Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
Would someone kindly hire Disco. Inst. lead vocalist Rob Crowther a copy editor? It wouldn't necessarily make what he says any less bogus, but at least his argument would be readable. It took me a long time to even find a grammatically correct interpretation of the title of his latest post "Revisioning Darwin's Theory as above Questioning." Turns out, he isn't failing to make the participle of "revise," he is claiming that there is some sort of re-envisioning.
Crowther proceeds to present the case for this "revisioning" in a post replete with sentence fragments ("Except when it comes to neo-Darwinism."), failures to capitalize proper names ("The supreme court"), missing prepositions ("who question parts Darwinian evolution"), obvious typos ("It looks as is Darwin would have been sorely disappointed"), and of course, totally incoherent gibberish:
As silly as it may sound, there are scientists who are still researching gravity. This isn't as absurd as you might think.This fails utterly to be absurd, or even silly.
Leave aside the ridiculously false assertion that ID proponents are trying to use scientific methodology to prove divine intervention."Ridiculously false" here is being used to mean "entirely accurate."
What's troubling here is the effort to relabel any questioning of Darwin's theory as the same as creationism. How convenient.As Twain said, "If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything." Very convenient, indeed.
The supreme court has ruled that creationism is not allowed in the classroom, so Darwinists simply tag any questioning of, or challenge to, their pet theory as creationism. Denmark smells relatively pristine in comparison.Non sequitur much?
Self-proclaimed evolutionary biologist Patricia PrincehouseI think the people who granted her a Masters in Physical Anthropology (Yale University) were the ones making that proclamation.
That would likely be news to the scores of scientists (many who are evolutionists themselves) who question parts Darwinian evolution.Literally SCORES of scientists? Veritable SCORES?
What's really absurd, though, is this part:
In Florida there was recently a vigorous debate over how evolution should be taught. Dogmatic Darwinists are insisting that Darwinian evolution be presented without any sort of critical analysis, as if it were 100% above reproach, as if it were a natural law that left no doubts.At the outset of this essay into essay-writing, Crowther observes that "there are scientists who are still researching gravity" and there are also scientists researching evolution. Why should this "critical analysis" be entirely restricted to evolution, and why is the high school biology classroom the right place for that? Crowther seems too tongue-tied to address those questions.
Comments
An erratum: Patricia finished her Ph.D. at Harvard.
Posted by: RBH | February 29, 2008 10:24 PM
No, the idea that the DI are trying to use scientific methodology is pretty ridiculous. They're really just trying to create the impression that they're using scientific methodology.
Posted by: MartinM | March 2, 2008 6:25 AM
I wonder when the Discovery Institute is going to prune the IDer (Science & Culture) branch to focus on real issues. That group simply doesn't fit into the rest of the mission and certainly detracts from their other work.
This is from the first paragraph of the mission statement:
Boy, affirming the possibility that intelligent beings (aliens?) might have planted the first bacteria on the planet would go such a long way to achieving those goals...
Granted, they'd have to jettison Steve Meyer who appears to have his fingers in everything at Disco., but would that really be much of a loss?
Posted by: Unsympathetic reader | March 2, 2008 10:56 AM
Just agreeing with RBH's point. They're trying to hijack scientific terminology ("it's just a theory") to try to sound scientific. Problem is, all their experiments are though experiments, and all their conclusions are unverifyable (no experiment can be created that shows the conclusion wrong).
Posted by: Andy Tripp | March 2, 2008 2:21 PM
Non sequitur much? LOL! Thanks for the breakdown. I've been researching creationist thought and am surprised at how much pseudoscience has saturated the Internet. There needs to be more voices like yours popping up in google searches...
I'm on my way back to Montana to visit family in a few weeks and am preparing for the invariable conversation about why there really is consensus--spanning all disciplines--in the scientific community on evolution...and then to hear a whole room of scientifically illiterate family members shake their heads at my naivete. :-)
Posted by: David T | April 30, 2009 10:29 PM