Ray Comfort being interviewed on Atheist Experience on local public access television in Austin, TX:

Un-fucking-believable. (How do you manage to sound like a blithering idiot within a minute-and-a-half of being introduced? Especially when 45 seconds of that time is eaten up by host introductions.) I watched about 25 minutes before my head exploded.

There’s a lot of nutcases out there.

OK, now I’ve officially heard everything. I’ve changed my mind–this guy is f-ing hilarious! I think he’s pulling a Steven Colbert-style satirical swindle on all of us.

From Pharyngula.

Is this modern-day Tennessee, or 1925? Hard to tell. From Panda’s Thumb:

Unable to deny the word of god to his students or himself, Joe Wilkey walks a thin line between science and religion…

No he doesn’t; he spews unadulterated horseshit. Perhaps he should watch some Eugenie Scott to bring himself up to speed.

Update: It turns out Ray Comfort* is a demonstrable liar. (OK, this is no surprise: he’s been a demonstrable liar on many issues for years. But here’s a nice, concrete example that he’s a demonstrable liar on this particular issue.) In addition to being disingenuous and despicable, turns out he’s also an intellectually dishonest plagiarist. Apparently, What Would Jesus Do? is copy and paste the text of a Darwin biography directly into your introduction, without appropriate citation.

Actually, this situation is even worse than what I was going to blame him for: I had assumed that the various stories I’d seen about this were all referring to the same instance of plagiarism. As it turns out, don’t give a guy like Comfort the benefit of the doubt: There are two separate issues of plagiarism in the first five pages of his introduction! He lifts an entire timeline of Darwin’s life into his book with a citation at the very end, suggesting that only the last statement is being cited, rather than a two-page hunk of text copied verbatim. And he appears to have lifted the preceding biographical essay nearly entire without any citation whatsoever!

And unsurprisingly, what changes there are in the copied text tend to be insulting to Darwin: Changing “in his youth he demonstrated predilections for hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation” to “young Charles showed less interest in studying than in hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation”; “In 1839 he married Emma Wedgwood” to “In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood”; etc. So, in the entire first five pages – and there’s an entire page of illustration – it looks like he might have written half a page himself.

(Just so I don’t get accused of plagiarism, thanks to PZ Myers for covering this.  )

In other evolutionary update news, check out this week’s Scientific American Podcast, with several concrete examples that one can use to smack people like Comfort upside the head, including the evolution of lactose digestion in adult humans, evolution of malaria resistance through non-ideal means, and NOVA’s new three-part series on human evolution, “Becoming Human” (part one, covering ~7-2 million years ago, was pretty good!)

*For those of you who don’t regularly follow Comfort, his partner-in-stupid is Kirk Cameron. Yes, that Kirk Cameron. No, seriously. No, for real seriously. I know – Reality has just Poe’s Law‘ed itself.

Starving, exhausted, lobotomized fish in a nearly-empty barrel.

Creationist nut-bag Ray atheists’-nightmare banana-fetishist Comfort has had the audacity (bad judgement? misfortune?) to go mano a stupido with actual scientist and non-crazy-person Dr. Eugenie Scott in a resent set of essays on the US News & World Report Blog. (Dragon*Con-ers may remember Dr. Scott from Skeptrack this year.) Comfort starts out . . . strong? Well, he starts out . . . and gets knocked down, but he gets up again (you’re never going to keep him down!) – oh wait, yes you are. And Dr. Scott does so handily.

Comfort’s arguments really are almost indescribably bad (he says, immediately before going on to attempt to describe them). Fallatious arguments abound: ad hominems, quotes out of context, straw men, special pleading, moving the goalposts, non sequiturs, appeal to consequences (hell, it takes him all of five paragraphs to smack into Godwin’s Law!). These essays, and everything Comfort has ever done, frankly, are such a mess of ignorance, mischaracterisation, and misinformation that they pretty much devolve to the level of Gish Gallop: he gives so much bad, innaccurate data so fast that’s wrong on so many levels, that a step-by-step refutation becomes impossible in the allotted space. For instance, here is his “argument” that evolution is wrong because of the problem of the evolution of sex:

[E]volution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

This argument is so blitheringly stupid, and is wrong on so many (basic) levels that even having it postulated in a “serious” debate makes my eyes bleed. Fortunately, it also makes him sound like a raving loon.

