I’m just going to reprint this one in its entirety. It’s from BSAlert.com.

Bill Nye, the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.

But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College’s Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they’d always suspected.

This story originally appeared in the Waco Tribune, but the newspaper has mysteriously pulled its story from the online version, presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

This story is so crazy that I’d like a second reference. Nobody’s that crazy, are they?

The 68th Skeptics’ Circle is up now over at Aardvarchaeology.

One of the posts that caught my eye was Greta Christina’s A Self-Referential Game of Twister: What Religion Looks Like From the Outside. Here’s just one excerpt:

Science has a built-in self-correcting mechanism; religion has the opposite, a built-in self-perpetuating mechanism that actively resists correction.

I also read an article about spiritualist camps over at the Bad Idea Blog, but what really caught my eye was a different article on that site. It turns out that the Virgin Mary appears on a garage door in Pennsylvania every evening!

If you bathe in the oil puddle on the garage floor, will all of your ailments be cured?

Michael Behe is an especially dangerous creationist, because he isn’t the strident, shrill looney that you typically see on that side of the fence. His arguments actually sound plausible to many people, even those who reject other creationist claims as downright absurd.

I’m currently reading Darwin’s Black Box (I’ll eventually post a review). In there, he points out that there is ample evidence for the evolution of large structures, such as legs and ribs. However, he claims there is no evidence for evolution on the molecular scale. He has a point here. Molecules typically don’t leave fossils. He especially wants to know how the more complex structures—such a his favorite “whipping boy”, the bacterial flagellum—evolved.

Behe believes in “irreducible complexity”, which is his claim that some molecular machines are so complex that they could not have evolved. He claims that if you remove one piece, the whole thing breaks. Evolution occurs piece by piece; the necessary intermediate structures would not have evolved, since they would not have provided any function.

From there he jumps to the ridiculous conclusion that God must have done it.

Wrong! You Lose!

Well, now Behe has been proven wrong. We now know how molecular evolution occurred in one case, and it works just fine without God.

Science Daily reports:

Scientists have determined for the first time the atomic structure of an ancient protein, revealing in unprecedented detail how genes evolved their functions.

“Never before have we seen so clearly, so far back in time,” said project leader Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon. “We were able to see the precise mechanisms by which evolution molded a tiny molecular machine at the atomic level, and to reconstruct the order of events by which history unfolded.” [Emphasis added. Flagellate that, Behe!]

What Thornton and his assistant Jamie Bridgham wanted to do was determine how a particular protein, the glucocorticoid receptor (GR), evolved its ability to interact with cortisol (a stress hormone).

They used computational techniques and a large database of modern receptor sequences to determine the ancient GR’s gene sequence from a time just before and just after its specific relationship with cortisol evolved.

So what they’re doing, if I’m interpreting the article correctly, is determining what this protein looked like right before it evolved one particular behavior. In order to conduct the new behavior, what would have to be added or changed to this protein?

Michael Behe would probably allege (if more than one mutation was necessary) that you can’t get there from here.

Now that Thornton and Bridgham have the DNA sequence, they still needed to get a sample of the protein. Remember that DNA is just the blueprint that tells how a protein is to be made. If you want to study the protein, you need to get some of it.

The ancient genes — which existed more than 400 million years ago — were then synthesized, expressed, and their structures determined using X-ray crystallography, a state-of-the art technique that allows scientists to see the atomic architecture of a molecule. The project represents the first time the technique has been applied to an ancient protein.

What that means is that they synthesized the genes, injected it into the DNA of bacteria (I’m guessing on this point, but that’s the usual method), and then let the bacteria produce the protein.

The important thing to know about this step is that proteins get their functionality from their three-dimensional shape. That’s where the X-ray crystallography came in.

The structures allowed the scientists to identify exactly how the new function evolved. They found that just seven historical mutations, when introduced into the ancestral receptor gene in the lab, recapitulated the evolution of GR’s present-day response to cortisol.

This is the part that Michael Behe would find interesting. Note how this new functionality requires seven mutations. Behe would claim that this is irreducibly complex. You need all seven. Take one away, and you’ve got nothing. Or do you?

They were even able to deduce the order in which these changes occurred, because some mutations caused the protein to lose its function entirely if other “permissive” changes, which otherwise had a negligible effect on the protein, were not in place first.

