Anti-Evolutionism
tqa | November 26, 2007
One of the joys of procrastination is that sometimes if you wait long enough, someone else really will take care of things. I mention that because Ed Brayton just did a good job dismantling Casey Luskin's latest whine about how big bad Judge Jones was such a nasty judicial activist for daring to issue a ruling in the Dover, PA Intelligent Design case that addressed the question of whether or not ID is good science. I was planning a long and detailed post on the same thing, but now all that I have to do is highlight one point that Ed didn't make in his post.
As Ed points out, there were a…
tqa | September 29, 2007
A couple of weeks ago, I posted two ridiculous quotes that are found in the Bob Jones textbook that's involved in the California Creationism lawsuit. I'm still wading through these texts and Behe's report explaining why it's really a very good book for high school students to use to learn biology. It's a slow process, and a painful one, but I've found another couple of outstanding quotes to share with you.
This time, I'm including three different types of quote. There are a couple where the authors say things have absolutely nothing to do with science of any kind (and are totally out to…
tqa | September 27, 2007
Today's New York Times has a story up on the upcoming Ben Stein "documentary" on the alleged persecution that ID proponents face in the academic world. The NYT article quotes a number of scientists who were interviewed for the movie (including Scienceblogs own PZ Myers) as saying that they were told that the interview was going to be for an entirely different movie.
Bill Dembski posted something about the article, with a brief comment of his own:
I can't say I feel sorry for these atheistic scientists in agreeing to interview for EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED. When the BBC…
tqa | September 25, 2007
Most of the readers of this blog are intelligent, interested, scientifically literate individuals, but I'm guessing that at least a few of you aren't familiar with one of the nouns in the title. Those of you who do know what a conodont is are probably wondering what it has to do with the others. If you bear with me for a little bit, the connection will be clear shortly. It has to do with fossils, fossilization, and the latest spectacular misunderstanding of those two things at Uncommon Descent.
Conodonts are (or, rather, were) an interesting group of animals. They were around from late in…
tqa | September 24, 2007
If you love predictability, you've got to love the Discovery Institute. Whenever someone publishes a paper about human evolution, it's a pretty safe bet that someone there will soon take the time to explain how having learned something new means that we somehow know less than we did before. You can set your watch by it, almost.
The latest example comes from Casey Luskin. He "discusses" a paper that came out in Nature this week that reported on some fossils from Dmanisi, Georgia. Several skulls have been described from this site already, and the current paper focuses on post-cranial (less…
tqa | September 16, 2007
I've been continuing to put some time into criticizing Michael Behe's expert report on the creationist texts involved in the California Creationism Case. This is a slow process, partly because I'm also working on other projects and partly because it's difficult to read the Bob Jones "Biology for Christian Schools" text without encountering a range of unpleasant side effects. I've been fighting the increased blood pressure and the nausea, and soldiering on. Along the way, I've encountered some real gems that I thought I'd share with you.
Today, I'm going to give you two quotes: one on…
tqa | September 5, 2007
From an article in the Baptist Press, linked from the Uncommon Descent homepage:
"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," [Dembski] said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."
Good job, Bill.