Michael Egnor is a friggen nutbar.

Well, now we know where Nisbet gets his Kool-Aid from...

What a histrionic self important little git. Half of his moronic mega church power base is in some form of receivership half the time because of the ridiculously lavish lifestyles of their leadership the rampant expense of supporting a harem of whores touting "expertise" from "back of the comic book" degrees, deranged state to state lobbying and mounting legal defenses for youth pastors that can't stop laying on hands.

This is the screeching and gnashing of a big fat rat caught in the corner of the larder who didn't jump on the train with the Presbyterians and Catholics soon enough to be adopted as a pet.

As the shovel falls on his greedy indolent willfully ignorant parasitic head his last thought will be not of eternity and his bogus death cult version of self loathing but of "Science truth and religious truth are different.....why didn't I think of that!"

you'll eventually have to hold all of your conventions in Madison or Ann Arbor

Excellent! Two fun towns right there.

You better watch it Abbie, cause he's got a big brother and ... and ... and a dog too, and they're gonna come beat you up, you big meany! Yer gonna get it then! snif, snif ...

LOFAO. Pathetic doesn't even begin to cover that! Too bad for him America got to see first hand the other night what a joke Jindal is.

Pdiff

John Belucci had a routine on the early Saturday Night Live news. He was presented a guest commentator who would start out sounding fairly reasonable in his rebuttal on some issue and slowly ramp up to an arm waving, frothing at the mouth rant finally falling off his chair and disappearing under the desk. I'm not sure why I just remembered that.

Jebus Criminy Cupcakes, who pissed in Egnor's Cheerios this morning?

Still, we should thank him for putting his paranoid delusions and violent fantasies on display for future reference.

I love Madison. They have a Trader Joes, a Wild Oats, a Whole Foods, AND a Penzeys Spices.

Such a Nazi Scientist town.

Boy, for a concept that IDiots claim "has nothing to do with religion" (in this case "academic freedom"), it sure is defended with religious zeal and rhetoric.

I think this is the humility thing that Jesus was talking about...

I for one am glad that he as abandoned any pretense of sanity. And A2 is only a stone's throw away--see you at Zingermans!

is someone going to record your talk at AU on video?

Three of the four for stores. We don't have a Wild Oats here in Madison, but we have a very good home-grown co-op called the Willy Street Co-op. We also have Fair Indigo here. We used to be home to The Onion, but apparently our science nazis drove them away.

OT but ERV linked so I'm biting.

I'm worried about the browncoats thing. I loved firefly and serenity (I recently reran the series on DVD) and got a whole load of the american civil war references; similar to the thmes in the outlaw josey wales. But my reading of civil war history suggests to me the south was more wrong than right. The type of folk that JW or MR represent were equally rebels to the southern establishment; most ably characterised in Boss Hogg. You never heard on the dukes of hazzard unkle jesse saying the farm would be better off if they could get some cheap help like in the old days.

The fact that orson scott card is listed as a prominent browncoat makes me shy away.

If there was a god, Michael Egnor would not have been given fingers with which to type. I think being afflicted with his mind-exploding shot of stupid is a bit overkill just for eating a lousy apple.

Wow. That's an amusing rant. I think Egnor is correct in so far as a boycott of this sort isn't really helpful. That's all he is correct about.

I'm amused that from the phrase "They think you're a bunch of atheist brownshirts -- can't imagine why" Egnor links over to PZ's desecration of a eucharist. If anyone sees pointed blasphemy in the same category as fascist tyrrany then they really aren't worth paying attention to. (And never mind that PZ made a point of also desecrating a copy of the God Delusion at the same time). Message to Egnor: Quit whining and do some research. Maybe if you had actual data supporting ID people would listen to you.

The most "evolution-denying" country in the Western world -- the United States -- is the world's undisputed scientific leader.

Fuck the heck?

The millions of ignorant people in this country are not the ones doing scientific research. I would have thought that to be a fairly obvious point.

Fuck the heck?

The millions of ignorant people in this country are not the ones doing scientific research. I would have thought that to be a fairly obvious point.

Blake,

Man, it's a spittle-flecked rant. Don't overthink it and just enjoy the ride.

But more seriously, Egnor is just doing what creationists need to do in order to perpetuate the lie that ID is science, which is to draw an imaginary line between "Darwinists" and "those who conduct lifesaving biomedical research".