This is important. They were able to deduce the order in which these changes occurred! That’s watching evolution in action. Even though we don’t have a fossil record of this occurring, we now know how this structure had to evolve.

Ah, but what are those “permissive changes” and how did they happen? The permissive changes were random, benign mutations! This is how evolution works. Mutations happen all the time:

1. Some mutations are useful and convey an immediate benefit to the organism, which allows it to better fit its environment. This gives it a survival advantage, so it’s more likely to live long enough to reproduce and pass along the beneficial mutation. Bingo! One small step along the evolutionary path.
2. Some mutations are harmful and either kill the organism outright or reduce its fitfulness in its environment. This mutation is therefore selected against by the environment. This is evolution’s self-correcting mechanism.
3. Many mutations are benign. They have no effect on an organism’s ability to survive. Therefore, they just sit there in the population. As that organism and its descendents reproduce, that benign mutation spreads throughout a subset of the population. Any population is full of countless benign mutations like this. Now if the environment were to change, some of these mutations would, by chance, convey an advantage in this new environment. That’s another way species evolve. But failing that, the mutation just sits there in some members of the population.

The atomic structure revealed exactly how these mutations allowed the new function to evolve. The most radical one remodeled a whole section of the protein, bringing a group of atoms close to the hormone. A second mutation in this repositioned region then created a tight new interaction with cortisol. Other earlier mutations buttressed particular parts of the protein so they could tolerate this eventual remodeling.

One of the collaborators, Eric Ortlund, said:

“We were able to walk through the evolutionary process from the distant past to the present day. Until now, we’ve always had to look at modern proteins and just guess how they evolved.”

It’s that guessing that gave Michael Behe the hook he needed to claim that God did it. Well now we no longer need to guess. Scientists have shown how one molecular structure evolved. With a lot of hard work, we can probably show how the other structures evolved.

The theory of evolution is yet again triumphant. God, and Michael Behe, need not apply.

My recent article about the AIG Creation Science Essay Contest winner was a bit depressing. Remember that it wasn’t just this one girl who is afflicted. Many other kids entered this contest (the AIG website doesn’t say how many), and countless more are taught the same creationist babble. It’s sad how many lives are being turned away from the thrill of science, the thrill of discovery, the thrill of finding out how the world works.

For contrast, head on over to Northstate Science. Christopher O’Brien has a more optimistic article about a real science essay contest. Here are just a few of the winning essays:

Ashley Hunt (7th grade) — Algae in the Weiva River: Is it Helping or Hurting Water Quality?
Noah McDonald (7th grade) — The Toads of Delaware County
Alexandria Day (8th grade) — An Analysis of Water Quality on the Severn River over Two Years

That’s right. Seventh and eighth grades. The higher grade levels have some even more impressive stuff. Compare that with what’s in the winning essays from the creationist contest.

There’s hope for at least some of this next generation. How tragic that not all kids can be exposed to a good (i.e., real) science education.

From Unfairly Balanced:

Creationist wackos and creators of the giant creationism museum in Kentucky, Answers in Genesis, recently announced the winners of their creationism essay contest.

Homeschooler (of course!) Karin Hutson of Missouri (there’s a freakin’ surprise!) won the contest. The prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

Zeno at Halfway There has a good overview article. He sums up the winning entries:

While it’s not fair to expect teenagers to write purely original essays, all of the winning papers suffer from the suffocating effects of their reliance on recycled creationist propaganda. Time and again the writers make demonstrably untrue statements (and they probably don’t know any better). In this, of course, they simply mirror their elders.

I thought I would examine the grand prize-winning essay. I debated whether to do this, because I didn’t want to be seen as beating up on a high schooler. I decided to go ahead because:

1. It’s actually a fairly sober essay and therefore doesn’t lend itself to my usual snide comments (read: It won’t be funny. Jump to the next article if you want funny.)
2. It’s worth seeing what the creationists are teaching their kids. What is the content and curriculum that they would like to impose on the public schools, if they ever get their way?
3. How good is it, from a writing perspective? In other words, how good is their home-schooling?

