September 18, 2006

Creationists using Google Ads for fraudulent advertising

I'm checking out some science news, and a Sep. 18 article at PhysOrg.com (one of the science news sites I frequent; they have an RSS feed) with the title "Why Evolution Drives Some Cells to Altruism" looked interesting. So I click over to read the article, and I'm promptly assaulted by not just one, but two, fraudulent advertisements by fundamentalists. These are fraudulent, because PhysOrg.com has signed up with Google for science related advertising, yet what we're seeing is that some religious people are gaming the system and posing their religious ads as science. Of course, this is just another aspect of the deceitful strategy that a lot of creationists in the United States started using a few decades ago when they determined to begin their "scientific creationism" charade with young earth creationism back in the 1960s for the specific purpose of trying to do an end-run around the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. But that doesn't mean we should put up with their deceitful shenanigans. We should complain to PhysOrg.com, and in turn complain to Google for the fraudulent ads. Google has mechanisms to filter out prank ads, and I think we need to let Google know what's going on to get them to filter out religious ads from a site that is paying for science related ads.

Since the ads are dynamically posted, I took a screenshot. I shrunk it for display here with my post, but if you click on the image that will give you the full size screenshot.

Fraudulent Creationist Advertising