Biology

As has been noted, sometimes people come to UD looking for answers to questions about what they have been taught regarding “Evolution”; typically in the context of indoctrination under the Lewontinian ideological a priori materialism that he outlined thusly in his infamous 1997 NYRB article: [T]he problem is to get [the general public] to reject irrational and supernatural explanations [–> note the implicit bias, polarising rhetoric and refusal to address the real alternative posed by design theory, — which was already topical in those days some months after Behe’s first book on Irreducible complexity. Namely, assessing natural (= chance and/or necessity) vs ART-ificial alternative causes on empirically tested reliable signs] of the world, the demons that exist only in their Read More ›

On August 6th, Steven Pinker, the well-known Psychology Professor from Harvard, had an article in New Republic entitled Science is Not Your Enemy, in which he lambasts those who decry scientists for propounding scientism.  You’d expect rebuttals of Pinker to come from the likes of Wesley J. Smith who indeed took Pinker to task in an article in National Review Online, which we discussed here at UD as well.  You wouldn’t expect attack from your own side, however, but that is precisely what P.Z. Myers has done on his popular anti-ID blogsite Pharyngula in a post entitled Repudiating scientism, rather than surrendering to it.  Never one to mince words, PZ launches right in: When I heard that Steven Pinker had Read More ›

In the comments of this UD post from yesterday, (comment #21) I referred to Nick Matzke’s rant over at the Panda’s Thumb yesterday as yet another illustration of the double standard’s Matzke’s has when it comes to his critiques of anyone who dares challenge Darwinian Orthodoxy.  In my comments yesterday, I gave an example of Matzke being guilty of the very same thing he (falsely)accuses Meyer of doing.  Today, I want to call out Matzke on another of his famous ploys: the bluff!  In earlier days, before he gained his current status among the defenders of the Darwinian Faith, Matzke posted and commented on various ID sites under various pseudonyms.  His favorite ploy was to use what we came to Read More ›

Our old friend PZ Myers holds school boards in utter contempt. In a recent blog post at his widely followed Pharyngula blog site, he takes contemptuous pot shots at the Springboro, OH School Board for having the audacity to even consider a “critical thinking” policy in the curriculum. The Springboro Community City School District is considering a so-called “critical thinking” policy that would require teachers to explore “all sides” of controversial issues. The proposed policy change would direct teachers to discuss creation science or intelligent design when teaching about the theory of evolution. <a href=”http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…..-proposal/ Full story here. PZ can’t restrain his contempt: Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it. The best argument that one student provided Read More ›

This my third installment of a discussion I began here and continued here on the validity of the claim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, or what I call the EC-EE claim. In the first installment we looked at the EC-EE claim itself and asked whether the EC-EE claim is an example of an EC-EE claim that failed to live up to its own standard. In the second installment, we looked at what exactly are the extraordinary claims being made by ID that so require such extraordinary evidence, or is it Darwinian evolution that is really making the extraordinary claim and so far has failed the EC-EE test? In this third post I want to look at the evidentiary side Read More ›

The late Carl Sagan is credited with popularizing the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. (hereinafter this will be referred to as the “EC-EE” claim) While the phrase has become the skeptic’s mantra, its original roots probably trace back to the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre –Simon LaPlace (1749-1827) who once wrote: “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness”. Regardless of its origins, the sentiment expressed in the quote has, over the last few years, become one of the bedrock critiques against ID. The notion seems to be along the lines that ID’s core claim is that only an unembodied supernatural intelligence can account for the specified complexity exhibited in biological systems, and Read More ›

Over on The Panda’s Thumb blog, Darwinian apologist P.Z. Myers recently posted a pejorative laden critique of a review article by Casey Luskin. Luskin was responding to a recent New York Times article on a study purporting to show how certain genes in fish might hold an important clue on how fins turned to feet. I won’t rehearse the articles here, you can read them in the links. Rather, I want to look a bit more closely at Myer’s critique of Luskin’s article and the supposedly “scientific” problems he has with Luskin. He begins by highlighting a quote from Luskin’s article where Luskin writes, “Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was Read More ›