A nice presentation about fossils and “transitional forms” that makes good use of basic analogy.

(H/T to REAL Science>

This is the last in a three-part series (the first is here, the second here).
Bruce Chapman had this to say yesterday:

[T]he new standards are just fine, an improvement, in fact. Now teachers can tell the kids about the scientific evidence in a variety of fields that seems to contradict the Darwinian account as well as the supposed evidence in support.

Interesting; I never knew that teachers heretofore were barred from discussing actual evidence of any sort. And “seems,” Bruce? And “supposed”? The sun “seems” to revolve around the earth, but we don’t teach kids that it does, because we have “supposed evidence” to the contrary.
Chapman has patently defined “evidence” in two wildly different ways here. Rarely does one see such bold equivocation within a single sentence, even from these guys. How mindless, and sold on hokum in advance, do people have to be to lend a shred of credulity to such weaselly presentations? (Of course, maybe this is just one more way of “framing science,” which means it may even be ethical since it’s not coming from someone with any interest in valid science.)
The DI crew and scientists both know that there is no scientific evidence against evolution. If such evidence existed, it would stand front and center on the DI Web site, probably linked in huge text at the top of the home page, and would be right next to the evidence supporting Intelligent Design creationism if that existed. The absence of these things alone should be sufficient to convince anyone of the flakiness of the entire ID “movement,” but unfortunately religion scrambles minds in a uniquely ugly way.
By referring to something that isn’t there, but which millions of Lone Star Staters need to be there, the DI gang foments uncertainty without the need to put anything scientific in its place, since they knows well the default position of the faithful. And technically, if teachers in Texas could be counted on to do their jobs competently and with integrity, the idea of “examining all sides of scientific evidence” in the world of biology morphs trivially into “examine the evidence for evolution” and everyone is happy.
But of course the public doesn’t know these things; otherwise, circuses like the one that was just conducted would never happen in the first place. At present, the burden of colossal, willful, angry ignorance is so great in Texas that it very easily overwhelms facts when left unchecked and usually does so even when facts are placed front and center and with due equanimity. Creationist teachers abound, and the DI knows full well that an abdication of teaching evolution implies the support–to whatever extent the teacher can get away with it–of evolution. The DI pretends to shun religious explanations for the diversity of life on Earth, but this is an obvious lie; their aim is to position students’ minds so that creationism can be molded into ID creationism.
Of course, these people are screw-ups, and so, despite all of the practice they’ve had honing their dishonest talking points, they can’t help but screw up here and there, often without any cloaking at all. Witness Casey Luskin:

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I’m referring not to the evolution of Texas itself, of course–there’s little evidence that this brand of evolution actually occurs, be it naturally or by dint of human intervention–but to the ongoing efforts to poison the public-school science-teaching standards there.
Christopher Hitchens has written a piece for Newsweek addressing the issue.

Perhaps dimly aware that they don’t want a total victory, either, [Don] McLeroy and his allies now say that they ask for evolution to be taught only with all its “strengths and weaknesses.” But in this, they are surely being somewhat disingenuous. When their faction was strong enough to demand an outright ban on the teaching of what they call “Darwinism,” they had such a ban written into law in several states. Since the defeat and discredit of that policy, they have passed through several stages of what I am going to have to call evolution. First, they tried to get “secular humanism” classified as a “religion,” so that it would meet the First Amendment’s disqualification for being taught with taxpayers’ money. (That bright idea was Pat Robertson’s.) Then they came up with the formulation of “creation science,” picking up on anomalies and gaps in evolution and on differences between scientific Darwinists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Next came the ingratiating plea for “equal time”–what could be more American than that?–and now we have the rebranded new coinage of “intelligent design” and the fresh complaint that its brave advocates are, so goes the title of a recent self-pitying documentary, simply “expelled” from the discourse.
It’s not just that the overwhelming majority of scientists are now convinced that evolution is inscribed in the fossil record and in the lineaments of molecular biology. It is more that evolutionists will say in advance which evidence, if found, would refute them and force them to reconsider. (“Rabbit fossils in the pre-Cambrian layer” was, I seem to remember, the response of Prof. J.B.S. Haldane.) Try asking an “intelligent design” advocate to stipulate upfront what would constitute refutation of his world view and you will easily see the difference between the scientific method and the pseudoscientific one.
But that is just my opinion. And I certainly do not want it said that my side denies a hearing to the opposing one. In the spirit of compromise, then, I propose the following. First, let the school debating societies restage the wonderful set-piece real-life dramas of Oxford and Dayton, Tenn. Let time also be set aside, in our increasingly multiethnic and multicultural school system, for children to be taught the huge variety of creation stories, from the Hindu to the Muslim to the Australian Aboriginal. This is always interesting (and it can’t be, can it, that the Texas board holdouts think that only Genesis ought to be so honored?). Second, we can surely demand that the principle of “strengths and weaknesses” will be applied evenly. If any church in Texas receives a tax exemption, or if any religious institution is the beneficiary of any subvention from the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, we must be assured that it will devote a portion of its time to laying bare the “strengths and weaknesses” of the religious world view, and also to teaching the works of Voltaire, David Hume, Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. This is America. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. We may one day have cause to be grateful to the Texas Board of Education for lighting a candle that cannot be put out.

