Debunking Creationism:
I've been sent Yet Another Proof of God. This one goes to rather a lot of trouble to appear to be mathematical. I thought that it would be fun to rip it apart. For a change, this one is...
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Posted on January 5, 2008 7:39 PM • 62 Comments •
A few weeks ago, I received an email about a new book, "The Faith Equation", by Marvin Bittinger. Bittinger is an author of math textbooks - including, I think, my first calculus text. The book is supposed to be...
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Posted on October 16, 2007 10:06 PM • 31 Comments •
Much to my professional shame, PZ recently pointed out David Plaisted, a Computer Science professor at the University of North Carolina, who has an anti-evolution screed on his university website. Worse, it's typical creationist drivel, which anyone with half...
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Posted on September 13, 2007 10:11 PM • 31 Comments •
When I'm bored, I'll periodically take a look at the blogs published by the bozos at the Discovery Institute. I can generally find something good for a laugh. So I was doing that tonight, and came across yet another...
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Posted on April 24, 2007 8:05 AM • 24 Comments •
Apparently, Michael Egnor just can't get enough of making himself look like an idiot. His latest screed is an attack on me, for criticizing his dismissal of evolution as a tautology....
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Posted on April 4, 2007 10:06 AM • 38 Comments •
A couple of weeks ago, I revisited George Shollenberger, the creator the alleged "First Scientific Proof of God", and commented on his pathetic antics on amazon.com, trying to explain just why no one had bothered to post a single...
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Posted on April 2, 2007 9:14 PM • 42 Comments •
Today's bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts...
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Posted on March 14, 2007 11:29 AM • 73 Comments •
So... Remember George Shollenberger? He's the goofball who wrote a book allegedly containing the First Scientific Proof of God, which I dealt with here and here. Well, George has been continuing to babble away. He's got his blog -...
Posted on March 6, 2007 2:12 PM • 63 Comments •
One of my fellow SBers, Kevin over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge wrote a scathing article reviewing an incredibly bad anti-evolution blog. There's no way that I can compete with Kevin's writing on the topic - you should...
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Posted on March 5, 2007 12:51 PM • 38 Comments •
I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then... Last week, DaveScott...
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Posted on February 5, 2007 11:30 AM • 56 Comments •
Being a Nice Jewish BoyTM, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the entire year. So yesterday, I was sitting with my laptop, looking for something interesting to read. I try to regularly read the Panda's Thumb, but...
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Posted on December 26, 2006 12:38 PM • 13 Comments •
Fellow SBer Tara from Aetiology pointed me at this bit of inanity, which I can't resist mocking: The mystery of the human genome has come into clearer focus as scientists have discovered that each individual person is at least ten...
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Posted on November 28, 2006 3:35 PM • 40 Comments •
So, as promised, it's time for part two of "The Creationists and the Shrinking Sun". The second main tack of the creationists and the shrinking sun is to not use the bare measurements of an allegedly shrinking sun as their...
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Posted on November 20, 2006 5:27 PM • 33 Comments •
One of the more pathetic examples of bad math from the creationist camp is an argument based on the claim that the sun is shrinking. This argument has been thoroughly debunked by other folks, so I haven't bothered to add...
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Posted on November 19, 2006 5:26 PM • 26 Comments •
A while ago, I wrote about Dembski's definition of specified complexity, arguing that it was a non-sensical pile of rubbish, because of the fact that "specified complexity" likes to present itself as being a combination of two distinct concepts: specification...
Posted on November 1, 2006 2:05 PM • 14 Comments •
Remember Granville Sewell? He's the alleged mathematician who wrote the very non-mathematical "A Mathematician's View of Evolution", which I fisked a few weeks ago. Well, he's back with a response to the people who criticized him, called "Can Anything Happen...
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Posted on October 19, 2006 8:18 PM • 13 Comments •
A reader sent me a link to an article by that inimatable genius of the intelligent design community, Granville Sewell. (As much as I hate to admit it, Sewell is a professor of mathematics at Texas A&M. I don't know...
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Posted on October 9, 2006 12:17 PM • 24 Comments •
Just for fun, I've been doing a bit of poking around lately in evolutionary algorithms. It's really fascinating to experiment, and see what pops out - the results can be really surprising. There is one fascinating example for which, alas,...
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Posted on September 27, 2006 9:51 AM • 28 Comments •
One of the bad arguments that I've frequently seen from creationists is the argument that some biological system is too good to be a possible result of an evolutionary process. On its face, this seems like it's not a mathematical...
