Claims About Science
tqa | December 9, 2008
I've been dealing with creationists for a long time now, and I thought that I'd gotten over being surprised by dishonest behavior in their ranks. In fact, I thought I'd gotten over it even when I'm on the receiving end of the false witness, and when the person dishing it out is someone who really should know better. As it turns out, I might not have quite as far over it as I thought.
As regular readers know, Dr. Michael Egnor is one of the more impressively credentialed denizens of the Discovery Institute's media complaints blog. He has decades of experience as a neurosurgeon. He's on the…
tqa | January 23, 2008
Over at the Discovery Institute's blog, Rob Crowther is playing up the "Dissent from Darwinism" list. Again. The list is nothing new. They've been working on it for several years now, and have managed to accumulate "over 700" signatures from around the world. Given the number of scientists on the planet, and the degree to which the DI folks have relaxed their definition of "scientist", it's hardly a stellar performance on their part. As much as I'd like to ignore the list for being the laughable public relations gimmick that it is, I'm not going to this time. Crowther managed to punch one of…
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 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…