason, as creationists are extremely fond of claiming that mutation cannot produce new, beneficial traits.  First up is intelligent design creationist Michael Behe, who wrote about the Lenski paper on his Amazon.com blog.

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Frothy right-wing commentators love to blame liberals for everything.  Literally every ill in this country, real or perceived, is due to liberals and their alleged love for “big government” and disdain of the individual, Jesus, and apple pie.  In fact, they love to blame liberal bogeymen so much that they often forget to actually research things before they speak.  Case in point, Mike S. Adams blaming “fascist” liberals for imposing BCE/CE calendar notation on poor, innocent Christian students.

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Concerned Women for America has sent out an alert to its supporters that boldly lies about the Miller-Jenkins case.  For those not familiar, this case is a custody dispute between two women, Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins.  The two are former partners who had formed a civil union in Vermont before having a child together, with Lisa as the biological mother.  The couple eventually split and Lisa moved to Virginia with the child and became a born-again Christian (praise the lord!).  Lisa subsequently asked a Vermont court to dissolve the civil union, award her full custody of the child, and to grant Janet visitation rights.  After the passage of Virginia’s anti-gay-marriage amendment, Lisa filed suit in Virginia court to deny Janet any visitation rights to the child and was victorious.  That decision was eventually overturned on appeal as it clearly violated the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, which prevents all States from interfering with a prior custody decision made by a court in another State.

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I admit I’m a glutton for punishment.  I have to be to read Townhall.com every day.  And now that Ben Stein’s pandering film Expelled has been released, I can expect a nice uptick in the number of blithering anti-evolution articles at the site.  Today we have Brent Bozell weighing in and, as you might expect from a supporter of creationism, it’s full of misinformation and distortion.  Not that that is totally the fault of Mr. Bozell, he is mostly just parotting the claims made in Expelled, after all.  But for a man who believes that mainstream academic science is guilty of willfully ignoring or suppressing supposed evidence for intelligent design creationism, you would think he would practice what he preaches (i.e. fairness to both sides) and do some digging into the claims that the movie makes.  Mr. Bozell, of course, does no such thing.  Instead, he goes out of his way to smear real scientists even more. Read the rest of this entry »