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Posted on September 20, 2006 12:14 PM • 44 Comments •
I thought that for a followup to yesterday's repost of my takedown of Berlinksi, that today I'd show you a digested version of the debate that ensued when Berlinksi showed up to defend himself. You can see the original post...
Posted on August 29, 2006 9:00 AM • 26 Comments •
I'm away on vacation this week, so this is a repost of one of early GM/BM entries when it was on Blogger. As usual, I've revised it slightly. Berlinksi actually showed up and responded; a digest of the discussion back...
Posted on August 28, 2006 8:41 AM • 4 Comments •
A reader sent me a copy of an article posted to "chat.anncoulter.com". I can't see the original article; anncoulter.com is a subscriber-only site, and I'll be damned before I register with that site. Fortunately, the reader sent me the entire...
Posted on August 14, 2006 9:27 AM • 40 Comments •
The stupidity and innumeracy of Americans, and in particular American fundamentalists, never ceases to astound me. Recently on Yahoo, some bozo posted something claiming that the bible was all correct, and that genetics would show that bats were actually birds....
Posted on August 13, 2006 11:00 AM • 110 Comments •
Over at his blog, William Dembski, my least-favorite pathetic excuse for a mathematician, has cited an article written by one John Davison about the theory of evolution. According to Dembski, this article explains "why the naked emperor still lingers"; that...
Posted on August 3, 2006 5:02 PM • 21 Comments •
While taking a break from some puzzling debugging, I decided to hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. Today, I came across...
Posted on July 31, 2006 4:03 PM • 77 Comments •
This weekend, I came across Granville Sewell's article "A Mathematicians View of Evolution". My goodness, but what a wretched piece of dreck! I thought I'd take a moment to point out just how bad it is. This article, as described...
Posted on July 24, 2006 9:45 AM • 75 Comments •
A reader sent me a link to this amusing blog. It's by a guy named George Shollenberger, who claims to have devised The First scientific Proof of God (and yes, he always capitalizes it like that). George suffers from some...
Posted on July 20, 2006 1:48 PM • 51 Comments •
There's been a bunch of discussion here at ScienceBlogs about whether or not mathematicians are qualified to talk about evolution, triggered by an article by ID-guy Casey Luskin. So far, Razib at Gene Expression, Jason atEvolutionBlog, and John at Stranger...
Posted on July 17, 2006 9:59 AM • 29 Comments •
Last night, a reader sent me a link to yet another wretched attempt to argue for the existence of God using Bayesian probability. I really hate that. Over the years, I've learned to dread Bayesian arguments, because so many of...
Posted on July 13, 2006 4:10 PM • 36 Comments •
In comments to my recent post about Gilder's article, a couple of readers asked me to take a look at a DI promoted paper by Albert Voie, called Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent. This paper was actually...
Posted on July 5, 2006 3:50 PM • 46 Comments •
As several other folks have mentioned, George Gilder has written a new anti-evolution article which was published in the National Review. There's a lot to hate in this article. It's a poorly written screed, which manages to mix together all...
Posted on July 4, 2006 1:01 PM • 54 Comments •
Right after finishing my post about how Dembski has convinced me that he is not a competent mathematician, I find PZ linking to a Panda's Thumb post about Dembski, which shows how he does not understand the meaning of the...
Posted on June 16, 2006 3:11 PM • 26 Comments •
I was recently sent a link to yet another of Dembski's wretched writings about specified complexity, titled Specification: The Pattern The Signifies Intelligence. While reading this, I came across a statement that actually changes my opinion of Dembski. Before reading...
Posted on June 16, 2006 12:54 PM • 56 Comments •
(Continuing in my series of updates of the GM/BM posts about the bad math of the IDists, I'm posting an update of my original critique of Dembski and his No Free Lunch nonsense. This post has more substantial changes than...
Posted on June 14, 2006 2:07 PM • 15 Comments •
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to repost a few of my critiques of the bad math of the IDists, so that they'll be here at ScienceBlogs. Here's the first: Behe and irreducibly complexity. This isn't quite the original...
Posted on June 13, 2006 10:50 AM • 80 Comments •
While perusing my sitemeter stats for the page, I noticed that I'd been linked to in a discussion at creationtalk.com. Expecting amusement, I wandered on over to see who was linking to me. Someone linked to my index of articles...
Posted on June 12, 2006 8:56 PM • 9 Comments •
One of my favorite places on the net to find really goofy bad math is Answers in Genesis. When I'm trying to avoid doing real work, I like to wander over there and look at the crazy stuff that...
Posted on June 10, 2006 3:30 PM • 6 Comments •
