Intelligent design/creationism
oracknows | December 26, 2008...more not-so-Respectful Insolence, courtesy not of Orac this time but of other skeptical physician-bloggers!
Enjoy:
Smackdown, please (yes, Egnor, I'm talking to you) (by blog bud PalMD)
Defending science-based medicine (by skeptical neurologist Dr. Steve Novella, who's been known to spar a bit with Dr. Egnor himself over evolution and neuroscience)
Egnorance is Bliss (by Dr. Kimball Atwood IV)
oracknows | December 24, 2008It's Christmas Eve.
I know, I know, it's all supposed to be Peace On Earth, Good Will Towards Men (and Women), and all that jazz. Really, that's exactly what I had intended for today and tomorrow. Indeed, my plan was to do nothing more than a quickie post today and a maybe a couple of brief (and hopefully amusing) Christmas-related posts this afternoon and tomorrow. Really, I had.
Then it came, and it came from a direction that I least expected. Yes, yet another "old friend" of the blog had to go and and not just ask but beg for a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. My readers…
oracknows | December 15, 2008Three goodies on skepticism and science:
Skeptical Battlegrounds: Part III - Alternative Medicine. Suffice it to say, Steve agrees with me. He just lays it all out in one post instead of ten.
Once again, Egnor and Tautologies. Blogchild Mark Chu-Carroll takes on our favorite creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Egnor. This time he deals directly with something I've touched upon recently: Egnor's false labeling of the theory of evolution as a tautology.
Alternative Medicine's Rapid Spread? Nonsense. Oddly enough, Avery Camarow, whose articles I've taken issue with before for credulity towards the…
oracknows | December 10, 2008
I have to wonder if the most famous denizen of the Discovery Institute in medical circles, Dr. Michael Egnor, is on vacation or something. For some reason, he's been especially active over at the Discovery Institute's repository of pseudoscience, Evolution News & Views, over the last couple of weeks. Neurosurgeons tend to be very busy people, more so even than a humble breast cancer surgeon like me, and few are as motivated as I am to blog. Yet, these days Dr. Egnor's been flooding EN&V with more of his blather than I've seen him do in a long time, maybe ever.
It's times like these…
oracknows | December 4, 2008It may well be; Roger Ebert has finally gotten around to reviewing Expelled! Short version: He didn't like it.
Long version: He really, really didn't like it.
I knew there was a reason I liked Roger Ebert.
oracknows | December 2, 2008Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time.
Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
oracknows | November 13, 2008
The things I do for my readers.
I'm referring to a movie entitled The Beautiful Truth, links to whose website and trailers several of you have e-mailed to me over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it's because the movie is only showing in New York and Los Angeles and hasn't made it out of the media enclaves of those cities out to the rest of us in flyover country, or maybe its release is so limited that I just hadn't heard of it. Certainly that appears to be the case, as the schedule shown at the website lists it as beginning an engagement in New York tomorrow and running through November 20…
oracknows | October 18, 2008Orac gets e-mail.
Most of it's just brief notes with a link that someone thinks I should check out (and possibly blog about). Even though I occasionally make sarcastic remarks about being deluged with one story or other from time to time, I actually do appreciate those. Many have been the times when I didn't really have anything that floated my boat enough to blog about that a juicy tidbit sent by a reader prevented the blog from going dark for a day. Whether that's always a good thing, I leave to the reader to judge.
Occasionally, I get mail profusely praising the blog. Affectation of an…
oracknows | September 14, 2008Heh.
"Please, ask this one about dinosaurs."
"I invite the media to grow a pair. And if you can't, I will lend you mine."
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
oracknows | June 25, 2008...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures.
Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…
tsmith | June 23, 2008 Many of you probably followed the 2005 "Kitzmiller vs. Dover" trial in Dover, Pennsylvania closely. From its early days, with daily updates at the Panda's Thumb to the publication of the ruling--"Kitzmas"-- in late December, the trial was filled with drama and moments right out of the movies. From the defendants' remarkable lying on the stand to Behe's admission that his definition of a scientific theory included astrology, it seemed that each day was better than the last for the pro-science side, culminating in the stinging tongue-lashing doled out by Judge Jones in his decision in favor…
oracknows | May 3, 2008Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain.
Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably…
oracknows | April 26, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about what I thought to be a fairly amusing story. It was the story of one hapless candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in a district in northwest Indiana whose excuses for giving a talk to the American National Socialist Workers Party's Chicago celebration of Adolf Hitler's 119th birthday last weekend can only be characterized as what in LOL Cat lingo one would call "EPIC FAIL" (he claimed he didn't think people there were of a "Nazi mindset"). I've also written more than I now wish I had about the inherent dishonesty of Ben Stein's claim in the movie…
oracknows | April 24, 2008Heh.
Before I abandon the disgusting piece of fecal matter that is Ben Stein's Expelled! for (hopefully) a long, long time, if not forever, I can't resist pointing out that it's good to see that at least someone totally gets it and sees through the lies. It's even better to see it coming from a hometown publication Real Detroit Weekly (you'll need to scroll almost all the way to the bottom of the web page to get past all the other movie reviews). A couple of gems:
In addition to the standard creationist claptrap, Ben Stein argues that there is a link between acceptance of evolution and…
oracknows | April 24, 2008Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don't agree with that assertion and that likening Ben Stein's claims in the movie actually weakened his otherwise excellent article that appropriately pointed out the inherent immorality and dishonesty in the way the movie links Darwinism to the Holocaust. To my surprise, Dr. Caplan actually…
oracknows | April 15, 2008As you may know, Ben Stein's execrable crapfest of a movie, Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed, slimes its way into theatres on Friday. From my perspective, the biggest, most vile lie pushed by Ben Stein and produce Mark Mathis is that it's a direct line from their hated "Darwinism" to the Holocaust, as I've pointed out twice before, but another major theme of the movie is that the poor, "truth-seeking" intelligent design creationists are ruthlessly "expelled" by those (pick one or more) atheistic/Stalinist/Nazi Darwinists.
Fortunately, there is a resource to counter Ben Stein's lies (and,…
oracknows | April 13, 2008Well, I'm here in sunny San Diego and about to head on over to the convention center to check out the day's festivities and to make sure to check out a friend's poster this morning. (If anyone reading this is attending AACR, you might recognize me by the Plexiglass box full of multi-colored blinking lights and the bad attitude who will have a propensity to whip out a laptop and blog if he finds interesting science to blog about.) The flight sucked, as usual. I was stuck in the middle seat, and the guy on one side of me looked like a bodybuilder and was suitably wide. It occurred to me that…