Intelligent design/creationism
oracknows | June 2, 2007Infophilia finds Dr. Michael Egnor's invocation of the Stalin Zombie from a couple of months ago and tears it apart.
Come to think of it, Egnor's been laying down some silliness about evolution lately. I had been restraining myself from commenting due to my previous oversaturation blogging about his antics, but I think I've given the blog a suitably long Egnor-free interval that it might be time to have some dismayed fun with our creationist neurosurgeon again...
tsmith | June 1, 2007Back when I used to discuss evolution directly with creationists more frequently, I'd often cite Answers in Genesis' page of Arguments we think creationists should not use" page. I hadn't checked this out in awhile, and forgot they have on there as an argument that is "doubtful, hence, inadvisable to use:" "Natural selection is a tautology." Yet that was just the argument given by Egnor in several posts, starting here--so even the young-earthers think Egnor has something to learn.
Typical me. I'm the one who always thinks of the snappy comeback hours after a comment is made too....
oracknows | May 28, 2007i think I've made it exquisitely clear how much I detest and despise the term "Nevile Chamberlain School of Evolutionists." Indeed, my disgust at the term led me to sic the Hitler Zombie on (of all people) Richard Dawkins, the originator of the term, a deed that was either the boldest thing I've ever done as a blogger or the stupidest. (In retrospect, I haven't decided which.) Recently, however, one of the most vociferous users of the term (and fellow victim of the Hitler Zombie with Richard Dawkins) seems to have backed away from the use of the term. I'm talking about Larry Moran, of course…
oracknows | May 27, 2007I've been a bit remiss in my blog carnival plugging; so here's my chance to make up for it. Here are some carnivals worth checking out:
Carnival of Bad History #14: The Backlog Edition (The name speaks for itself.)
Carnivalesque #27 (Ancient, medieval and early modern history.)
Tangled Bank #80 (Science.)
The Creation Museum (The blogosphere's skeptical response to Ken Ham's creationism museum, which recently opened. Unfortunately, I forgot about this, and didn't write up something suitably snarky myself, but fortunately plenty of other bloggers did. Alas, the message will be lost on the…
oracknows | May 16, 2007Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century:
"It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children."
"[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all."
"At the present time there are in the United States more than a million people with serious hereditary defects, and to reduce their numbers by even a few thousand would reduce the amount of…
oracknows | May 3, 2007If there's one undeniable aspect of "intelligent design" creationism advocates, it is their ability to twist and misrepresent science and any discussions of evolution to their own ends. Be it Dr. Michael Egnor's twisting of history to claim that eugenics is based on Darwinism, rather than the artificial selection (or, as we snarky ones like to call it, intelligent design), claims that "Darwinism" is a tautology and irrelevant to the question of antimicrobial resistance, or blaming evolution for atheism, the decline of Western mores, and, if you believe the ID advocates, bad breath, key to the…
oracknows | April 29, 2007Thanks to a reader commenting in yesterday's post, I've been made aware of a truly brilliant summation of creationism of both the young earth and intelligent design variety:
Exactly.
oracknows | April 29, 2007I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly it's a bad thing that another physician is diving head-first into the pseudoscience that is "intelligent design" creationism and making a of himself in the process.
On the other hand, at least this time it's not a surgeon:
A Columbia medical professor made his case for scientific acceptance of "intelligent design" last night and found himself taking fire from his peers for his view.
John Marshall, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, argued in front of about 100 people in a University Hospital…
oracknows | April 26, 2007On May 5 New York City will witness what will perhaps be the most unintentionally hilarious spectacle of two fundamentalists making utter fools of themselves:
MEDIA ADVISORY, April 26 /Christian Newswire/ -- After ABC ran a story in January about hundreds of atheists videotaping themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit, best-selling author Ray Comfort contacted the network and offered to prove God's existence, absolutely, scientifically, without mentioning the Bible or faith. He and Kirk Cameron (co-hosts of an award-winning Christian TV program) challenged the two originators of the "…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike...
