A Moron Interviews a Liar

This is a sickeningly shameful performance by Fox News (which has apparently just come completely off the rails lately) wherein some idiot reporter who obviously has no idea what he’s talking about (which describes nearly all reporters) interviewing a smug liar. Casey Luskin is lying through his teeth here, and he knows it. Let’s see if we can count the lies.

I can’t embed the video here, so pop over to LGF and watch it. It’s under three minutes long. I’ll wait.

Back? OK. I’m not going to count the idiotic things the reporter said. Let’s just concentrate on the demonstrable falsehoods uttered by Luskin.

• “textbooks…censor the science that challenges Darwin”. FALSE. It is not censorship when you don’t print crackpot theories. It is not censorship when textbooks don’t print the phlogiston theory. That’s because there is no evidence to support it, and all available evidence points a different direction. Also, IDiots like Luskin try to hang the word “Darwinism” around evolution as if it were just another philosophy. In fact, there is no such thing as Darwinism except in the minds of creationists. There is only science, and there is so much evidence for evolution now that even if you discount everything Darwin ever wrote it would still have to be considered a fact.
• “this is not about teaching creationism”. FALSE. So-called Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in drag. This has been demonstrated multiple times, including in court, and with the Discovery Institute’s very own documents.
• “…evidence that challenges evolution.” FALSE. There isn’t any. And it’s not because scientists are hegemonic lemmings. Scientists go where the data lead. The problem is that now there is so much fossil and genetic evidence that it is completely overwhelming. Absolutely everything in modern biology depends on common ancestry, or evolution. When all of the evidence supports a hypothesis and none of it contradicts, it is called a theory. That means you can make predictions with it and treat it as a fact. If the DI has any evidence contradicting evolution they should publish it.
• Haekel’s Embryos in modern textbooks. FALSE. One of the few things he said that was true is that those illustrations were debunked decades ago. That would be why they aren’t in any modern textbooks. And the fact that they are false in no way falsifies the theory of evolution. This is just more fallacious thinking on the part of the IDiots. The mountains of evidence for common ancestry are in our DNA, not any old drawings. He’s shooting squid’s ink here.
• Darwin’s Tree of Life is full of holes, therefore evolution is wrong. FALSE. More selective quotations from the IDiots. It’s true that some scientists are questioning Darwin’s simple, branching tree. But, as I’ve pointed out before, evolution is not Darwin. Instead of a tree, life may be more of a web due to “horizontal gene transfer” or, simply put, interbreeding.

Other cases of HGT in multicellular organisms are coming in thick and fast. HGT has been documented in insects, fish and plants, and a few years ago a piece of snake DNA was found in cows. The most likely agents of this genetic shuffling are viruses, which constantly cut and paste DNA from one genome into another, often across great taxonomic distances. In fact, by some reckonings, 40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions.

This in no way nullifies Darwin’s insight about natural selection and descent with modification:

…the tree concept could become biology’s equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world.

• “We don’t support the teaching of creationism”. FALSE. (See above)
• “The best science shows that there’s a scientific controversy over this.” FALSE There is absolutely no scientific controversy. Evolution is the only theory there is for speciation. There are no competing theories.

A minimum of seven falshoods in three minutes. Fox should be absolutely ashamed of this. It’s yet another data point to support my contention that no TV “news” program should be trusted about anything, ever.

Update:

Apparently this “Trouble with Textbooks” feature is an ongoing piece shilling for a book of the same name. If you got past the faux religion in part one, you’ll love part 2, which turns this book into an important-sounding “study”. Now, I’m sure that most textbooks are indeed politically correct, meaning in part that they have to be hostile to anything Judeo-Christian and friendly to Islam. But the relentless religious nature of these features on Fox really puts the phony “science” in this one into context.

There are more of these than I’m willing to watch. Knock yourself out, though.

Hobbit News

I’ve been following the story of the Flores “Hobbits” for a while. Some of this is new, though. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time — a more-than-unlikely scenario — they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.

For Jungers and colleagues, this suggests “that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented,” the researchers conclude.

Companion studies, published online in the Journal of Human Evolution, bolster this theory by looking at other parts of the anatomy, and conjecture that these more ancient forebear may be the still poorly understood Homo habilis.

Either way, their status as a separate species would be confirmed.

As Charles points out over at LGF this could cause some discomfort amongst creationists. And do watch the video. In spite of some cheesy parts, there are some good interviews and it does a decent job of painting a picture.

While the odds are against it, just how cool would it be to find these guys still alive?

Hail Montana

The state of Montana is challenging the Federal Government.

The Montana State Legislature recently passed legislation, which was signed into law by the Democratic Govenor Brian Schweitzer, which exempts citizens of Montana from federal background check requirements if a gun was made in Montana, sold to a resident of Montana, and intended to remain within Montana.

The idea behind this is that if the gun remains within the state then the commerce clause of the U.S. constitution does not apply and the Federal Government would not be allowed to regulate the sale or distribution of these firearms. This is an interesting concept, and is sure to generate a fight. This one could get really ugly, really fast.

What a beautiful idea. Who knew that legislators could actually think?

Oprah Tries To Kill Children

By promoting the dangerous lunatic Jenny McCarthy and, by extension, her anti-vaccine agenda Oprah is putting children in mortal danger. Jonathan Adler asks if Winfrey has no shame. That’s a strange question to ask about someone who puts herself on the cover of her own magazine every month.

A desperate grasp at a silver lining:

McCarthy’s quite dingy and can’t spell to save her life — “grimmess” for “grimace” in this blog post — so maybe people will stop taking her anti-vaccine ravings all that seriously and the Oprah-enhanced part of her career will be short-lived. For our children’s sake, I hope so.

I’m not so hopeful. Life-saving vaccination is under attack from many fronts.

Update:

I’m not crying wolf here.

Parental doubts about the safety of childhood vaccinations are leading to outbreaks of largely eradicated diseases like measles and whooping cough, doctors warned in a new report.

A U.S. measles outbreak last year — almost exclusively among unvaccinated people — has sparked concern about places where many parents opt out of having their children vaccinated.

Convincing people not to vaccinate their kids is the hight of irresponsibility. Anybody not vaccinating their kids should be arrested for child endangerment. In fact, they should also be arrested for assault, because their malfeasance affects all of the rest of us. If someone walked into a mall and started randomly throwing bricks at people they’d be cuffed and hauled away. How is this any different, other than disease is slower than bricks?

Pile Driver Jam

Construction on Pixar’s Phase Two building has reached the pile-driving stage. We’re on loose soil that used to be part of the Bay, so over five hundred giant concrete columns will be driven into the ground. Some are annoyed by the sound.

Others hear music.