Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
DaveScot quotes Martin Niemöller's famous "First they came… poem" arguing that:
Those who believe Guillermo Gonzalez’ involvement with ID outside the Iowa State campus can be justly used in consideration of whether or not to grant him tenure would be well served to think about this.No. Guillermo Gonzalez was not put in a concentration camp. He was not shot, starved, gassed or otherwise abused. His employer evaluated his future prospects as an astronomical researcher, and found him lacking. Equating a personnel decision with the Holocaust is, and I say this cautiously, a form of Holocaust denial.
I say that because there are two major strands of Holocaust deniers. One simply asserts that nothing at all happened. Concentration camps, if they existed, were full of happy fun, and attempts to claim that millions of Jews, gypsies, Catholics, atheists, Communists, etc. were killed as part of an intentional scheme is just wrong.
The other group acknowledges that Hitler was anti-Semitic, and will quietly accept that his decision to create concentration camps is evidence of that. But they will low-ball the fatalities, and try to point out that lots of people die in war, anyway. Mel Gibson and his father both seem to occupy this category, talking about the deaths of thousands of Jews, rather than millions.
Part of what makes the Holocaust what it was is the sheer scale of death. To compare the systematic and carefully planned slaughter of 6 million Jews and nearly as many members of other groups with one person failing to get tenure is to deny the scale and devastation of the Holocaust.
All of this is above and beyond the fact that Gonzalez included his work on ID creationism in his tenure review materials, which puts them well within the scope of a tenure review committee. It was not "outside the Iowa State campus."
Item two:
Sal Cordova seems to believe that people's beliefs are genetically coded. No one who did not believe such a thing could argue that higher birth rates among creationists will cause creationism to increase in popularity.
Item three:
Michael Behe makes up numbers. It isn't that it's surprising that IDolators have to make things up in order to make their case, but that doesn't make it less disappointing when it happens.
Comments
Can you imagine being Behe? How could you live with yourself?
Behe takes other people's work, he doesn't do any research himself, and he doesn't understand it, so he comes out with the following nonsense:
"Here's something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts."
It's the same old creationist agument, parts is parts, but this time he doesn't mince words.
It was designed, Auntie Em! It was! It was! It was! I saw it and Toto, too!
So, let me get this straight. Behe, after studying "intelligent design" in Nature for over TWENTY YEARS, Nature which is composed of countless billions of biological bits and pieces, comes up with a two amino acid mutation in a stinking plasmodium and leaps to the "obvious" conclusion that it was Designed.
It's plain to see. Uh, huh.
It's plain to see that Behe is a M.O.R.O.N.
Posted by: Doc Bill | June 6, 2007 5:50 PM
>>No one who did not believe such a thing could argue that higher birth rates among creationists will cause creationism to increase in popularity.
So then is the reason so many Hindus come from India because of the weather?
An individual's parents have a great influence on their beliefs, but not through genetics -- at least that's what my parents taught me.
Posted by: Rob Cozzens | June 6, 2007 8:27 PM
Anyone else think sometimes these guys aren't really funny any more? I mean, like, maybe they ought to get therapy? How would you like to be Davescot's dad? Would your son's posts make you start wondering about an intervention? "Okay Dave, your mother and I don't think you should play with your ID friends any more."
I'm serious - the compulsive lying, the quote mining, the shrill rhetoric and ridiculous comparisons, the isolation, the martyr complexes, and of course the obsession with anal orifi and their expulsions. It's like the Raelians meets Beevus and Butthead. Are there any psychiatrists in the house?
Posted by: Science Avenger | June 6, 2007 10:36 PM
In re: Guillermo Gonzalez's tenure denial, it seems the main factor was his failing to bring home the bacon -- that is, research funding. While his colleagues in the department brought in an average of $1.3 million each, Gonzalez brought in only a paltry $23,000.
Anybody these days who thinks that isn't a powerful reason for denying tenure is living in a fantasy world. DaveScot et al. want to make it all about ID, but if Gonzalez had brought in a couple of mil, nobody would have cared what he did in his spare time.
Posted by: Mousie Cat | June 9, 2007 3:55 PM