Ann Coulter Nostalgia: Behold, For *I* Am The Giant Flatulent Raccoon

Ann Coulter Nostalgia: Behold, For *I* Am The Giant Flatulent Raccoon
Ann Coulter Nostalgia: Behold, For *I* Am The Giant Flatulent Raccoon
It’s been a while since we’ve treated to the spectacle of Ann Coulter lecturing about evolution, but she’s at it again. She’s just written an op-ed in the wake of Rick Perry’s recent statement that Texas teaches evolution and creationism [his word] because evolution is “just a theory out there.” Coulter takes this opportunity to […]

NCSE Classic

NCSE Classic
NCSE Classic
Way back in 1989 (I was only six!), Eugenie Scott and other members of the National Center for Science Education got together for a mock debate pitting evolutionary scientists against creationist impersonators at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. How things have changed (well, except young earth creationist arguments)…

Fashionable Nonsense: Reconciling science with Genesis

Fashionable Nonsense: Reconciling science with Genesis
Fashionable Nonsense: Reconciling science with Genesis
Eden, from The World Before the Deluge. At least I know that, if I fail at everything else in life, I could write a book claiming to reconcile science and Christianity. People love them. No matter how many times the same old talking points are trotted out there always seems to be room for one […]

What about creationism?

What about creationism?
What about creationism?
I get a lot of questions about my forthcoming book, Written in Stone, but the most popular by far is “What are you going to say about creationism?” Presently there is a glut of books that confront creationism in one way or another. There are books that counter creationist claims with scientific evidence (Evolution: What […]

Portraying the fact, but losing the theory

Portraying the fact, but losing the theory
Portraying the fact, but losing the theory
The display of horse evolution at the AMNH as created by W.D. Matthew. Price reproduced this illustration without permission in his creationist textbook The New Geology. The 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” put scientists on the defensive. It did not matter that the defendant in the famous case, John Scopes, probably never taught evolution in a […]

P.H. Gosse’s Failure to Untie the Geological Knot

P.H. Gosse’s Failure to Untie the Geological Knot
P.H. Gosse’s Failure to Untie the Geological Knot
A mammoth as restored in Gosse’s Omphalos. In Gosse’s view of history, however, such a scene never actually existed. The bones of the mammoth existed in the earth from the time of Creation and had never given form to a living animal. Without a doubt, Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalos is one of the strangest books […]

Test of Faith: Of False Alternatives and Straw Men

Test of Faith: Of False Alternatives and Straw Men
Test of Faith: Of False Alternatives and Straw Men
Not long after I wrote about how creationists got paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine to appear in the anti-evolution film Darwin’s Dilemma I received a message from someone at the Faraday Institute. Conway Morris had done an interview with them about science and religion for a miniseries called Test of Faith, they said; […]

Robert Broom and the “End of Evolution”

Robert Broom and the “End of Evolution”
Robert Broom and the “End of Evolution”
During my studies of the history of paleontology I have often stumbled upon the work of the same scientists over and over again. The 19th century anatomists Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley, especially, worked on a variety of fossil vertebrates and were critical to the establishment of paleontology as an evolutionary science, yet there […]

Have creationists tricked scientists yet again?

Have creationists tricked scientists yet again?
Have creationists tricked scientists yet again?
Update: I have released important new information about this story here. Creationists have made a habit out of tricking scientists and historians into appearing in pro-creationism films. Such “culture warriors” view their dishonest tactics as fully acceptable. They think their deceit is working for the greater good, and scientists must increasingly be aware of who […]

What is your favorite transitional form?

What is your favorite transitional form?
What is your favorite transitional form?
Carl Buell’s restoration of Aetiocetus weltoni. From Demere et al., 2008. By now many of you have no doubt seen the abysmally bad story on evolution and creationism in yesterday’s Telegraph. After referring to the reactions of fundamentalist Christians to the forthcoming Charles Darwin biopic Creation (based upon the book Annie’s Box), the anonymous author […]

Trudging Through Fossil Hunter

Trudging Through Fossil Hunter
Trudging Through Fossil Hunter
True to my word I have been reading John Olson’s creationism-infused novel Fossil Hunter. I am at approximately the halfway point, but I can’t say I have been enjoying it very much (though it is much better than Frank Peretti’s Monster). This is not so much because of the book’s creationist themes, which have yet […]

Creationism where it belongs, in the fiction section

Creationism where it belongs, in the fiction section
Creationism where it belongs, in the fiction section
Today Greg Laden mentioned a paleontology-based creationist novel that was bundled in with the Expelled marketing campaign called Fossil Hunter. Some of you may recall that I mentioned the book about a year ago but never got around to reading it/posting about it. Since I went to all the trouble of getting a used copy […]
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