Intelligent design/creationism
tsmith | April 3, 2008The Expelled producers lied about canceling a movie showing in Tempe. Anyone surprised?
oracknows | March 29, 2008Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about "intellectual oppression" by those evil "Darwinists" directed against any valiant "intelligent design" creationist or anyone else who "questions" Darwin and (2) lots of blaming the Holocaust and other atrocities (but mainly Hitler and the Holocaust) on "Darwinism," replete with lots of shots of Nazis, Ben Stein clumsily emoting…
oracknows | March 24, 2008I really didn't want to get involved with the whole "framing" debate again. For whatever reason (and they are reasons that I've failed to understand), the very mention of the word seems to set certain members of the ScienceBlogs collective into rabid fits of vicious invective that leave rational discourse behind. And, yes, I know that by saying that I risk setting myself up as a target of said invective, but I don't care. It must be the natural cantankerousness that my low level death crud is inducing in me or maybe it's a lack of judgment brought on by large doses decongestants and…
oracknows | March 23, 2008...because Boston skeptics get to have all the fun with a meeting of Skeptics in the Pub on Monday, March 24 at The Asgard (great name for a pub!) in Cambridge at 7 PM. Keynote speaker for the night is our very own Mike the Mad Biologist. We've done a little blog tag-teaming in the past of some idiotic arguments by creationists claiming that evolution is unnecessary to understand the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria; so it's a shame I don't live in Boston.
Oh, well. One of these days I need to find out if there's a skeptics' group in my neck of the woods.
oracknows | March 22, 2008The other night, I wrote about how the painfully inept and just plain dumb actions of the producer of Expelled!, the neuron-apoptosing movie that's basically an extended argumentum ad Nazium against the dreaded "Darwinism" that blames Hitler, Stalin, and, apparently, puppy hatred on Charles Darwin himself. Basically, the producers were having one of their private screenings (although how one can call a screening for which almost anyone can sign up on the web "private" is beyond me), and, by serendipity, the screening happened to be in the Mall of America on the Thursday before a large atheist…
oracknows | March 20, 2008...to see Expelled!
In perhaps the funniest incident I can recall involving a fellow ScienceBlogger since there has been ScienceBlogs, earlier this evening scourges of "intelligent design" creationism P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins went to see a screening of the antievolution pro-ID creationism movie Expelled! in the Minneapolis area. The guards recognized P.Z. and wouldn't let them in the movie.
They apparently didn't recognize Richard Dawkins and did let him in to see the movie.
Let's get this straight. The producers scheduled a screening in the Minneapolis area on the same weekend that…
tsmith | March 20, 2008PZ got kicked out of a screening of Expelled, the latest ID propaganda movie--in which he's featured. Someone else who's in it? Richard Dawkins. Guess who PZ's guest was--a guest who was let into the screening?
Yep. Dawkins.
The irony. The hypocrisy. Just incredible.
oracknows | March 11, 2008You may remember from yesterday that I wrote about a concerted propaganda effort by antivaccinationists to torture the facts and science behind a case of a girl with a rare mitochondrial disease whose condition may have been exacerbated by vaccination, resulting in an encephalopathy with some autism-like symptoms. Actually, I had had in mind an entirely different topic for yesterday, but news events drove me. Basically, I couldn't stand all the B.S. I saw emanating from antivaccinationists on news broadcasts and radio, and I had to do my little part to counter it. Fortunately (or…
oracknows | March 3, 2008I'm not sure why, but it's been a while since I've delved into the cesspit of pseudoscience that is the Discovery Institute's propaganda organ, Evolution News & Views. Perhaps it was because I simply got tired of diving into the depths of stupid. Of course, that then begs the question of why I've been spending so much time diving into the Age of Autism website or the sophisticated-sounding yet ultimately vacuously pseudoscientific blather that is David Kirby. Trying to decide which is stupider, AoA or ENV, is rather like deciding whether it would be better to die of cancer or Lou Gehrig's…
oracknows | February 19, 2008In response to my post yesterday castigating J. B. Handley of Generation Rescue for hypocritically accusing the American Academy of Pediatrics of "manipulating the media" when manipulating the media is Generation Rescue's raison d'être, Mike the Mad Biologist turned me on to a rather fascinating article in the New York Times by its Public Editor Clark Hoyt entitled The Doctors Are In. The Jury Is Out. It discusses a topic very near and dear to my heart, namely how newspapers report scientific or medical controversies, specifically, how the NYT covers controversies in which one side is the…
oracknows | February 16, 2008When you don't have the facts on your side, can't get published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and have consistently failed to make a case for your hypothesis, what do you do? Well, if you're a real scientist, you might just finally pack it in, admit that you were probably wrong, and move on to another scientific question or to another hypothesis about the same question to investigate.
