I was honored when the Jesus and Mo author asked me to update an old strip he/she did on evolution. It was a good strip to begin with, and I simply added a few lines of evidence for evolution that the artist had neglected. Now I’m famous, for the author noted on today’s strip: “I asked the famous biologist Jerry Coyne to edit this one from last year, and he agreed! It’s much more scientifically sound now. Thanks, Jerry.” Yay!
Don’t forget that the author is on Patreon, and for as little a dollar a month (you spend four times that much on a latte on Starbucks!), you can support this important strip. Or give more if you have it. The artist is up to $872 per month, and it would be nice to get it up to a cool grand. Pity there’s no Muslim equivalent of the fatuous “Uncommon Descent” ID site so they could get the vapors over this one.
Oh, and remember that Muslims tend to be creationists, even in the West, for strict adherence to the Qur’an means that even Muslim “faith schools” that teach evolution adhere to a form of human exceptionalism, whereby evolution might be true but Allah created humans specially and out of nothing.
Don’t worry, I’m sure UD is up to the challenge (of getting the vapors, that is).
I’ve subscribed my dollar a month. It’s painless.
sub
sub, too.
3⃣
oops
4️⃣ or 5️⃣ (I’m confused now.)
I spent so much time finding the right emoji that I forgot to tick the boxes. 😳
Harun Yahya just caught a few wafting vapors underneath his Atlas of Creation mask.
I saw an intersting article on Harun Yahya earlier this year.
The Islamic Sex Cult Supporting Turkey’s Prime Minister
Harun learns about sexual dimorphism and sexual selection by proxy. His Darwinian impulses are working their subconscious magic on him even while he sleeps (The Atlas of Sensation).
Oh, by the Power of Greystoke (or whatever that bullshit is) ; I just realised that I’m likely to end up crossing swords with that bunch of shoe-size IQs towards the end of the year. Cheers! Not.
A muslim recently tried to advise me to read an over thirty years old book by Kurtén which allegedly disputed the common origin of modern apes and humans from an ape ancestor. Looking into how he might have come across this book by a credible scholar, who was understandably working at his time from knowledge which did not yet include thorough DNA research (chromosome 2 fusion), I found that Kurtén is systematically used and presumably misrepresented and quotemined by notorious Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya.
Unsurprisingly, muslim creationists enjoy the same m.o. as Christian ones, namely regurgitating through the grapevine what a single propagandist said somewhere, without understanding the science and scientific history or the context, or being familiar with easily available refutations and criticisms of the dishonesty and ignorance of creationists. It simply eludes them that science is a progressive endeavor, not handed down by rare authorities to be memorized and parroted like scripture, unchanged, untested and un-amended for centuries.
“It simply eludes them that science is a progressive endeavor, not handed down by rare authorities to be memorized and parroted like scripture, unchanged, untested and un-amended for centuries.”
That’s a very good point. To them, it’s as if it’s one book versus another, the bible versus Darwin. The idea of convergent and independent evidence is alien to them, never mind the massive such evidence that establishes evolution as fact.
Yes, I like that quote, too.
It doesn’t just apply to Muslim creationists either. You can throw it at the entire “all beliefs are based on faith” crowd — which is a pretty big crowd. There seems to be something in human nature which enjoys thinking of knowledge as received wisdom, like children being told what they have to remember by a trusted grown-up.
The misuse of Kurten by creationists is all the more idiotic in that Kurten never doubted that humans had evolved from earlier primates, he simply thought that the hominid line had split off much earlier than we now believe to be the case, back sometime in the Oligocene if I remember correctly. Better fossil evidence and the avalanche of data from molecular biology have killed off that idea, but it wasn’t a totally unreasonable scenario when Kurten was writing.
“like children being told what they have to remember by a trusted grown-up.”
Another strong point that I think often has a lot to do with the intransigence of religious belief. It might pose the biggest problem when one’s parents are basically loving, intelligent, and trustworthy. Why would such parents mislead you on a topic so important and that penetrates so deeply in one’s culture and heritage? Now you’re not just questioning the faith, you are questioning multiple, significant relationships. Perhaps it’s better just to stay with the program. (I didn’t–well, mostly I haven’t.)
John Wilkins has a paper on the tendencies of the anti-science crowd – worth reading.
philpapers.org/archive/WILTSR.doc
I have run into this sort of argument as well. To a fundamentalist, truth is revealed and passed on by authorities. A belief must be absolute, and any doubt or discord is a worrisome sign of schism within the church. So when they hear of any debates between evolutionist authorities about this or that detail in evolution science, they regard this as a sign of weakness.
+1
Such occasions are a fine moment to remind them of centuries of very much not peaceful discord among believers in general and theologians in particular, all of which have been resolved either not at all or simply by censorship, threats and violence. Meanwhile science has tested itself against reality and evidently and undeniably produced tons of applicable knowledge by discarding bad ideas. Creationists enjoy these products a lot. They can’t be made aware of the dissonance between their denialism of the methods and their embrace of the products often enough.
Well, I did buy the t-shirt.
I plan on wearing it to the Atheist Alliance convention in Seattle this weekend. But not on the plane. At the convention.
Do you think that if you wore it for the plane you might be suspected of being one of those atheist suicide terrorists?
I just think that it would be wiser if I didn’t place any dependence on the reasoning powers or sense of humor of the TSA.
That is, I’m less likely to regret not wearing it then and there. I’m not a Penn Gillette, who invents subtle ways to piss them off and then uses the resulting inconvenience as material.
Besides, the convention doesn’t start proper till the next day.
Unfortunately, that is a wise choice. The TSA does not take kindly to pro-Islamic t-shirts! 😉
I’ll start re-packing the bags. I was going to take my “Too stupid to understand science? Try religion!” shirt, but since it’s Germany, I think a J’n’M shirt should be fine.
I’ve posted this before, but just trying to get more support for the artist. If you donate $4 a month “D” will write a “Clerihew” for you. This was mine. I was chuffed!
“Hi Mark Here’s your clerihew:
Mark Richardson
Is no friend to witch or nun
Being of a rational bent,
He gave up religion for Lent
(This was a tough one!) Thanks again! D”
But I gave up religion AND Lent 🙂
Cool rhyme on your name – worthy of Tom Lehrer.
Nice, both Jerry and J&M artist!
That’s so cool! I fantasize about meeting a barmaid as smart as that.
AS a web cartoonist myself, I’m very pleased to see a great web comic get the attention it deserves!