2011

[Contest closed for judging.] Contest judged here.

Recently, a list was posted to Listverse identifying Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as “#1 in a list of 10 books that screwed up the world” because “Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true.”

At the time, we noted,

Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3)

[ … ]

And this beats der Fuehrer? So World War II was for nothing? Wow.

The list’s author tried to cover his base by asserting that his 10 through to 1 list order isn’t supposed to mean anything. Just an accident with numbers, like the universe itself?

Lists can be fun. So here’s the contest: Read More ›

… as usual: Despite the many changes that have rippled through American society over the last 6 ½ decades, belief in God as measured in this direct way has remained high and relatively stable. – Frank Newport, “More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God: Professed belief is lower among younger Americans, Easterners, and liberals,” Gallup (June 3, 2011) The new atheists have played a central role, sources say, in strengthening belief in God.

… like this one, here’s a doozy from the archives: On the first Earth Day, in 1970, some scientists predicted that pollution would make “breathing helmets” necessary in ten years’ time.  Prophecy above may be used as a substitute for the usual Sunday apocalypse. Of course the prediction was fulfilled. It “shows environmental concern.” Such predictions are always granted Fulfilled status. Also file under: You’d think people’d notice that there are enough real environment issues out …

In an act of touching faith, Darryl Cunningham tries his hand at cartooning Darwin’s pious legends here. No really, he believes every one of them. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

In “Answering the Dreaded ‘Evolution’ Question” (The American Spectator 6.24.11), Jay Richards and David Klinghoffer explain how politicians can avoid the “speed trap” of the “evolution” question:

Though a president doesn’t have much influence over state and local science education policy, reporters lie in wait for the unwary candidate, ready to pounce with a question he’s poorly prepared to answer yet that is important to millions of voters. Fortunately, there’s a reply that not only avoids the trap but helps advance public understanding.

Oh yes? They suggest:  Read More ›

Few or no documentaries. Okay, that doesn’t matter. But this does: In unbylined “An Environmentalist’s Lament” (Breakthrough Journal, June 2011), we learn, once again, about the high costs of hype when it does matter:

Take last summer’s BP oil spill in Louisiana. Covering the spill was the Super Bowl of environmental journalism. You couldn’t have asked for a better disaster: the never-ending gusher, the oiled birds and tar balls, the callous foreign corporation and corrupt government agency. [ … ] I was in no position to go off chasing oil slicks — but also with a certain discomfort I couldn’t put my finger on until recently, when New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian published an exhaustive investigation into the spill.

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In “Darwinian Medicine and Proximate and Evolutionary Explanations,” at Evolution News & Views (June 25, 2011), neurosurgeon Mike Egnor makes a critical distinction between proximate explanations and evolutionary explanations,s they apply to medicine: Read More ›

How’d that work out at a used car lot? In “Wrong Again: Planetologists Embarrassed” (Creation-Evolution Headlines, June 23, 2011), Dave Coppedge comments on getting it wrong about planets: In most careers, being wrong too often is grounds for dismissal. False prophets in ancient kingdoms were stoned or shamed out of town. Only in science, it seems, can experts consistently get it wrong, and not only keep their jobs, but be highly esteemed as experts. Among the guiltiest of the lot are planetary scientists, whose predictions have been consistently wrong for almost every planetary body studied since the dawn of the space age. Their orbital mechanics is solid; they do get their spacecraft to arrive at the right place at the Read More ›

Granville Sewell’s sin is pointing out the obvious that anyone can understand. This represents a tremendous threat. As David Berlinski has observed, Darwinists — who have invested their worldview and even their careers in Darwinian storytelling — react with understandable hostility when told that their “theory” is simply not credible. It’s really easy to figure out that the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection cannot possibly do that with which it is credited. Life is fundamentally based on information and information processing — a software computer program and its associated, highly functionally integrated execution hardware. Computer programs don’t write themselves, and they especially don’t write themselves when random errors are thrown into the code. The fact that biological Read More ›

In Nature News, we learn: “Europe tackles huge fraud: Regulators scramble to recover millions of euros awarded to fake research projects.” (Quririn Shiermeier, 14 June 2011):

talian authorities and the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) in Brussels, Belgium, have confirmed that they are prosecuting members of a large network accused of pocketing more than €50 million (US$72 million) in EC grants for fake research projects. In Milan, Italy, the Finance Police last month charged several individuals in relation to the fraud. In Brussels, meanwhile, the EC has terminated four collaborative projects in information technology, and excluded more than 30 grant-winners from participation in around 20 ongoing projects. Investigations are still under way in the United Kingdom, France, Greece, Austria, Sweden, Slovenia and Poland. 

“We don’t have any records of [previous] fraud at such a scale,” Read More ›

Granville Sewell, math prof, satirist of silly ideas, and apology recipient (from math journal), has this to say about Darwinists’ attempt to rescue their theory from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Organization always decrees, left to itself. Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as it is “compensated” somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. [ … ] According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting Read More ›

Unless, of course, it’s okay that bureaucrats and social engineers do your thinking for you … in which case, you won’t be next, you’ll just be toothpaste.

“In Defense of ‘Hurtful’ Speech” (The Wall Street Journal June 24, 2011) Geert Wilders speaks out on an issue of critical importance to the intelligent designcommunity: free thought:

I was tried for a thought crime despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament.[ … ]

I was brought to trial despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament. I was not prosecuted for anything I did, but for what I said.

[ … ]

I was dragged to court by leftist and Islamic organizations that were bent not only on silencing me but on stifling public debate …

Is this happening in your country? Shame! It was happening in Canada, and we have started to put a stop to it. We have a long way to go …

The secret of success is Read More ›

In 2006, Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer wrote: “We have to wonder why the Intelligent Designer added to our genome junk DNA, repeated copies of useless DNA, orphan genes, tandem repeats, and pseudogenes, none of which are involved directly in the making of a human being. In fact, of the entire human genome, it appears that only a tiny percentage is actively involved in useful protein production, It looks as though Rather than being intelligently designed, the human genome looks more and more like a mosaic of mutations, fragment copies, borrowed sequences, and discarded strings of DNA that were jerry-built over millions of years of evolution.”- Jonathan Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA, p. 23 Incidentally, at Amazon it’s (10:00 Read More ›

In “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,” Hugo Merciera and Dan Sperbera argue (loaded word, that!) for a theory about how argument evolved:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought.
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And that’s what matters. Every Darwin myth you’ve ever heard is crammed into David Brooks’ recent happy face novel., The Social Animal (Even so, P.Z. Myers didn’t like it.) But, the curious thing is, notes John Gray in “Mr. Brooks’s Miracle Elixir”, is who did like it: DAVID BROOKS is not the first contributor to the airport book stand to whom our leaders have turned for enlightenment and instruction. In the search for insight on the issues of the day, the politicians who are meant to be guiding us toward a better world have nudged, blinked, pirouetted on tipping points and anxiously pondered the wisdom of crowds. Yet none of these brightly packaged manuals has proved to have the practical Read More ›