Not "intelligent design" creationists.
To them, it doesn't matter just how bad their arguments are, how untestable and incoherent their hypothesis is, or how obvious it is that they are simply…
oracknows | February 7, 2008Nooooo!
I thought I might be safe. It's been a really long time since I've had to hang my head in shame and contemplate covering it with a paper bag because of creationist pontifications of a fellow physician bringing shame upon our shared profession. It had even been longer since I had dealt with Dr. Geoffrey Simmons, a particularly clueless "intelligent design" creationist. And don't even get me started on the whole "Physicians and Surgeons Who Dissent from Darwinism" silliness started by the Discovery Institute.
Now P.Z. Myers informs me that Dr. Simmons is back and dumber than ever…
tsmith | February 7, 2008It's not certain there will be a decision immediately, though:
From the Iowa State Daily:
The Iowa Board of Regents will meet Thursday to discuss the tenure denial appeal of Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State, at its regional meeting on the ISU campus.
The meeting is at 8:30 a.m., with a one-hour closed session dedicated to discussing the appeal beginning at 8:35 a.m. The regents will emerge with either a decision on the case or a decision to postpone it.
"The board does not have to decide within the hour time slot given for the meeting, and…
oracknows | January 29, 2008In nondescript dressing room in a nondescript studio in a nondescript office building in in a nondescript industrial park, a short, pudgy 63-year-old man with the stereotypical demeanor of a particularly boring economist was trying to squeeze into a pair of shorts.
"Why oh why did I agree to do this?" he muttered in a whining drone.
He continued to struggle to get into the black shorts, virtually identical to the ones worn by English schoolboys and still worn by Angus Young of AC/DC on stage. Even though Young is over 50, somehow he managed to get into them, and so will I, thought the man.…
oracknows | January 17, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
oracknows | December 23, 2007You be the judge:
I believe, first of all, evolution is a crock.
It takes a lot of faith to believe that I came from an ameba. A lot of faith!
So evolution should be taught in Faith Class, otherwise known in parochial schools as Religion Class.
It's a crazy world we live in. Crazier every day. But one of the craziest notions that ever came down the pike is evolution. Who in his right mind would ever believe that the complicated homo sapien derived from a speck? That's getting the larger from the smaller.
No, it's an even crazier world when a clueless twit like Grant Swank can write something…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
It's almost here.
No, not Christmas, although that's almost here too. what I'm talking about is the fast-approaching 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is due to land at Aardvarchaelogy on Thursday, December 20, right in time for the holidays. (And what better time to indulge in a serious dose of skepticism than in the midst of all this pre-Christmas cheer?) Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud. Well, the pre-visitation Scrooge, anyway. The post-visitation Scrooge clearly believed in ghosts and other paranormal happenings, like visitations promised to happen in over three nights…
oracknows | December 12, 2007Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and its propagnda arm (Discovery Institute) in particular have done their best to try to portray Gonzalez as a martyr who was "persecuted" for his beliefs and denied his "academic freedom." Despite the attempts of the DI to milk it for all its PR value, as usual, the…