Read alla bout it! Radical Muslim organization Answers in Koran opens theme park in Kentucky. In rare display of ecumenism, governor promises additional theme parks dedicated to Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, and Scientology:

Gov. Beshear [says] that even though he might not agree with the religious message of the park, the economic benefits of Koran Kountry make it worthy of his administration’s support.

“I wasn’t elected to debate religion,” Beshear said. “I was elected to create jobs.”

Thanks again to Dan Phelps for the link.

Polish your lenses (but not dry, please) – this post announces the fourth Panda’s Thumb photography contest,

Lab Rats

The winners will receive the usual great deal of satisfaction and a so far unspecified prize.

Argoflex twin-lens reflex camera.

The theme of the contest is lab rats, by which we mean any object of experimentation or observation, from single-celled organisms, through nematodes, fruit flies, rats, chimpanzees, and undergraduates to volcanoes, stars, and galaxies. In order not to omit theoreticians, we will consider computer-generated pictures and also photographs of equipment, such as computers. Photomicrographs and electron micrographs are likewise welcomed.

Similarly, in order not to omit laypersons, we will have a second, general category, which includes pictures of just about anything of scientific interest. If we get enough entries, consistently with Rules 12 and 13, we may divide either category and award additional prizes, presuming, of course, that we can find some prizes.

The rules will be substantially the same as last year’s and will be posted in detail on Monday, July 30, at noon, Mountain Daylight Time (UTC - 6 h). We will accept entries from July 30 through August 13, inclusive.

We will leave this post in place for one week.

Wiley’s Non Sequitur cartoon for today, June 18, 2012, “very nicely captures the problem of the creation laws,” as my colleague Kim Johnson very nicely put it

Ratio Christi is a new-ish college campus oriented apologetics organization whose Wright State University (Ohio) chapter’s goal “… is to populate heaven by planting seeds of Truth into the minds of atheists, agnostics, skeptics, and spiritual seekers.” If one is so inclined, one can earn a Certificate in Christian Apologetics from Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles) at a discount through Ratio Christi. In some ways Ratio Christi looks like a sort of successor to Casey Luskin’s now-defunct IDEA center.

Like Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, Ratio Christi is heavy on anti-evolution. It’s recommended resources include books and papers by Disco ‘Tute stalwarts like Michael Behe, David Berlinski, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and Jonathan Wells, along with Fuzzy Rana of Reasons to Believe, young earth creationist Paul Garner, and apologetics philosopher Alvin Plantinga.

The subtitle of this book is “Confessions of a religious paleontologist,” but you will find only one confession: that the author, Robert Asher, believes in God. More on that later.

The heart of the book is 8 chapters that irrefutably demonstrate descent with modification. I found much of the book compelling, but also fairly difficult and much more detailed than I thought appropriate for a lay audience. A number of times, Asher uses a term that is obviously well known to biologists, but known to me only vaguely if at all – and I have been a fellow traveler in biology for approximately a decade. Pseudogene, for example, appears, undefined, in the very last sentence of the chapter that describes the evolution of whales from terrestrial to marine animals. I looked it up in the index and found that it is defined, implicitly at best, 50 pages later.

No, I am not fooling or exaggerating. You may see a billboard here. As nearly as I can tell, they are serious about it.

Thanks to Dan Phelps for the link.

Florida Citizens for Science points to the existence of a new group, Citizens for Objective Public Education, and says,

I have an assignment for you folks. The national science standards that many states, including Florida, are considering adopting are predictably under fire due to the prominence of evolution in the draft document. Kansas has hit the news first, firing the initial shot: Kan. official wants evolution concerns considered,

referring to an AP release which is posted in somewhat longer form here. According to an AP release datelined Topeka,

By Yan Linhart, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder

Lou Guillette, an expert on sexual development, explained to a congressional committee in 1993 that sperm counts have been decreasing for decades and warned the congressmen, “Every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was!” Since Guillette’s testimony, we have learned further that the sex ratios of newborn babies are changing in some industrialized regions: the proportion of newborn males to females is decreasing.

These dramatic changes are associated with our increasing exposure to multiple chemicals and may shape our evolution as a species. Gender-bending chemicals affect some individuals more than others and some populations more than others. In addition, they can reduce the frequency of fertile males in populations of humans and wildlife.

Well, I just got interviewed about this, so I suppose I should blog it! Today a review paper is coming out in Nature entitled “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere” (Nature, UC Berkeley press release) It is getting a huge amount of press, in part because of the message, and in part because of the upcoming United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The message of the paper is that, while much is uncertain, we think that the biosphere – the global community of species and ecosystems – is heading for a “state shift”, or “tipping point”, due to human activity. More on what exactly this means in a moment.