Egnor is the perfect spokesman for the DI - intellectually dishonest, arrogant, ignorant, hypocritical (gotta love a call for open dialogue on a site where comments are disabled) and completely unreadable to any but the already deluded. He is the best weapon we have.

He is the best weapon we have.

Well, besides all that data, of course...

Egnor is upset because Flipper died and now his life has no porpoise.

Srsly. That makes as much sense as what Egnor wrote.

Egnor makes Ben "Darwinism doesn't explain Thermodynamics" Stein sound like Einstein by comparison.

And he published this as an Open Letter. Can you imagine? What a maroon, as Daffy Duck would say.

Michael Ignore, tbh. Isn't he the moron that argued that the mind must be immaterial, because when you stand upside down, it doesn't fall out of your head? Wish I could find the reference. PZ comes to mind...

Never knew there were creationist concern trolls...

Abbie, it's not healthy to repress your feelings. I suggest that you tell us what you really think about Egnor. Come on, let it out. You'll feel better.

Whats he so angry about? I dont get it.

And yeah,call for dialogue on a site that doesnt allow comments is rich,as is going from persecuted minority in XPLD to "we creationists finance your research and is much more than you !"

Dont these people realize what BS theyre babbling? (of course they dont)

No doubt Egnor developed his style of robust debate from attending the scientific symposia of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. I'm sure he's deeply respected by his colleagues for his clear commitment to logic and evidence above mere sectarian or personal concerns.

Sounds like it's time for a mass diaper change at the Dishonesty Institute.

NOT IT!

What Egnor obviously doesn't realize is that every single piece of scientific evidence for ID is already taught in schools. It's not our fault there isn't any.

Sounds like it's time for a mass diaper change at the Dishonesty Institute.

Nope. Not gonna do it. I changed enough of those when I was a new daddy. Not gonna do it now.

I now! Let's get Rhology to do it! He'll do it! Yeah!

The National Association of Evangelicals represents 40,000,000? Is that number inflated at all? That's a very large number of people.

I hope Jindal changes the state motto to "Boycotted by Darwinists since 2009". We can then watch the state deteriorate into some sort of dysfunctional amalgam that the rest of America will avoid like the plague. It will actually be a concrete observation showing how religion can turn an entire state into a pit of ignorance and despair.

For those thinking this boycott won't have any impact, of course it won't on mere financial terms. Financially, it's a drop in the bucket. What it does do, however, is put politicians on notice that they've picked a side, and at least some people are paying attention. Nonsensical creationist politics are not "free" attention grabbers that don't come with down sides.

And that explains why Egnor has shit in his hand and flung at the rest of us the way he has here. Because science and medicine have also picked a side, and are not sitting quietly and pretending that political grandstanding doesn't matter the way they used to. They did not pick his side, and that's one more step towards that awful day when religious kookery cannot be compartmentalized in the mind of a person with a serious medical career any longer.

His obsession with insisting, contrary to obvious examples, that evolution is irrelevant to medicine reflects the approaching extinction of his kind.

CV, Louisiana is already a pit of ignorance. It has one of the worst education systems in the country. Louisiana is the buckle of the bible belt. Ignorance there is worn like a badge of honor. I travel to Louisiana often, and I shudder at the utter stupidity of the average backwoods rednecks that I encounter there. It's actually mind boggling how inbred and stupid they are. Louisiana is a hopeless, mindless, jeebus infected place.

What percentage of American Scientists are "Darwinists"?
What percentage of Evangelicals are Scientists?

So Egnor's argument comes down to "ignoramusus (or is it ingnorami) outnumber scientists" which indicates what.

I suspect that America's scienticfic leadership now comes largely from immigrants and the children of immmigrants.

Shorter Egnor : "Numbers make truth, so shut up".

Hurrah for science by popular vote !

I suggest that next time Dr Egnor operates on a brain, he organizes a vote first to ask people how he should cut.

Also, as it's still very popular, I suggest that astrology should be taught in school. In science class, of course.

Nowhere in his rant did he claim ID is science or has any evidence to support it.

#32 has a point. I lived in West Virginia for a (painful, excruciatingly painful) while. My father, the child of Italian immigrants (my mother was also herself an Italian immigrant, though she and I have since returned to Italy), is a doctor (a pathologist, specifically). The majority of his colleagues were immigrants, either Indian or East Asian. The few remaining "natives" were mostly imported from New York and New Jersey, leaving barely a handful of locally educated physicians. WV, of course, looooves the Jebus.