The sad thing is that people like Comfort, who is at best a complete idiot, and at worst an outright liar, are given such prominent stages from which to present their arguments, as if they weren’t definitively refuted long ago. Of course debate of contentious issues should be fostered in the public arena, but you don’t see them giving Time Cube Guy a chance to debate his position on ABC’s Nightline. Why? Because he is clearly nuts, and any rational person can see that his arguments are ridiculous. It’s about time to start treating Ray Comfort the same way.

For a cogent and thoroughly watchable discussion of “Why Evolution Is True” (and a pallet-cleanser to get all the Comfort out of your system), check out this recent lecture Jerry Coyle at the AAI conference in Californina:

Particularly nice was his inclusion of the excellent transitional fossil record of whales, which Comfort claims is completely missing – something that further shows that he is either completely out of his depth, or is deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Or both.

A follow-up of sorts on my earlier post about local mayoral candidate Bill Foster and his belief that there are dinosaurs in the Bible. Today the St. Petersburg Times ran the results of recent polling of “likely voters” on subjects that have to do with next month’s mayoral election. One of the questions asked was “Bill Foster believes the earth was created in six literal days and that, contrary to the view of most scientists, dinosaurs and humans lived on earth at the same time. How much does this concern you?” The results of that poll were as follows.

A lot – 27%

Some – 12%

A little – 15%

Not at all – 44%

Don’t know/Refused – 2%

I suppose the good news here for those of us with a rational, evidence-based worldview is that at least 54% of likely voters (as I understand it, likely voters are usually self-identified during the polling process) don’t agree with Bill Foster’s Young Earth creationism. I say “at least” because it’s possible there are people in the 44% who say they aren’t worried by his Young Earth views who don’t agree with those views, but don’t feel the need to take them into account when voting for a mayoral candidate. It may be a small group, but I bet it exists. (It’s tough to imagine that the opposite group could exist: people who are worried by Foster’s beliefs and agree with them.)

Certainly, I wish the number of my fellow citizens who accepted science was higher, but at least we’re not in the minority in St. Pete.

This week’s two-hour long Nova, titled “Darwin’s Darkest Hour,” was really excellent. The exposition was occasionally (OK, frequently) heavy-handed, but probably out of necessity. But the settings were gorgeous, the acting was good, and it was very historically accurate. True, Darwin is suspiciously handsome, but I suppose that’s to be expected. Also (coolness), they present some scenes set at London’s Natural History Museum that were either filmed there, or are very accurately recreated. And, when Darwin meets with John Gould, a couple of the cases displayed in his office appear to be very recognizable currently-exhibited NHM cases displaying quite extraordinary Victorian collections of exotic birds.*

(The movie also features an awful lot of cetaceans and penguins jumping majestically out of the sea–but I assume that was mostly for Joël’s benefit.)

I’m writing this while watching – Darwin just puked in the Andes. Historical verisimilitude! And, for some reason, he’s dressed like Doctor Who.

I don’t know enough about the actual historical record, and, given that it’s the Victorian age, maybe it’s an accurate portrayal, but Emma Darwin is presented as a bit of a flighty sounding board for the brilliant man to bounce his ideas off of. “Can you explain that to me? I’m just a woman.” She does have a certain strength that shores him up, but there’s something grating about her naïvety. It gets a little old.

They (the Darwins) do have a practice of giving a daily beer to their mailman, of which I must heartily approve. I also like the abundant in-jokes, like quotes from the Origin, an edge-of-screen shot of the B-tree, and the inclusion of Linnaean Society president’s comment that “The year… has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize… the department of science on which they bear” – it’s like a goddamn comic book movie for evolution nerds.

OK, still watching it – Emma Darwin is literally kneeling and praying by her bed, after having her spiritual world rocked by the Big D., when he gently knocks on the door, enters, and starts making out with her (in a very sexy Victorian nightgown) (Emma, not Charles)! Creepy.

But why, why did they have to begin the program with the disclaimer:

The following program contains material that may be considered offensive.

Offensive?! Well, I suppose that make-out scene was a little offensive. And I guess it’s the best that can be expected from a local affiliate these days – at least the show itself didn’t pull any punches.

*The cases themselves are beautiful works of art, and the contents are stunning. But the specimens are displayed in that singularly disturbing Victorian death-in-life style, akin to death photography, that seems to have fueled Tim Burton’s nightmares. The best part of those (and similar) display cases in the Natural History Museum (including the one holding the dodos) are the little attached notes, which say, effectively, “Yes, these are all very rare, very beautiful animals that were killed, stuffed, and returned to England for public display. We’re very, very sorry, but that’s how they did things back then. And, since they’re already dead, we may as well and go ahead and display them, right? Also, here’s a nearly-extinct stuffed tiger.”