So what say the creationist readers of this blog (if any?) Does this sound like a fair deal? Or, as I suspect is the case, does the Christ myth not admit of any “weaknesses”?

This is a continuation of a post from yesterday, where I took great pains to introduce something no one else has figured out: that the Discovery Institute not only is filled with people who are dead wrong, but is a tremendous font of dishonesty, too.
Witness John West, unrepentant serial liar:

One has to wonder whether the Dallas Morning News reporter even attended today’s meeting of the Texas State Board of Education. It’s hard to tell from the garbled account the paper just published, which pretty much claims that the evolution dogmatists won everything … Most egregiously, the article fails to mention that the final standards preserve amendments added in January requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for major evolutionary claims such as natural selection, common ancestry, and mutations.

West posted three separate entries on Friday complaining that the media failed to emphasize the “analyze and evaluate” nonsense. Yes, we get the point–West wants the media to do his job for him and behave as though there exists scientific controversy over whether evolution occurs. But there’s a problem with West’s perseverating, because if you repeat something over and over, even people sold on your bullshit from the gate are going to eventually expect some evidence backing up what you’re saying or implying. West, of course, does not offer any links, anywhere, to scientific evidence refuting evolution, in whole or in any part. He just leaves the idea of it floating around out there, the same great rank intellectual fart as always, hoping no one will notice that what he and his fellow prevaricators continue cheerfully waving in everyone’s faces smells like anything but roses.
Then there’s West’s most hilarious whopper–the basis for the “concern troll” reference in the title of this post and its partners:

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Imagine a highly intelligent alien species landing on Earth and immediately availing itself of the knowledge humanity has acquired about how it and other organisms have, in biological terms, come to occupy their present niches in Earth’s various ecosystems. These aliens, armed with knowledge about earthly living cells and how information is chemically encoded therein, would quickly assimilate everything that has been proposed, tested, accepted, and rejected about evolution and evolution-like impostors (e.g., Lamarckism), and would surely be satisfied that evolution and its chief tenets (common descent with modification and natural selection acting on the substrate of genetic mutations) is sufficient–and even necessary–to explain the diversity of life on the third planet from what we call the Sun.
Given this, the aliens–who know nothing of religious thought–might be surprised to learn that a great many people are unhappy with this eminently satisfactory set of explanatory mechanisms, and are allegedly proposing alternatives. When informed of the movement known as “Intelligent Design,” they would no doubt peruse the writings put forth by the chief proponents of this alternative idea. Were they to visit Evolution News & Views, they would, availed of the Discovery Institute’s tireless insistence that evolution is a lie, have every reason to expect a compelling assembly of data- and experiment-driven presentations serving to build and bolster the case for ID. When, instead, they found not one example such a thing, only found page after page of hollow complaints about evolution unaccompanied by specifics about its alleged shortcomings, they would probably lose interest in our lowly species and toss a few supernukes over their shoulders as they sped off so as to guarantee that the worst of Earth’s poor thinking could never survive to infect faraway life forms who were themselves in the process of struggling to reach levels of genuine understanding about the world.
This is a long means of reiterating what most here already know: that the DI makes no pretense about trying to support its own “theory.” It never really did, but the bottom has really fallen out, for if you go to the EN&V site now and do a text search of the home page, the only mention of ID you will find is the hacks who contribute to this ongoing joke complaining perfunctorily that its critics just don’t get it. It’s quite blatant, but when attempting to stand by a dead ally, what can anyone do other than wail about those who desecrate the body?
Well, there’s the obvious–they can keep complaining about the unfair dominance of evolution, and so they do. But with the happenings in Texas in recent days, there’s a somewhat new twist: The DI is trying to portray itself as a champion of sound science and in the process making a heroic effort to keep a collective straight face. What its flacks are doing is nothing more than a clumsy rendition of the time-honored wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing gambit. Specifically, they are fixating on the amendment to the educational standards approved by the Texas State Board of Education that includes this language:

[Students must] analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations in all fields of science by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.

I’ll get to the problems with this, and how the DI lampoons itself in attempting to portray itself as an ally of science, in a post later today or tomorrow.