Darwinian Debating Devices

In this post Dr. Hunter shows us professor of English Terry Scambray completely destroying three Ph.D Darwinists on basic logic and reasoning.    Jeffrey Shallit takes to his website to rebut Professor Scambray’s arguments and falls flat on his face.  First Shallit takes Scambray to task for asserting that  “Animals and plants appear in the fossil record fully formed and remain unchanged through millions of years.”  Shallit dismisses the claim as “pure creationist babble.”  Eminent Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould wrote the following:    The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: (1) Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they Read More ›

One of the Darwinists’ favorite tactics is the “False Quote Mining Charge.” For those who do not know what “quote mining” is: Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint or to make the comments of an opponent seem more extreme or hold positions they don’t in order to make their positions easier to refute or demonize. It’s a way of lying. In summary, to accuse someone of quote mining is to accuse them of lying. It is a serious charge. Let us examine a recent example of the charge to illustrate. In Origin of Species Darwin wrote this about the lack of transitional Read More ›

Darwinists frequently employ the debating device that I call “Desperate Distractions.” This occurs when the Darwinist has lost the debate beyond any hope, and instead of admitting they have lost, the Darwinist continues to throw mud at the wall to see if anything will stick. Apparently, their determination never to cede a micro-millimeter impels them to continue to post even the most outrageous foolishness rather than be seen as ceding the field. I suppose they believe that as long as they continue to respond nobody will notice they have lost. Our example of this debating device is drawn from a comment posted by a Darwinist defending Jeffrey Shallit, who ran a string of gibberish through a compression program and then Read More ›

One of the Darwinists’ favorite tricks is known as “moving the goalpost.” The essence of this trick is deflecting away from having been defeated in a debate by pretending the debate was about something else. Thus, if the ID proponent meets a Darwinist’s challenge with respect to issue X, the Darwinist will pretend the issue was something else and say “Ah hah, you utterly failed to address issue Y,” thereby deflecting from the fact that the Darwinist has just lost with respect to issue X. In the following example, a Darwinist insisted that “survival of the fittest” was not central to Darwinian theory. The ID proponent cited a prominent Darwinist (Stephen Jay Gould) for the proposition that “survival of the Read More ›

Recently Eric Anderson started a series on Darwinian Debating Devices, to which I submit the following contribution: “turnabout.” KF has a great explication of this debating tactic at his website, which I summarize: This fallacy turns on blaming the victim by implying or asserting (a) moral equivalency through pretended equality of blame for the cycle of attacks; or (b) trying to give the false impression that the victim trying to defend himself is the one who started the quarrel. Yesterday a long-term guest gave us a pristine example of the turnabout tactic. It started when william spearshake posted a comment noting that he was “no longer with us.’ As this is frequently the terminology used when a troll has been Read More ›

A week or so ago, Cornelius Hunter referenced a paper by Christoph Adami titled “Information-theoretic considerations concerning the origin of life” available here. Hunter cites the NewScientist article about Adami’s paper, “Chances of first life improved by weighted dice” and highlights in particular the remarkable statement: “Christoph Adami of Michigan State University in East Lansing decided to study the origin of life purely in terms of information theory, so he could ignore the chemistry involved.” The article continues: “[Adami] assumed that molecules must exceed a certain length in order to have enough information to self-replicate. These long molecules are made from different kinds of short molecules, called monomers.  Adami calculates that if you start with an equal number of each Read More ›