To answer that last question, it’s fairly well written, from a purely technical perspective. Its main flaw is that it’s saturated with the logical fallacies that all creationists are prone to. So let’s examine Karin Hutson’s winning essay:

Evolution of Ethics: How the Biology Class Undermines Morality 101

Can Darwinian evolution adequately account for and uphold human morality? This paper concludes it cannot. Within a naturalistic worldview that denies absolute truth, morality has no standards. Ethics then disintegrates into fickle opinions and conflicting preferences. Hence, evolution supports amorality, not morality!

Morality has no absolute standards, because societies change over time; they evolve, in a manner of speaking. The hope is that over time, we become more enlightened about what is moral.

It is not evolution that supports amorality. If anything, it creates morality. Altruism, which is one of the underpinnings of morality, has been proven to exist in some animal species. Furthermore, a society without morals does not long survive.

Instead, I would argue, that it is the misguided notion of “absolute truth” that creates amorality. This causes the believers of that particular “absolute truth” (and the world is full of many contradictory “absolute truths”) to blindly and rabidly adhere to a doctrine that is woefully out of date and grossly immoral by most objective standards. If you doubt this, just read the Letter to Dr. Laura.

When Evolution is Taught

In this section, she just parrots back the standard creationist lie that evolution didn’t happen. This is where she fulfills the essay contest’s requirement that she use the fundie-written “science” textbook Evolution Exposed as a source. The other book she cites in this section is the Bible! Oh yeah! There’s a reputable source! It’s a good thing she got accepted to Liberty University. With scholarship like this, she wouldn’t be accepted by a real school.

Because of those conflicting presuppositions, creationists and evolutionists interpret their observations differently. Creationists examine fossils and point back thousands of years to the worldwide flood explained in the Bible, while evolutionists look at the same fossils and point back millions of years.

That’s the problem with presuppositions. Creationists blindly accept the Bible, so they are forced to jump through a series of massively-convoluted hoops just to reach their foregone conclusion. Scientists follow the straight line of the data to whatever conclusion that data leads.

If creation offers just as valid answers for life’s origin as Darwin,…

But it doesn’t. Where does she get such a crazy idea?

…which Evolution Exposed reveals,…

Oh. Well that’s her problem!

…why is it banned from public schools?

I’ll tell you why:

1. Creationism has no evidence to support it.
2. It’s religion.

[T]wenty-first century school officials unfairly regulate evolution to the classroom as science and creation to the church as religion.

I think the word she wants here is “relegate”, not “regulate”. Home schooling. Woohoo!

…Morality is Undermined

She opens this section by quoting Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis. Oh yeah! Suck up to the judge!

In this section she claims that evolution creates moral relativism, which then creates violence and vice. If one society says it is OK to crash airplanes into skyscrapers, then another society can’t tell them that it’s wrong.

She’s wrong here. There are certain behaviors that can be agreed upon as bad by members within a society. You do have disagreements between societies. Her 9/11 example demonstrates this. Radical Islam hasn’t evolved to the same level of moral sophistication as the West. They’re still living in the moral Dark Ages. You don’t say “That’s OK! Their morality works for them, so we’ll let them kill us!” (For a good article on moral relativism and how it isn’t necessarily the default position of non-theists, see this article at Biblioblography.)

Response of Evolutionists

[N]aturalists either unabashedly glory in their liberation from absolute morality, trusting innate human goodness, or they stoically accept the pointlessness of existence.

I guess when mommy home-schooled Hutson, she didn’t cover the either-or fallacy. I don’t completely fit into either camp, and I don’t know anyone who does.

The Nihilist Approach

Nihilism, futile existence, is living life according to evolutionary philosophy.
[…]
Evidently, most evolutionists are not nihilists. According to evolutionary tenets, however, all should be.

No. She’s making the leap from “The data do not suggest a creator” to “Therefore, we should all just kill ourselves.” That’s ridiculous.

While evolution doesn’t directly cause sin,…

How nice of her to admit that!

…its naturalism presents a good excuse because it denies that morality is universal, that sin is sin, that a Judge will requite!

Maybe it’s a good thing that fundies have their moral code already created for them. They’re obviously incapable of the complex thought required to develop one on their own.

Hence, studies show moral decline among those who accept evolution.

Actually, the “studies” she refers to is something published by the Institute for Creation Research. I’m sure its scholarship is on the same level as Hutson’s essay.

The Creation Answer

This section is all about how wonderful God is and that people who believe in him blindly follow whatever is in the Bible. Somehow this is portrayed as a good thing.