What did I ever do to deserve this? Specifically, your remarks about our creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor:
In his "response," "Egnor" manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the "Michael Egnor" articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes...It's been fun while it lasted, but the game's over now. Would whoever is really writing this stuff please take this opportunity to own up to it? Please…
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
oracknows | April 16, 2007...because he's sure as heck doing his best to cause it damage with his latest antievolution "broadsides," even to the point where it needs the loving ministrations of a neurosurgeon! His latest screeds produce in me a nearly irresistible urge to pound my head against the nearest hard surface to make the psychic pain stop. He's placing me in danger of real, physical pain, from epidural hematoma (in fact, I wonder if I'm in the middle of a lucid interval right now) to subdural hematoma to cerebral contusions.
First of all, regular readers may have noted that I haven't yet responded to the…
oracknows | April 10, 2007I don't want to make this blog "all Egnor all the time." I know it's hard to believe, given my posting behavior recently, but really I don't. No matter how much the Discovery Institute's creationist neurosurgeon may embarrass the hell out of me as (I shudder to have to admit) a fellow surgeon, I've recently been trying to ration the rebuttals of his nonsense about evolution, and I note that I took one swipe at him yesterday. Even so, I hope you'll forgive me for this brief lapse. I had to do it because my irony meter is building up to a meltdown and explosion because of what Dr. Michael Egnor…
oracknows | April 4, 2007Well, well, well, well.
I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…
oracknows | April 3, 2007One of the consistent themes of this blog has been combating Holocaust denial and, as a subtext, another consistent theme has been that passing laws to criminalize Holocaust denial (or, as has been attempted recently, criminalize "genocide denial") or throwing Holocaust deniers like David Irving into jail is about as ill-advised an approach to fighting this particularly odious form of racism and anti-Semitism as I can imagine. It makes Holocaust denial the "forbidden fruit" and at the same time facilitates the truly disgusting spectacle of Holocaust deniers donning the mantle of free speech…
oracknows | April 2, 2007Now that it's been admitted that the apparent Discovery Institute prank, in which Dr. Michael Egnor posed as a parody of the most ignorant creationists there are, spouting truly inane and long-debunked canards about evolution for a month and a half, all in an effort to snooker us evil Darwinists into attacking him and then gloat as he revealed to the world that it was all just a joke, has been revealed to be in reality a Panda's Thumb April Fool's Day prank, I have to admit that it's depressing to have to contemplate again the fact that Dr. Egnor actually believes all the pseudoscientific and…
oracknows | April 1, 2007This Panda's Thumb entry makes me wonder if I was wasting my time with all those rebuttals of Dr. Michael Egnor's astoundingly ignorant attacks on "Darwinism." Could it be that Dr. Egnor really was just pulling our legs all along?
I have to admit that it seems plausible. After all, how could a man like Dr. Egnor make it through an undergraduate biochemistry degree program, then medical school, then the often brutal and--dare I say it?--Darwinian culling process of a neurosurgery residency program, only to go on to become a respected Professor of Neurosurgery at SUNY Stony Brook, and, with all…
oracknows | March 30, 2007While looking for a birthday card for a relative a while back, I found this card and was intrigued enough to buy it, even though it wasn't appropriate for the person for whom I was seeking a card:
So far, it's just pretty standard Bush-chimp stuff, a staple of comedy ever since W. took office. But what got me was the inside of the card:
Two points:
It's rather amazing that the whole "intelligent design" debate has become so ubiquitous that it's showing up in birthday cards, of all things.
I haven't decided if this is the best birthday card ever or the worst birthday card ever. Opinions?
tsmith | March 30, 2007I don't know if you've seen any of the posts here at Scienceblogs or Panda's Thumb about the Discovery Institute's newest protégé, Dr. Michael Egnor. A professor of neurosurgery at SUNY-Stony Brook, Dr. Egnor has been pontificating on how "Darwinism" has nothing to offer to medicine; and indeed, that evolutionary biology has "hijacked" other fields of study. Mike has already aptly pointed out many of Egnor's strawmen and intellectual dishonesties, so I won't review them all. I've stayed out of the fray until now because I've had limited time and others have been handling it quite ably,…