Troy Britain at Playing Chess with Pigeons does an exceedingly thorough job on creationist and IDist blather about gill slits in embryology, and in the process provides some nice historical context. Recommended.

And for the “ID isn’t religious” crowd out there, IDists Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe of the Disco ‘Tute’s Biologic Institute, along with the DI’s attack gerbil Casey Luskin, have a new book called Science and Human Origins coming out in which they “…debunk recent claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple.” An intelligent design argument for a literal Adam and Eve, anyone? The Discovery Institute is becoming more and more overtly creationist, with apologetics overwhelming any scientific aspirations it might once have had. And after all, what do those dumb population geneticists know?

As most here know, ScienceBlogs has moved to National Geographic (well, not literally moved, but is now somehow affiliated with NatGeo), and also just migrated to WordPress. That has caused some problems. One problem I found today was that Google Reader no longer recognizes new posts on Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog. I had to resubscribe in the reader to get the new posts.

The problem appears to be general across ScienceBlogs–it’s the same in Aardvarchaeology and Greg Laden’s Blog.

Commenting is still screwed up over there, too, and they are aware of it. But to get new ScienceBlogs posts it looks like you’ll have to resubscribe in Google Reader.

Whilst spending the afternoon catching up on the 1,000+ unread posts in nearly 200 blogs in my reader, I happened onto a two week old post on Exploring our Matrix pointing to a post by Fred Clark at Slacktivist on the Patheos Progressive Christian channel titled Answers in Genesis teaches how not to read a story. An excerpt to whet your appetite:

The beginnings of the Clovis culture date back to around 13,500 years ago. The newer findings suggest people had arrived in North America even earlier – as early as 14,300 years ago. Allow me to translate those figures for my young-earth creationist, illiteralist fundamentalist friends. The godless scientists used to believe that the first humans arrived in North America 7,484 years before you think the Bible says the universe was created, but now the godless scientists have found evidence that humans were here at least 8,284 years before the creation of the universe.

I know, I know, picking on the young-earth creationists is too easy. Fish in a barrel and all that.

But they invite it. They’re not just wrong, but audaciously wrong. The weirdness of their conclusions becomes all the more horrifying when you try to trace the arcane routes they traveled to arrive at them.

Don’t miss the dig at a freethought billboard for taking the creationists’ literalist Biblical exegesis (semi-)seriously by calculating rainfall rates for Da Flood.

For my sins I’m on AIG’s emailing list, so I get regular invitations to various YEC and apologetics events. I got this one just the other day:

Voddie Baucham at Proclaiming the Faith 2012

We are excited to announce that Dr. Voddie Baucham of Voddie Baucham Ministries and pastor of the Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, Texas, will be joining us at the Proclaiming the Faith family conference in Branson Missouri this July! Voddie was one of the favorite speakers with us two years ago at our family conference in Sevierville, Tennessee.

The following quote from Grace Family Baptist website describes Dr. Baucham’s unique style of teaching:

Voddie makes the Bible clear and demonstrates the relevance of God’s word to everyday life. However, he does so without compromising the centrality of Christ and the gospel. Those who hear him preach find themselves both challenged and encouraged.

Voddie’s area of emphasis is Cultural Apologetics. Whether teaching on classical apologetic issues like the validity and historicity of the Bible, or the resurrection of Christ; or teaching on biblical manhood/womanhood, marriage and family, he helps ordinary people understand the significance of thinking and living biblically in every area of life.

Joining Dr. Baucham will be Todd Friel from Wretched Radio, Mark Spence of Ray Comfort’s School of Biblical Evangelism, Ken Ham, and all your favorite AiG speakers.

This is a summer experience you don’t want to miss! Bring your whole family for a week of fun, teaching, and a challenge to proclaim your faith.

Register online today at www.proclaimingthefaith.org.

I don’t think I could take Ken Ham and a Ray (Banana Man) Comfort minion on the same program. I don’t have Jason Rosenhouse’s forebearance.

I read Public money finds back door to private schools in the NYTimes last night and planned to post on it this evening, but Jerry Coyne beat me to it. I’ll quote just a bit from the story and refer you to Coyne’s post:

Mr. Arnold, the headmaster of the Covenant Christian Academy in Cumming, Ga., confirmed that his school used those texts but said they were part of a larger curriculum.

“You have to keep in mind that the curriculum goes beyond the textbook,” Mr. Arnold said. “Not only do we teach the students that creation is the way the world was created and that God is in control and he made all things, we also teach them what the false theories of the world are, such as the Big Bang theory and Darwinism. We teach those as fallacies.”

With creationist books from Bob Jones University and A Beka bought via donations that yielded state tax credits for the donors.