Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
You may remember Cordova's puppy post, well he is at it again. In a post at UD, supposedly a response to Tara's post Egnor just doesn't know when to quit Cordova starts with an attack on Darwin:
I was nicknamed "Gas."Charles Darwin
AutobiographyIs evolution of antibiotic resistance by bacteria an example of Darwinism? Such a claim is very suspicious since Darwinism deals mainly with the origin of species.
Evolution of antibiotic resistance is an example of survival of the fittest within a species, not an origin of species. This phenomenon ought more properly to be credited to the ideas of Edward Blyth rather than Charles "Gas" Darwin.
We are supposed to think, based on the above quote, that Darwin had some sort of Dembskian flatulence issue. So, let's look at Darwin's Autobiography (the source of Cordova's quote):
Towards the close of my school life, my brother worked hard at chemistry, and made a fair laboratory with proper apparatus in the tool-house in the garden, and I was allowed to aid him as a servant in most of his experiments. He made all the gases and many compounds, and I read with great care several books on chemistry, such as Henry and Parkes' 'Chemical Catechism.' The subject interested me greatly, and we often used to go on working till rather late at night. This was the best part of my education at school, for it showed me practically the meaning of experimental science. The fact that we worked at chemistry somehow got known at school, and as it was an unprecedented fact, I was nicknamed "Gas." [emphasis mine - afarensis] I was also once publicly rebuked by the head-master, Dr. Butler, for thus wasting my time on such useless subjects; and he called me very unjustly a "poco curante," and as I did not understand what he meant, it seemed to me a fearful reproach.
Hmm, seems Darwin was learning chemistry, you know doing chemistry experiments and sciency stuff like that - something intelligent design advocates avoid like the plague. Apparently the divine wind emanated from Cordova and not Darwin. Really Sal, it's a tired trick that everyone can see through. Give it a rest will you?
The rest of Cordova's post consists of Sal redefining Darwinism and castigating Tara because her post wasn't based on Sal's weird definition of Darwinism. Towards the end he uses Dembski's Searching Large Spaces: Displacement and the No Free Lunch Regress paper to argue that natural selection can not create large scale biological innovation (which strikes me as being some of that sleight-of-hand equivocations Sal is complaining about in that Sal is trying to subtly bring up the whole microevolution vs. macroevolution dichotomy so beloved by creationists and argue that Darwin was only talking about macroevolution). In a future post (hopefully on Saturday or Sunday) I will be discussing some experiments that totally undermine Dembski's pseudo-mathematical ramblings in the above paper.
Comments
It's also a sign of Cordova's US-centric use of language. Darwin's schoolmates probably would have called him farty trousers if he had a problem with "gas".
Posted by: KiwiInOz | April 5, 2007 12:07 AM
News flash: Professional IDers lie. In other news, dog bites man, and sun rises. Scientists do science, pseudoscientists play word games. One can be forgiven for thinking that ID stands for "Intentional Deception".
Posted by: Scienceavenger | April 5, 2007 12:30 AM
Heehee, "farty trousers." Indeed, if Cordova really wanted to magically discredit Darwin based on his imaginary flatulence problem, why even bother using a non-imaginary nickname? If he'd redefined the theory of Charles "poopy-pants" or "underwear streaker" Darwin so that it somehow had nothing to do with variability within a population, then I might have actually paid attention to what he had to say.
In any case, that bizarre argument has never made any sense to me: "evolution is about one species changing into another... so changes within a species are entirely unrelated!!" Sure.
Posted by: pie.rat | April 5, 2007 12:59 AM
Farty trousers? It's all there in black & white, faithfully recorded by his wife:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2032461,00.html
"Emma recorded his blackouts, retching and flatulence that were features of his mystery illness."
[In C19CE, it is worth pointing out, "flatulence" referred to belching, rather than farting, but even so...].
Posted by: Amenhotep | April 5, 2007 4:20 AM
There's a big difference between making gas and talking shite. I'm off for a walk on my local mid-Jurassic beach. It's 6000 years old you know.
Posted by: Peter McGrath | April 5, 2007 8:05 AM
There is something strage here, and I am probably not the first one to notice it. IDcreationists seem to think that -and really, really, believe - math trumps reality.
It astounds me.
Posted by: slpage | April 5, 2007 9:52 AM
So Darwin (in his later years when he had that chronic mystery illness) had a gas problem, which was not where he got the nickname "Gas." So what? Is that a reason to denounce evolutionary theory? If Einstein was nicknamed "Runs" (also after the bowel ailment) would that mean Special Relativity is bogus?
Posted by: King Aardvark | April 5, 2007 9:57 AM
Perhaps Scholar Sal, trying to understand evolution, looked it up in a dictionary--and found one of the definitions: giving off gas. Now he can call evolution the process of farting. Hardy har-har. Meanwhile, how is Sal's scientific research into the Theory of Intelligent Design coming along? Publish any papers lately?
Posted by: mark | April 5, 2007 12:52 PM
Darwin was extremely embarrassed by his sickness-related flatulence. He wrote at least one discreet letter to a cousin (if memory serves) when they were ill, asking whether the also suffered from flatulence.
I was delighted to work out some years ago that the name "Charles Robert Darwin" is an anagram of "rectal winds abhorrer".
Kind of makes you think.
Posted by: Richard Carter, FCD | April 5, 2007 7:17 PM
Stop Press: It turns out that, in Darwin's day, flatulence meant burps, not farts. See my post Disinherit the Wind.
Posted by: Richard Carter, FCD | April 16, 2007 4:59 PM