Intelligent design/creationism
tsmith | September 13, 2006 You may or may not be familiar with the name Ignaz Semmelweis. It's not one that's typically taught to school children, like Koch or Pasteur may be. He even tends to get glossed over in upper-level biology courses. But Semmelweis was an important figure in the history of microbiology (indeed, I picked his work as the greatest experiment in my field). Here's what I wrote about him in that post:
Semmelweis was a physician in Vienna in the 1840s, with an interested in "childbed fever," a leading cause of mortality in women who'd given birth. During this time, he noticed that the mortality…
tsmith | September 10, 2006In the comments to this post on creationists'/HIV deniers' (mis)use of statistics, several people have been trying to argue that because overlapping membership in the two groups is limited, my comparison of the two is false. I explained:
It's the *tactics* that are the same in both groups: misleading use of statistics as evidenced in this post, cherry-picking the lit, appeals to authority, grand conspiracies imagined, painting scientists as greedy and hopelessly biased, quote-mining, hell, they even each have their own prizes based on an impossible standard of evidence.
Michael replied:
Oh…
tsmith | September 8, 2006It's been a busy week over at Panda's Thumb. Three additional reviews of Jon Wells' Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design are up:
First, PT's resident lawyer Timothy Sandefur writes about Wells' misleading characterizations of legal cases involving intelligent design.
Next, Mike Dunford discusses Wells' chapter on speciation.
Finally, Ian Musgrave tackles Wells' chapter on irreducible complexity.
And, for an extra dose of Panda's Thumb, check out Nick Matzke's post highlighting his recent paper in Nature Reviews Microbiology on the origin of bacterial flagella.
tsmith | September 4, 2006Regular readers are very familiar with my refrain that many science deniers use the same tactics: bad arguments, quote-mining, appeals to authority, castigation of originators of respective theories, etc. etc. Another common thread is the complete bastardization of statistical analysis. Mark Chu-Carroll elaborates on Peter Duesberg's misuse of statistics here, while mathematician John Allen Paulos destroys creationist/ID analysis here. I'll highlight some of the best parts below:
For those of you who are familiar with creationist/ID arguments, you know that they take an event (say, the…
tsmith | August 30, 2006Mark Perakh reviews yet another chapter of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. In this particular chapter, Wells argues that "Lysenkoism is now rearing its ugly head in the US, as Darwinists use their government positions to destroy the careers of their critics." Obviously, Perakh disagrees, and shows how Wells has again distorted quotes and history. Check it out here.
oracknows | August 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
tsmith | August 29, 2006 As has been mentioned elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Ohio creationst Deborah Owens Fink is facing a challenge for her seat on Ohio's school board this coming November 7th. Fink has been one of those who, when I've contacted the Board members to urge them to support good science, I've not even bothered with--it's a waste of keystrokes. Ed has the lowdown on the situation, and the Columbus Dispatch has more:
This year, pro-evolution members prevailed in efforts to strip a provision from highschool science standards that they said promoted the teaching of intelligent design.
"They got what they…
tsmith | August 29, 2006In the ongoing collection of rebuttals to the new Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, check out Andrea's review of Wells' chapter on molecular biology.
oracknows | August 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 26, 2006The other day, in the wake of D. James Kennedy's dishonest documentary Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which blatantly tried to blame the Holocaust and Nazi racial hygiene policies to Darwin's theory of evolution in a totally dishonest way. Particularly ridiculous was Richard Weikart's emphasison the observation that the Nazis used the term "selection" when doctors met each new train transport of Jews at the entrances to the camps to choose who would go straight to the gas chambers and who would survive a while to work, most likely to die in a matter of weeks or months of a combination of starvation…
tsmith | August 26, 2006Burt's write-up of Wells' first chapter of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design is up at The Panda's Thumb. PZ's also re-posted his review of Chapter 3 at PT; link here.
oracknows | August 25, 2006Amazing.
I've found Internet access, and, of course, I can't resist using it to add a bit to the commentary about the special being aired by the Coral Ridge Ministries that seeks to blame the Holocaust on Darwin. Yes, I did launch a Hitler Zombie attack on Monday, right before heading out on vacation, but a couple of other thoughts came to mind. For instance, consider this quote by Hitler:
For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can…
tsmith | August 25, 2006Check it out here. I mentioned previously that I'll be reviewing another chapter of the book in the future, and PZ has a write-up of the chapter on developmental biology here (that will be posted to Panda's Thumb in the coming days), and he also has some suggestions here on how bloggers can help make the rebuttals to this nonsense stand out. As Reed notes in his introduction to the book:
The Discovery Institute is the epicenter of "intelligent design" activism, which took a major blow when Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District effectively declared it religiously motivated pseudoscience,…
tsmith | August 23, 2006So, you may or may not be aware of the latest "challenge" to evolutionary theory--DI Fellow Jonathan Wells' new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design." Following in the footsteps of Tom Bethell's "Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" (whose terrible chapter on AIDS I reviewed here), the book is just all shades of terrible. (As has been pointed out by many others who've read books in the "Politically Incorrect" series, they should just drop the pretense of "Politically"--simply "Incorrect" sums them up much better). I'll have a more comprehensive…
oracknows | August 21, 2006Things had been quiet. Too quiet. So quiet that Orac couldn't even enjoy his usual recreational pastime of analyzing limericks and jokes linguistically in order to try to understand what made them so amusing to the humans among whom he was forced to exist. Even probing the perturbations in the electromagnetic fields caused by the nearest black hole wouldn't let him shake this sense that something was going to happen.
Sense? Orac is a computer; how could he have a "sense" of anything? Certainly, computers don't usually have intuition or a "sense," but Orac was a much higher order of computer,…
tsmith | August 20, 2006So, the Discovery Institute is planning the "largest conference on Intelligent Design ever held," sponsored by Physicians for Scientific Integrity (yeah, this group I wrote about previously) and being held in Florida in two parts--late September and early November. In the latter portion (held in a church, of course--but nooo, it's all science, not religion), they claim to be hosting "The Great Debate." Who's it between, you ask? Nick Matzke has the answer:
Featuring: Dr. Stephen Meyer, Ph.D. in philosophy of science, Cambridge University
and Dr. Donald Duh, professor (emeritus) at…
tsmith | August 18, 2006Workers at candy company see form of Virgin Mary in chocolate:
Workers at a chocolate company have discovered a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary.
Since the discovery of the drippings under a vat on Monday, employees of Bodega Chocolates have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it.
OK, beside my initial thought of "shouldn't they be working??", I hope they're not getting those candles too close to the chocolate...
But…
tsmith | August 15, 2006The grandaddy of the state science groups, Kansas Citizens for Science, celebrated its 7th birthday. Congrats to everyone involved, and much thanks for your leadership--not only in the state, but in the national fight for better science education. Happy birthday, and keep up the excellent work!