I've never understood how Bill Maher, who gets it so wrong on vaccination, gets it so right on evolution. Nonetheless, he hits this piece about evolution and influenza out of the park (except for referring to evolutionary biology as 'Darwinism'):
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in again.
Yes, I know I've used this clip before at least twice and the line in it several more times over the last couple of years. However, sometimes it's just so completely appropriate to how I'm feeling about a topic I'm about to write about…
The seventh chapter of Wells' book could be summed up in a single sentence: "biology doesn't need no steeekin' evolution!" Wells argues that, because medicine and agriculture were already doing just fine prior to Darwin's publication of Origin, clearly then, these fields (and others) haven't…
Here we go again. The 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, anti-vaccine wingnut and lover of cancer quackery Bill Maher, decided to use the occasion of the season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher to answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled against him. All I can say is this:…
Baratunde Thurston and Zanny Minton Bedoes react to a particularly ignorant bit of antivaccine misinformation by Bill Maher on Real Time With Bill Maher. (February 13, 2015)
I really don't want Mondays to be come "let's refute and make fun of the conspiratorial antivaccine nonsense Bill Maher…
Mahrer works much better from his gut than from his head, and doesn't really pretend otherwise. So it's not inconsistent. I think we're inclined to over-estimate the amount of intellectual/analytical rigor that goes into people's stances when they happen to coincide with our own.
Maher doesn't really nail anything about natural selection or selection pressures that turn novel strains of swine H1N1 into pandemic strains that can spread from human-to-human. He's just taking the fact that credible agencies are talking about the "evolution" of the virus and rubbing that in the face of creationists. He hasnt proven to me that he knows anything more about the role of evolution of pandemic viruses than your average creationist, and I think he's out of place for ridiculing people on a subject he is only a wikipedia-expert on.
I don't think you need to accept the most current modern synthesis of evolutionary biology to ask for an antiviral, I think you just need to understand that antivirals and antibiotics work by inhibiting funtions that are vital to microbe replication. It's understanding how the drug works, not why the virus is on earth.
Maher should be pointing and laughing at people who deny germ theory or the 'theory' that DNA replication is essential for life to reproduce...oh wait Maher has denied on of those theories himself...