Concluding with the Beginning

In order to share Christ with secular America, one must first confront the blinding worldview of evolution. This indoctrination begins in the classroom.

And that really sticks in the craw of fundies. In the “good old days”, they used to read the Bible in public schools. The only indoctrination in the schools that fundies want is their indoctrination.

[S]ome time may pass before creation science is allowed back in the public school system….

Remember, creationism is religion, so just swap those words in that sentence, and you’ll see the real fundie agenda:

[S]ome time may pass before religion is allowed back in the public school system….

My Conclusion

So that’s the end of her essay. I see why she won, and I have to admit that it’s a masterful piece of writing. She artfully managed to cite a variety of creationist propaganda pieces, numerous Bible passages, and she also sucked up to the judge! Throughout the essay, she told the fundies exactly what they want to hear.

But what have we learned about Karin Hutson? We’ve learned that she managed to write a 3000-word essay about the ethics and morality of “evolutionists” without one whit of understanding of their ethics and morality.

The American Decency Association is the small fundie pressure group that’s offended by topless mannequins. Over the last year they’ve taken a little time out of their busy schedule of whining about Victoria’s Secret, Family Guy, and Sports Illustrated to hound their sheeple into donating enough funds to buy their very own building. Wow! They’re all growed up now!

They recently held their dedication of the building. I’m sure the event was full of lots of self-congratulating praises and self-righteous bloviating, and praying and thanking Gawd and Jeebus for all of their blessings. I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it, but I had previously committed to gouging my eyes out with a sharp stick. But attending that event was my second choice!

It turns out that I missed a humdinger of a shindig. The American Decency Asshats actually managed to snag the one and only ultra-Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Fundie Association to deliver the dedication speech! It’s a good thing I gouged out both of my eyes, or I would be kicking myself for having gotten the poorer end of the deal.

Thanks to the miracle of the internet (that strange series of tubes that can also deliver pornography on demand!), we can actually read Wildmon’s speech and fantasize about what it must have been like to actually be there in person. Here’s some of what he had to say:

We are in a cultural battle, a spiritual war.

Fundies never tire of their war metaphors. It sure is a peaceful religion!

We have been for several decades now. It’s getting worse. It’s not getting better.… We’re in a spiritual battle for the future of the western civilization. Europe and the U.S. came out of the mind of Christ. Our view of democracy came from there. And our view of capitalism came from there.

Since when has Christianity been about democracy? Jesus never mentioned it. The Catholic church presided over centuries of religious totalitarianism. Modern fundies don’t even want democracy. They want a theocracy that they can label “democracy”.

Where does Jesus preach capitalism? Is that why virtually all modern fundies are Republicans? Jesus’ message was very much anti-capitalism. Unbridled capitalism (a.k.a. neo-conservatism) exploits the working classes and the poor for the benefit of the richest half-percent of the population. Christianity can be compatible with some forms of capitalism (e.g., FDRs New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society); it’s just not compatible with the fanatical, social-Darwinist neo-Republicanism of today.

It was this view—this Christian world-view—that gave us the ability to be the most successful country in the world.

And then the neo-cons came along and threw it all away.

Somewhere along the way several years ago, somebody decided that our system, our way of doing things, wasn’t so good, so they starting changing it. The first thing they tried to do was remove the basic Christian faith from the everyday world. They’ve got to get Christianity out of the marketplace—out of society.

Stop being so paranoid, Wildmulch. Nobody is trying to remove Christianity from society, just from government.

Well, it started with prayer in school. For two hundred years there wasn’t anything illegal about prayer in schools. But all of a sudden the Supreme Court says you can’t pray in schools.

For 180 years there wasn’t anything illegal about segregation. But all of a sudden the Supreme Court says you can’t segregate in schools.

Then we came along with abortion. And we kill babies.

No, we kill unviable tissues. Maybe it’s not pretty, but it’s far short of murder.

I saw a poll not long ago about a group of college students. This is about the conflicted society that we live in today. A group of college students were asked the question, ‘Is abortion murder?’ And the majority of them said ‘Yes. Yes. It is murder.’ They were asked a second question. ‘Should abortion be legal?’ And the majority of them said ‘Yes.’ They didn’t see any conflict. Yes abortion is murder, but it should be legal!

