Science Education

As expected, a bunch of creationists wrote to complain that I disparaged the national embarrassment that is the Answers in Genesis “museum” outside Cincinnati.
Many of the letters were the typical personal attacks I’ve come to expect. After a while, though, they got repetitive and I stopped reading them.

Many quoted a response the AiG people posted to their Web site, supposedly refuting me.

“Aren’t you embarrassed to be refuted on the AiG site?” they crowed.

Well, no. Because the site didn’t actually refute me very well.

What the AiG article did was demonstrate a typical creationist trick: Take a few examples of things that seem to support them (distorting them as necessary) and completely ignore the thousands of examples that refute them.

I had said in my column that “museums” like AiG’s were bad for technology because they were bad for science education. Kids who believe the nonsense spouted there weren’t likely to create the technology we’ll want tomorrow.

The AiG folks jumped on that, pointing out, for example, “It was actually the creationist Robert Boyle who fathered modern chemistry” and “Lasers depend on electromagnetic radiation theory, which was pioneered by creationist James Clerk Maxwell” and “The creationist Wright brothers invented the airplane after studying God’s design of birds.”

Other creationists they mention were Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), as well as Pascal (1623-1662), Joule (1818-1889), and Pasteur (1822-1895).

All important, to be sure. And all, except for Orville Wright, dead for more than a century.

They didn’t like it when I said, “every kid whose parents take him to places like [the Creation Museum] can probably be scratched from the list of ‘America’s future scientists’.”

Their reply: “I guess that means that the list of Ph.D. creation scientists on our website should be deleted…”

They refer to a list of about 163 scientists who support creationism.
And that’s what I meant by taking a small example and trying to make it sound big. Because against that list of 163 comes another list — one at the National Center for Science Education. It’s PhDs who signed a statement that said, in part, “There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence.”

There are now about 550 signatures on the document — more than three times what the creationists have.

But wait. Here’s the fun part: The NCSE’s list is limited to PhDs (and the equivalent, such a MDs) named “Steve.”

So even limiting the list that way, they were able to get more signatures supporting evolution than AiG could get supporting creationism. FYI: About one percent of the U.S. population is named Steve, and about one percent have a PhD.

(The NCSE also has statements in support of evolution from dozens of scientific organizations including the American Anthropological Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Society of Biological Chemists, American Chemical Society, American Geological Institute, American Psychological Association, American Physical Society, National Academy of Sciences, Society for Neuroscience, Society of Physics Students, and Society of Systematic Biologists.)

They find that kind of support easy to ignore, I guess.

The AiG’s arguments continue to fit the pattern: Find a few examples that vaguely appear to make your case, and ignore the thousands upon thousands of examples that refute it.

Example: In a discussion on the site of how dinosaurs must have co-existed with humans (call it the “Hanna-Barbera theory”), Carl Wieland, founder of Creation magazine, explains that there is evidence.

“There are a number of anomalous finds,” he is quoted as saying, “such as the Tampa figurine, and the ‘Malachite Man’ remains in dinosaur rock in Utah.”

Sounds interesting, until you stop to realize that he offers only two “finds,” neither of which is anything more than “anomalous,” against thousands upon thousands of pieces of evidence that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago, and millions of years before humans.

By the way, if you’re curious and do a Google search on “Tampa figurine” you’ll find mostly quotes from Wieland.
And “Malachite Man” is regarded as a creationist hoax.

Yet another example of AiG’s tactic of taking small things and trying to make them sound big: On the site, as “evidence” of T. Rex and humans living together, are references to a 1997 article, “The Real Jurassic Park” in a short-lived consumer science magazine called Earth. It discussed the preliminary analysis of a bone from a T. Rex.

AiG says the article reports red blood cells being found. Sadly, that’s not true. The authors say quite clearly that what they found “were, at best, derived from blood, modified over the millennia by geological processes.”

If the truth don’t fit, AiG is happy to distort it. They have repeatedly referred to ‘T. Rex blood being found’ even though that’s not at all what the article said. (Read more of the lengths they go through to distort the facts at the Talk.Origins Archive.)

At this point, creationists often take a side trip to Dopesville with the argument, “Well, how do you know the dinosaurs were around millions of years ago? Were you there?”

Nope. I wasn’t in World War II, either, but I suspect that actually happened. And I guess these people believe we shouldn’t convict anyone of a crime unless there was an eyewitness; crime-scene evidence could never be enough, not by their logic.

And that’s why arguing with them is a waste of time. They do a very good job of coming up with slick-sounding but empty arguments, and drag you into an unending series of pointless discussions.