Why, the Discovery Institute. This video shows Joshua Youngkin of the DI spewing lies like a geyser of bullshit in testimony in Louisiana.
Look at what he claims:
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Laws demanding equal time for creationism are anti-bullying laws, and all those trained biologists are just big bullies.
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The Discovery Institute wants more evolution taught in the schools.
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It’s the scientists who want students to learn less about evolution.
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The Discovery Institute publishes peer-reviewed research. He gets the title of their journal and their “research” organ wrong, and it’s an in-house journal stacked with creationist reviewers.
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800+ Ph.D. scientists have signed their “dissent from Darwinism” document…which is only true if you count dentists and chiropractors as “Ph.D. scientists”.
Mind-blowing, isn’t it, that someone can sit before a legislature and calmly recite such a litany of falsehoods…oh, wait. I guess that happens all the time in legislatures. I guess he fits right in, then.
I’ve pointed out before that the Discovery Institute’s publication history has some serious problems, but about that journal: Jeffrey Shallit has a fine summary.
…pseudoscience is sterile: the ideas, such as they are, lead to no new insights, suggest no experiments, and are espoused by single crackpots or a small community of like-minded ideologues. The work gets few or no citations in the scientific literature, and the citations they do get are predominantly self-citations.
Here is a perfect example of this sterility: Bio-Complexity, the flagship journal of the intelligent design movement. As 2012 draws to a close, the 2012 volume contains exactly two research articles, one “critical review” and one “critical focus”, for a grand total of four items. The editorial board has 30 members; they must be kept very busy handling all those papers.
(Another intelligent design journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, hasn’t had a new issue since 2005.)
By contrast, the journal Evolution has ten times more research articles in a single issue (one of 12 so far in 2012). And this is just a single journal where evolutionary biology research is published; there are many others.
But that’s not the most hopeless part. Of the four contributions to Bio-Complexity in 2012, three have authors that are either the Editor in Chief (sic), the Managing Editor, or members of the editorial board of the journal. Only one article, the one by Fernando Castro-Chavez, has no author in the subset of people running the journal. And that one is utter bilge, written by someone who believes that “the 64 codons [of DNA are] represented since at least 4,000 years ago and preserved by China in the I Ching or Book of Changes or Mutations”.
Never, ever trust a creationist.
Can you Americans tell me whether there is a line where this kind of testimony becomes in some sense illegal, or at least a formal case of misconduct or something?
Wow. Add some xenophobia, and it sounds like the biology version of TimeCube…
I wonder how many of those Ph. D. scientists were biologists named Steven or Stephenie.
Obviously, there hasn’t been any progress.
Nick Gotts #3 wrote:
Give it time: selective pressure on variation happens only over many, many generations. You can’t expect sudden miracles.
No, I think this is the biology version of the time cube. Warning: Comics Sans and derp in concentrated form.
sqlrob: thanks for the cite. My favorite bit is the “tsunami waves” photo that’s just a single ripple on an otherwise placid body of water. These wankers aren’t even trying to be as serious as the Timecube guy.
They want to teach more of what they blame for causing Nazism. Gee, I wonder why they’d do that, do they also want Nazism to be a part of the discussion?
Oh well, lies rarely mesh properly. How can evolution be the fault of all that is wrong in the world, be the target of elimination in the Wedge document, and yet be something that they want to teach even more?
Lies are a major set of weapons in the would-be bully’s arsenal.
Glen Davidson
Is he under oath for this testimony? I could hope that perjury charges were possible. Unlikely, given the proclivities of the legislature, but still.
These people never seem to remember that if there is a designer, it is some combination of evil, incompetent, and/or insane. They wax poetic about the beauty of the light reflecting off a butterfly’s wing, but are weirdly silent about, say…the human botfly, or ebola, or the recurrent laryngeal nerve, and other such absurdities of design.
And it would be asking far too much for them to deal with human chromosome 2 vis-a-vis the ape genome, genetic gulonolactone-oxidase in the same context, or the endogenous retrovirus record.
There has got to be a way to shut these people up. They are not only wrong, their wrongness is harmful.
Gluconolactone. And what’s genetic about its oxidase?
The inability to make vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in some primates, compared to animals with that gene.
Is there any DI member or ID advocate who doesn’t identify the designer is Jesus or Yahweh? At least self identified creationists are honest about their delusions.
It takes monumental effort to be that monumentally stupid.
Mr Youngkin quotes Gov Jindal of Louisiana as someone to support his case, Jindal is a deluded religious crackpot kept in office by other ignorant delusional nutjobs, he is actually proud of his stupidity and ignorance.
Excellent advice!
Precisely equivalent to, “Never, ever trust a chronic liar”.
They both twist and mangle truth…the only difference is that the creationists lack the imagination to be any good at it.
Creationists constantly attempt to make up for this lack of imagination in two ways: 1) by incessantly accusing their sworn enemies of being evil liar-minions of Satan (as well as literally every other pejorative they can come up with), and 2) by persisting to the point of literal insanity.