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.

Here in St. Petersburg, the November mayoral election has come down to a choice between two distinct candidates: lawyer and former city council member Bill Foster, and lawyer and former city council member Kathleen Ford. While there are plenty of important issues facing the electorate, I would like to highlight one minor sideshow of interest to skeptics.

Back in September, the St. Petersburg Times reported that candidate Bill Foster is a young Earth creationist. He says this shouldn’t matter, and it’s up to voters to decide if that’s true. Luckily, the mayor has little power over public education. But I was struck by the following, which verges on a factual claim:

“Dinosaurs are mentioned in Job, so I don’t have any problem believing that dinosaurs roamed the earth,” [Foster] said, referring to the book of Job, which mentions the “behemoth.” He said he believes dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, though most scientists say there is a gap of at least 60 million years between dinosaurs and mankind.

Leaving aside that whole 65-million-year gap, are dinosaurs mentioned in the Book of Job? That’s certainly an interesting claim, and one I’d like to examine.

The Book of Job is part of the Hebrew Bible, and is accepted as part of the Old Testament by Christians. In it God and Satan (not the devil, but another deity that acts as God’s enforcer) discuss the pious man Job. To discover the source of Job’s piety God instructs Satan to destroy Job’s life. Job’s worldly possessions are all destroyed, and his children are killed. Job still doesn’t curse God, so God gives Satan permission to physically harm Job as much as possible without killing him. Job is inflicted with boils and other horrible diseases. Finally, Job breaks and laments that he was ever born. What follows is debate among Job and his friends over why Job suffers so. This goes on for a while, until God, in the form of a whirlwind, interrupts and proceeds to kvetch to Job about how hard it is to be God and how Job should just be glad that there’s someone willing to do it. It’s in this part of the story, as God describes some of the more high-maintenance parts of His creation, that Christian fundamentalists find a description of a dinosaur:

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.

Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly.

He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him.

Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play.

He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens.

The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about.

Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.

(From the King James Bible.)

The first thing that strikes me is that this description isn’t very descriptive. The Behemoth is big and strong and eats a lot, but what does it actually look like? The passage says almost nothing on the subject. No “he hath a head like a snake” or “he resembleth a giant lizard.” How do Biblical literalists get a dinosaur out of the passage? They focus on the line “He moveth his tail like a cedar.” The only animal, they claim, with a tail that resembles a tree (or at least a tree trunk) is a dinosaur. Creationists.org is quite adamant on this point, and other fundamentalist scholars make similar arguments. But why describe the physical appearance of only the tail of the Behemoth, when most of the other lines are similes about strength? The answer can be found by looking at the passage in the original Hebrew:

His tail hardens like a cedar; the sinews of his testicles are knit together.

(Translation by Rabbi A.J. Rosenberg)

It’s a bit more obvious that the “tail” being referred to is not a literal tail, but something else. Something attached to the testicles, something that gets hard like a tree, and something that is called throughout the Bible by many euphemisms, including “tail,” “thigh” and “foot.”

I think it’s safe to say that the Behemoth is a giant bull. All the attributes given to it match those of a bull, and the lack of a physical description would suggest it’s an animal that would have been familiar to the Hebrews. Furthermore, God’s explanation of its place in the scheme of creation is similar to that of the “Bull of Heaven” of Sumerian mythology and the Epic of Gilgamesh, down to it drinking up whole rivers. This would make sense because the Book of Job may be based on an earlier Sumerian story. In any case there’s absolutely no part of the passage that is more likely to be referring to a dinosaur than some mundane (if mythologically embiggened) animal.

It’s disturbing that Bill Foster is using badly translated literature from 2500 years ago to form his view of the natural world rather than taking time to learn about the facts.

"Behemoth and Leviathan" by William Blake. I'm guessing Blake imagined Behemoth to be a hippopotamus. The dragon is Leviathan, which is a whole other can of worms.