Report on a Creation Evidence Expo

On Biodork there’s a guest post reporting a visit by several skeptics/atheists to a Creation “Evidence” Expo held recently in Indianapolis. A couple of excerpts to entice you to read it all:

It turns out creationism is still alive and kicking. Okay, maybe not kicking so much as floundering so it doesn’t drown.

Of some note, creationists have already picked up the ENCODE project’s “80% of the genome is functional” meme that’s polluting mainstream media and the blogosphere. (See T. Ryan Gregory for a representative critique of the PR misrepresentations of the ENCODE papers, and Nature News for an overview of some of the critiques. And here’s Nature’s portal to the ENCODE data.) At the Creation “Evidence” Expo YEC Nuclear chemist Dr. Jay Wile is reported to have used ENCODE’s bogus ‘80% functional’ claim:

He began quoting biology books from 1989 and talking about “junk DNA”. He informed the audience that junk DNA doesn’t exist because god made us and that they now know 80% of what our DNA does.

Ewan Birney, lead coordinator of ENCODE, has a lot to answer for.