Michael Egnor
denialism | August 6, 2007Ah Egnor. The chief purveyor of foot-in-mouth disease at Evolution News and Views takes on Dunford's recent post on the intellectual dishonesty of the intelligent design creationist movement and shows exactly why Dunford has a point.
Intelligent design is a cheesy attempt to smear a patina of scientific legitimacy on creationist ideas. Dunford quite reasonably points out that at least the creationists are honest about their objectives, while the ID cranks play a game of hiding their creationist dogma behind psuedoscientific nonsense. Egnor takes offense, and suggests that Dunford is…
denialism | June 29, 2007Take that Egnor!
Altruism -- helping another with no expectation of personal reward -- was once thought to be a uniquely human trait, The Times of London reported. However, in recent experiments, chimpanzees repeatedly helped humans who appeared to be struggling to reach a stick within the animal's enclosure.
The chimps, which were interacting with humans who had not given them food, spontaneously helped the humans by reaching across and helping them get the stick.
The experiments were carried out among 36 chimpanzees at a sanctuary for the animals in Uganda.
Anthropologists cite altruism as…
denialism | June 16, 2007You know how dumb Egnor sounds with his mind outside the brain cell-phone silliness? He sounds as dumb as Deepak Chopra writing more brain-dead new agey nonsense for the Huffington Post.
To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn't register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as…
denialism | June 15, 2007Michael Egnor is to "argument from analogy" as a fish is to __________.
A. Fire
B. Victorian Literature
C. Mathematics
D. Water
Imagine scientists living on an isolated island who have developed sophisticated science and culture, with one exception: they deny that telecommunication is possible. For assorted reasons, they deny that the human voice can be transmitted through space, except as vibrations in air. We'll call this civilization the 'Verizon Deniers.'
One day, they find a cell phone (it dropped from a plane or something). They turn it on, and they hear things. They hear hissing,…
denialism | June 4, 2007The latest gem from Egnor:
Clearly the brain, as a material substance, causes movement of the body, which is also a material substance. The links are nerves and muscles. But there is no material link between our ideas and our brains, because ideas aren't material.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but that's strikes me as the dumbest thing I've heard yet. No material link between our ideas and our brains? So I guess when we take a hallucinogen like LSD it works by magic? How could it be that thinking
is separate from "material" as he puts it, when we can ingest material substances that alter our…
denialism | May 30, 2007The latest entry in the Darwinism = eugenics nonsense comes from the crank Michael Egnor.
Once again, as a Charlottesvillian I feel the cranks are invading my home turf. About a mile away from me is this sign:
It reads:
In 1924, Virginia, like a majority of states then enacted eugenic sterilization laws. Virginia's law allowed state institutions to operate on individuals to prevent the conception of what were believed to be "genetically inferior" children. Charlottesville native Carrie Buck (1906-1983) involuntarily committed to a state facility near Lynchburg, was chosen as the first…