All the nurses were locally grown, however, presumably because the only acceptable careers for girls in WV are either in nursing or 'education' (the standard of which, by the way, is horrifyingly low).

You Darwinists are good at covering your tracks (remember "junk DNA"?).

You'd think they were revising their theories based on research or something...

Anyway, #35. Locally educated physicians in WV are rare because there are very few med schools and the malpractice insurance rates are nasty. Considering that the population has been dropping steadily, even having enough patients to maintain a practice is a challenge. Same goes for the "educators" -- that was the primary focus of my University, and virtually everyone (male or female made no difference) left the state for better prospects. Nursing degrees, however, can be gotten through a community college, and are in high demand because of a lack of general medical professionals. Add in that they are among the better paying jobs in a region that's been economically depressed for a few decades now, and you see a lot of nurses. That's where some evidence and experience with the system might point.

Or, of course, you could shoot your mouth off like an idiot. Either one.

I'm pretty sure that rant was written after four, maybe five beers. Read it again, imagining slurred speech, and it sounds natural.

Evolution is worthless to experimental biology and worthless to medical research.

Weeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Madison, woo-hoo! Mad-city is a fun place.

I'm not sure how using my experience with the WV town (The somewhat ironically named "Point Pleasant") I lived in qualifies as shooting my mouth off like an idiot, but ok. Maybe things were different where you're from, but in Point Pleasant the educators were all local, and frequently woefully unqualified for the subjects they were teaching: French teachers who didn't speak French, English teachers who knew less about grammar than some of their students, etc. There was no shortage of newly qualified teachers (just as many people were becoming teachers as nurses, so I'm not sure what point you were trying to make about nurses vs teachers. Both were mostly women and mostly local).

I misspoke when I said "locally educated," as what I meant was local, period. My apologies. The two often go hand in hand and I was not being attentive enough to say what I meant. Yes, there are few med schools in WV, and maybe their programs aren't fantastic. That I don't know enough about. However, there's nothing keeping a bright, motivated kid who wants to be a doctor from getting good grades. getting some scholarships, grants or other aid, and going to university somewhere else where the education is of a higher standard, then coming back home to work. In my experience, at least in Pt. Pleasant, the employers preferred to hire local people over imports whenever possible, so if enough WV natives became qualified to fill all the positions, out-of-towners wouldn't need to be brought in.

I'm not claiming any universal knowledge and I don't have any figures or statistics. I'm just discussing my own observations and experience. I haven't been back to WV in ten years, so things might have changed since then. I hope they have.

This has been horrendously off topic. My apologies. I got a teensy bit carried away.

I apologize, as well. Morning coffee sort of thing, along with some of the old tribalism rearing up. Yeah, WV is generally a hellhole, and we who spent most of our lives there get tired of hearing about it from everyone else. If there were anything resembling an economy, a lot of the people with educations that got out might stay to make things better. The town you mention is in an area that doesn't have much in the way of industry, but it's still better off than a lot of the area southward, where more than 40% of the population is below the poverty line.

Yeah, those areas tend to be religion-soaked. I have a game when traveling through to see family to find the church with the most words in its name, such as "The Free Apostolic Calvary Church of the Christ for All People". This is often painted on a cardboard sign with an arrow toward someone's garage. That said, there's also a strong atheist/apatheist streak on the other end. The people who are religiously active are very active, but those who aren't cut that crap out of their lives pretty much entirely. There's little middle ground.

I can't speak to the educational standards, because I got a pretty good one. However, I did attend one of the better schools in the state, and had the privelege of educated parents, so I got ahead. I do point with pride to the state science standards, which back the teaching of evolution to the hilt. Part of that is the paranoid xenophobia is tempered with the desire to maximize job potential, and having the string of chemical companies along the Kanawha river puts some emphasis on strong science education. But, like I said, there's an enormous amount of brain drain. Probably 80% of my college graduating class left the state for work. It's a vicious cycle until more industry (particularly white-collar) comes in, but that won't happen until a lot of environmental cleanup is done. Middle management doesn't want to live next to a slag pile. Hell, I'm degreed in business and computers, and the best-paying job I ever had in-state was in retail liquor at $6.75 an hour.

