Evolution
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Evolution
“Germany, we have a problem…” Or: Should anything be done about two bad apples of pseudoscience on the tree of ScienceBlogs.de?
Posted by Orac on December 2, 2008 Well, it looks as though I’ve stepped into it yet one more time. Believe it or not, I hadn’t intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I’ll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when…
Denialism: Sometimes there’s no other way to describe it. Except maybe one.
Posted by Orac on November 26, 2008 Here we go again. Every so often, one of the–shall we say?–less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I’m referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it’s not him lecturing us just…
Where’s that Doctor Doom mask again?
Posted by Orac on November 25, 2008 As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of…
The (not-so-)Beautiful (un)Truth: The “alternative” medicine movement gets an Expelled! to call its very own
Posted by Orac on November 13, 2008 The things I do for my readers. I’m referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it’s because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn’t made it out of…
Saturday morning mailbagl: How could natural selection “do it” without some intelligence?
Posted by Orac on October 18, 2008 Orac gets e-mail. Most of it’s just brief notes with a link that someone thinks I should check out (and possibly blog about). Even though I occasionally make sarcastic remarks about being deluged with one story or other from time to time, I actually do appreciate those. Many have been the times when I didn’t…
Images from New York, part 3: A fellow ScienceBlogger corrupting an innocent creature
Posted by Orac on August 11, 2008 Look what Bora‘s doing with poor Professor Steve Steve: And what’s poor Charles Darwin got to do with it? No wonder Jason‘s looking on in bemusement–or perhaps puzzlement.
Time to get out the paper bag or Doctor Doom mask again…
Posted by Orac on June 26, 2008 Sigh. He’s baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that “intelligent design” apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who…
When it comes to refuting creationist nonsense, I am but slime…
Posted by Orac on June 25, 2008 …from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski’s E. coli cultures. Lenski’s second response to the clueless “request” of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for “independent review” supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary…
Geez, give a guy tenure…
Posted by Orac on May 7, 2008 …and suddenly he reveals his true stripes. Oh, well, at least the Hitler Zombie hasn’t eaten Jason’s brain, as he has so many of the others who complain about being Expelled! Yet. Thanks, Jason. I needed the laugh after the events of yesterday and today. Oh, and congratulations on getting tenure!
The Darwin-Hitler claim as a form of Holocaust denial, revisited
Posted by Orac on April 24, 2008 Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don’t agree…
Bioethicist Art Caplan: The Darwin-Hitler claim is a form of “Holocaust denial”
Posted by Orac on April 23, 2008 I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan. Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that “Darwinism” led directly to the…
Richard Dawkins and the Age of the Machine
Posted by Orac on March 29, 2008 Hilarious, particularly “big-pimpin’” Daddy Dennett: I can’t make up my mind if it’s meant to skewer Dawkins or whether it’s meant ironically as a way of making fun of ID creationists and how they view Dawkins…
A question for Ben Stein: Why are you singling out Darwin and ignoring the true inspirations for the Holocaust, Pasteur and Koch?
Posted by Orac on March 29, 2008 Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about “intellectual oppression” by those evil “Darwinists” directed against any valiant…
Rush Limbaugh gives Expelled! thumbs up
Posted by Orac on March 24, 2008 Why am I not surprised? The stupid, it does so burn.
Too bad I don’t live anywhere near Boston…
Posted by Orac on March 23, 2008 …because Boston skeptics get to have all the fun with a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub on Monday, March 24 at The Asgard (great name for a pub!) in Cambridge at 7 PM. Keynote speaker for the night is our very own Mike the Mad Biologist. We’ve done a little blog tag-teaming in the…
Things that make me smile, Saturday edition, part 1: Creationists shooting themselves in the foot
Posted by Orac on March 22, 2008 The other night, I wrote about how the painfully inept and just plain dumb actions of the producer of Expelled!, the neuron-apoptosing movie that’s basically an extended argumentum ad Nazium against the dreaded “Darwinism” that blames Hitler, Stalin, and, apparently, puppy hatred on Charles Darwin himself. Basically, the producers were having one of their private…
Bad scientific arguments in the service of “animal rights” activism
Posted by Orac on March 17, 2008 One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research…
Time for the metal mask again: The Egnorance that is ignorance returns, and Orac is not pleased
Posted by Orac on March 11, 2008 You may remember from yesterday that I wrote about a concerted propaganda effort by antivaccinationists to torture the facts and science behind a case of a girl with a rare mitochondrial disease whose condition may have been exacerbated by vaccination, resulting in an encephalopathy with some autism-like symptoms. Actually, I had had in mind an…
Once more into the muck: Creationists and the evolution of antibiotic resistance
Posted by Orac on March 3, 2008 I’m not sure why, but it’s been a while since I’ve delved into the cesspit of pseudoscience that is the Discovery Institute’s propaganda organ, Evolution News & Views. Perhaps it was because I simply got tired of diving into the depths of stupid. Of course, that then begs the question of why I’ve been spending…
A trio of terror, part III: The search for everybody’s favorite brain-eating Führer continues
Posted by Orac on January 17, 2008 Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction–I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these…
What was that again about evolution not being relevant to medicine?
Posted by Orac on January 16, 2008 It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with creationists trying to claim either that evolutionary theory is not relevant to the problem of microbial resistance to antibiotics or, even worse, making really bad medical recommendations on the basis of their interpretation of evolution. This time around RPM has posted a nice article on Competitive Release…
Ron Paul: Quackery enabler
Posted by Orac on December 28, 2007 Lately, bloggers, including some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, have been expressing various concerns about the phenomenon that is Ron Paul, the Republican candidate who’s ridden a wave of discontent to do surprisingly well in the polls leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. First, Jake and Greg have pointed out that Ron…
Dumbest creationist anti-evolution rant ever?
Posted by Orac on December 23, 2007 You be the judge: I believe, first of all, evolution is a crock. It takes a lot of faith to believe that I came from an ameba. A lot of faith! So evolution should be taught in Faith Class, otherwise known in parochial schools as Religion Class. It’s a crazy world we live in. Crazier…
More nonsense about bacterial resistance: Why a little medical knowledge is a dangerous thing in the hands of “intelligent design” creationists
Posted by Orac on December 11, 2007 It’s been a while since I’ve visited the cesspool that is Uncommon Descent, a.k.a. Bill Dembski’s home for wandering sycophants, toadies, and lackeys. There’s a good reason for this; I just get tired of the sheer stupidity that routinely assaults my brain every time I make the mistake of taking a look at UD’s latest…
All the way from Denmark: The 75th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle
Posted by Orac on December 6, 2007 It’s hard to believe that two weeks have flown by once again. It’s even harder to believe that the Skeptics’ Circle has been around long enough to reach its 75th edition, which this time around comes straight out of Denmark, courtesy of longtime Respectful Insolence commenter and now blogger Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science. Kristjan’s a…