You’re looking at it backward, Windbag. Yes, those two statements are in conflict. All it proves, though, is that you fundies have been extremely successful in convincing people that abortion is murder. Murder should be illegal. If abortion were murder, then I would advocate banning it. However, abortion is not murder, despite your lies and propaganda. I examined this issue previously. I recommend that the Reverend go read that article before shooting his mouth off.

[T]here is a distinct possibility that a hundred years from now, or fifty years from now, Christianity will have no influence in government and government policies at all. Period.

Oooooo! You’re such a tease!

And if you profess to be a Christian, you will be isolated and rejected by society.

Just how are we going to “isolate and reject” 90% of the population? Geeeez, this Christian persecution complex is huge!

You won’t be taken out and fed to the lions. They will just pass laws that keep you in your place.

Poll tax! We’ll pass a poll tax! That will keep “those people” in their place! And we’ll have a literacy test. You can’t vote unless you pass a literacy test! You have to be able to accurately describe Darwin’s principle of descent with modification.

And society will begin to look down upon you as being a little bit, what Stalin used to say, a little bit mental—unstable.

“Begin” nothing! We already look down on you as being “a little bit mental”!

Let’s go back twenty years. Let’s go back to television. Twenty years ago, there was no program on the networks that featured anybody identified as a Christian living in a modern world in a positive manner. Did you hear what I’m saying?

Unfortunately yes. So do us all a favor and shut up.

Go back to the fifties and you’ll find the church, you’ll find it in movies, you’ll find grace being said before the meal. You’ll find religion, Christianity, being an important part of society.

Yes, let’s go back to the days of segregation and racism and homophobia.

There is an intentional effort to reshape our society.

Yes. For the better!

I never thought twenty-five years ago that I’d live to see the day…

I’d also like it if you didn’t live to see another day. Why? Have you been feeling depressed lately? Don’t let me stop you!

…when churches—Christian churches—would have a major push to ordain or accept as ministers practicing homosexuals. I never thought I’d see that. The Bible’s quite clear on that.

The Bible’s also quite clear that you should own slaves. You’re sounding very nostalgic today, Rev.

Pornography. …Today turn on your computer. There are 10 million porn sites.

But still no HotTeenFundies.com! What will Reverend Wildmunch do?

Did you know that in the last fifteen years there was a president by the name of Bill Clinton?

Yes. I think I may have heard of him.

There’s a current president by the name of George W. Bush.

By golly! You may be right about that!

The older Bush there before Clinton had a little bit of prosecution against pornography going. But from Bill Clinton through the current President George W. Bush, there has not been one single, major supplier of obscenity indicted or taken to trial or charged in any way. Not one. Not one.

Not one! Not one, I tell you! Oh, the horror!

It’s gotten where every morning when I pick up the paper, I read about some child that has been abused or somebody who has been caught with child pornography.

That’s a rather abrupt transition. So what’s your point? Oh, wait! I just had a crazy thought! I think Donald Wildmon thinks there’s a connection between legal adult pornography and child abuse or child pornography! What a scream! Where do you get your information, Wildmouth? Do you still believe that illness is caused by swamp gas? Are the “humors” in your body out of whack?

What a moron.

Via Pharyngula, we find an article about HIV denialists. These are the people who claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. This belief is big in Africa, but even people in the developed world fall for it. At least with creationism, I can understand the appeal. I don’t understand the appeal of HIV denialism.

However, like the evolution denialists, the HIV-ignorers use a familiar approach. A section of the article is titled “Portraying Science as Faith and Consensus as Dogma”. Does any of this sound familiar?

Since the ideas proposed by deniers do not meet rigorous scientific standards, they cannot hope to compete against the mainstream theories. They cannot raise the level of their beliefs up to the standards of mainstream science; therefore they attempt to lower the status of the denied science down to the level of religious faith, characterizing scientific consensus as scientific dogma.
[…]
Deniers also paint themselves as skeptics working to break down a misguided and deeply rooted belief. They argue that when mainstream scientists speak out against the scientific “orthodoxy,” they are persecuted and dismissed.
[…]
HIV deniers accuse scientists of quashing dissent regarding the cause of AIDS, and not allowing so-called “alternative” theories to be heard. However, this claim could be applied to any well-established scientific theory that is being challenged by politically motivated pseudoscientific notions—for example, creationist challenges to evolution.