Sorry, too much on my mind today. When I think about the old home, I get depressed. I apologize again for my reaction earlier.

its funny how upset Egnor is over something that he proclaims to be such a great thing

"waaaahhhh! don't boycott us cause we pay for your research!"

"yay! Darwinist free since 2009"

Abbie, Abbie, Abbie. . . .

I can't believe that you, you of all people, would say something so ignorant and stupid.

You never warm a bottle in the microwave. Any pediatrician will tell you that. There's too much chance you'll burn your child. You heat them on the stove, in a saucepan filled with water.

-This message brought you from the New Father's Council (motto: "What do you mean: 'I have to change diapers, too'?")

Dear Michael Egnore,

Yes, let the blind lead the blind, and the majority are always right.

You mention a quaint notion that science depends on the freedom to ask questions. Well yes it does, but it also refers to increasing knowledge through scientific method, and reproducible experiments, something ID fails quite badly on (one theory, no experiment, no proof). Science also requires the ability to abandon old ideas when they have been proven false, again something ID fails quite badly on (a sheer refusal to adjust to new ideas).

Being a creationist does not contribute to science; being a scientist does. If you can come up with a reproducible experiment that advances our knowledge, and demonstrates the requirement for ID, then feel free to teach it as much as you want, you'll have the backing of all the scientists. Otherwise please don't peddle your myths as facts, and stop trying to block the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Feel free to tell people your ideas as much as you want, but do not claim they are science, as that is a lie. By claiming ID is being repressed by "Darwinists", you insult the hard work of scientists throughout the world, and show a complete failure to understand what science is, or the issues it addresses. It is this aspect of your cause that we scientists find offensive. Science encourages creativity, you only mean to stifle it.

Finally, you claim that the US one of the highest prevalence of creationists, but you are the world's undisputed scientific leader. Well you also happen to have a lot of money and people, which is a far more useful resource for science. Don't assign causation where there is only correlation. And kindly don't downplay the work of other smaller countries, many of whom are just as prolific in their contributions.

I think they should have made Eg-snore the head of the Republican Party! :-D

Do you know, I think he likes us. He really likes us!

This has probably already been said as I've only skimmed the thread but, it's nice to see someone on the DI side finally just admit that it's all about religion and creationism, not any sort of scientific controversy. If they were actually interested in scientific controversies or problems, perhaps they would want their children to critically make up their own minds about quantum theory and the theory of relativity in a high school physics class. Those two theories both A: Explain a huge body of data wonderfully and B) are mutually exclusive. At least one of them is dead wrong.

Lastly, Egnor could unfortunately be right about political repricusions for evolutionary biologists. They are in larger part dependent on public grant money and the good education of science students in the public K-12 system and public universities for a new generation of scientists. As stands, the majority of the tax payers supporting these institutions are not on the side of good science in general, and evolution in particular.

@ ShadowWalkyr ....yeah, all pediatricians tell you not to heat a bottle in the microwave, and almost every mother I know (including myself) has done it at least once. When you have a screaming child who refuses to take a cold bottle, microwaving one is easy and efficient. You DO need to be careful to shake it thoroughly after 1 minute and test the heat on your wrist before you feed the baby. But those saved minutes (1 in the microwave as opposed to 5+ on the stove) can mean the difference between sanity and insanity in a busy mother.

Now...GO CHANGE THAT DIAPER!!! ;-)

(This message brought to you by a mother who survived and now has 2 adults...)

What Bobby Jindahl might have said:

Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of boo-hooing at the Disco Isn't-stitute.

Gee, I wonder what funds Bobby is going to withhold from the Darwinists, considering that he rejected the stimulus money?

Better watch out, folks.

Egnor's gonna spend all his time through elementary, middle, and high school lifting weights, playing football, and watching old Sonny Chiba movies, then he's gonna come back and kick science in the nuts!

Man, that gave me the creeps. Replace "creationists" with "white people" and "Darwinists" with "black people" and the rant sounds like something that would have come out of the mouth of a racist cracker back before the civil war. "There are more of us than there are of you, so you don't matter or deserve freedom, money etc..."

Way to make me almost puke, you prejudiced Creationist Hatemonger. Go back to your damned cave.

Off topic, but Abbie I presume you've seen http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE52203620090303?feedTyp…

Any chance you could explain what this means/implies? I'm a bit confused since SIV already infects some non-human primates. It seems from reading the article that this is essentially like HIV-1 but they've modified it slightly so it can infect monkeys. Is that an accurate summary? What will this mean for HIV research?

Quick and dirty answer-- Most SIVs cant crossover into humans (or vice-versa) due to those innate things I was talking about in the Behe thread (TRIM5, APOBEC). HIV is not SIV, and not all SIVs are the same thing. There is a lot more diversity in virology than people realize, and zoonosis is harder than Behe says it is :)

And, SIV is indigenous to African primates (Chimpanzees, African Green Monkeys, Mandrils, etc).

Getting an HIV-like virus to infect macaques (an Asian/Indian monkey) is an important step towards generating an animal model (SIV or SHIVs in macaques are the 'best' model we have, right now).

Hey! Not everyone in Louisiana happens to be an IDiot! Sweden looks better every year...

That was some serious anti-intellectualism. It's a good thing that science isn't democratic.

Can you imagine how Egnor must react to traffic tickets?

"Most people in the nation are speeders. The vast majority have gone over the speed limit. We pay your salary! How dare you use our police cars and radar to pull us over and fine us!"

What else would you expect from a site with this disclaimer:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/

"The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution."

Liars!

I don't know, that first sentence is pretty truthful. Misreporting on evolution is their raison d'etre!

"The human brain evolved because the apes got better spit"

What does that mean?

i think this will be more effective:

visit

spam

to see how we WON THE MILLION DOLLAR PARANORMAL CHALLENGE

and CRUSHED the entire atheist movement...

and PZ too....

predict the future too!

spam

Jared: Hey! Not everyone in Louisiana happens to be an IDiot! Sweden looks better every year...

Well, the good news (for you guys) is the currency is now 50% cheaper than a year ago. Sigh...

What the "gifted" dave mabuse fails to mention is that the raving thread he links to was already closed when he posted here. It seems he is a little infamous drive by troll. I can't even make sense of anything he says. Maybe one of us needs mo'betta medikashon.

ERV, my lady, you have truly arrived when David Mabus graces your blog with his insanity. Two headed goats and Depeche Mode predicted 9/11. Wow. You're in the big leagues now!

As a historian, I do, often, have to point out to my students that the states in rebellion LOST the War of the Rebellion. Note the use of the official title for the US Civil War. I am also amazed that so called scientists are calling Darwinism as it is call a "ideology". It's not an ideology it a set a theory with many converging lines of evidence. I thought that Kitzmiller v. Dover showed that even a republican judge can see the difference. I remember being in school when DNA was first being studied in the early 1980s. It was thought then that it would "prove" Darwin wrong. Instead it has strengthened the argument.

I am all for presenting a new paradigm. However, it has to have something more than a super natural element to be scientific. If you allow for the supernatural by that definition, then you allow a whole cast of psychics, astrologers and other loons the ability to call themselves scientists.

In addition, I like to point out that these same people would be on the side of the Inquisitorial Courts of the 13-15th centuries. Many had proved mathematically how the earth revolves around the sun. The Catholic Church would not accept that. And what about Newton's Laws of Gravity? He proved what it was but would these same people question Newton's principles if we saw something float up? We certainly would question and investigate. But we would not throw away Newton's Laws.

Hence, I sympathize with the scientists. This whole drive is nothing more that to make a whole new generation of students deficient in their education. The comment above about the people who conduct science in the US being from other countries is exactly right. It is because they have a higher standard of science education than the US. That is discouraging. The main problem I have with the Academic Freedom issue is the definition. I think that one would have to show that ID is not academic. Instead, it is faith based and does not belong in a science class.

As an academic, I want proof. so show me the proof. In various areas, Darwin's model fits. ID does not have an explanation. When it comes up against an issue, it "well its an invention of the creator." Well, I am sorry that is ignorance. What does ID say about the natural world and science. It doesn't

So keep up the criticism and in the words of the late Molly Ivins, "raise hell and keep fighting for freedom."

If you want to see something really bad, check out this guy's blog post.

Jeezus, it's hard to describe. If you read through his other blog posts, you'll see this guy is kind of full of it himself, only here he's taken it on himself to gather all the "information" there is on the "Expelled Exposed" site and run them down.

Well, I replied to that shit, but it's a small thing compared to what's there.