mturner turns his molasses-thick wit on me

A reader who has been stymied by TypeKey (I wish I could fix that bug) informs me that mturner, one of the creationists at the ARN message board, thinks he has rebutted my post on whale limb evolution, claiming that Thewissen et al. have actually found evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. It’s fairly typical nonsense from the ARNies, but it’s so amusing I had to rebut his rebuttal.

ARN is a weird place. There are several patient, intelligent people working it to correct the babble that the flaming idiots who dominate the board put up. I am not that patient, so I can’t stomach the fools who frequent it, and mturner is one of the nastiest and dumbest of the lot. You can read his comments at ARN, or just go below the fold here—I’ve put the full text in this post.

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Don’t worry, Skeptico

It seems that Skeptico has a copy cat—a guy who goes around posting under the name Skeptico, and who has started a blog of his own at skeptico.blogspot.com—but I don’t think anyone will confuse the two. This new Skeptico is an evolution denier and global warming denier, and is your typical run-of-the-mill dumbass reactionary. He’s more of an anti-Skeptico…no, a mini-anti-Skeptico.

I took a look at the work of the pseudo-Skeptico, and was surprised at his ignorance.

Well, it so happens that I am quite new to the ID-EVO debate, indeed to ID literature itself (although the controversy has intrigued me for many years). I’ve just only recently finished Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box.” This whole intriguing field of microbiological complexity, replete with innumerable individual irreducible complexities, is very fascinating. And I am sure that not a few level-headed people, upon reading that book, must have thought it nothing short of a succinct and irrefutable refutation of neo-Darwinism. For, indeed, that is precisely what it is.

Nevertheless, how many hardcore Darwinists will change their positions as a result? Few, I daresay. Very few. Because, at the end of the day, to relinquish this cherished theory requires an act of will that unavoidably involves a whole phalanx of personal vested interests with philosophical, moral, religious, teleological, and most emphatically social ramifications (friends could be lost, you see, or maybe even a mentor). “Science”–howsoever many times that encumbered shiboleth be invoked, howsoever sanctimoniously, howsoever shrilly and desperately–is not the issue here. Not for them. Not for the believer. Not now. Not ever.

There’s an admission that he’s new to the debate, and has only just now read Behe’s crappy little book, and now he thinks the debate is all over. He expects, though, that scientists will refuse to give up their tired old ideas because, unlike him, they aren’t open-minded and are tied up in the establishment. Everything he says is wrong. The book is not irrefutable; quite the contrary, I know a few biologists who have read it (not many, though, since the book’s cheesy reputation precedes it), and they remain unconverted because the science in the book is badly done. Irreducible complexity is a crock. Behe’s testimony in Dover was a farce. His attempts to ‘disprove’ evolution since have been laughable.

The science is against him, which makes that last paragraph I quoted above a fascinating example of creationist projection.

Department of cluelessness

Clear off a space on the floor near you, because soon you’ll be rolling around laughing on it.

You may recall that John A. Davison, infamous advocate of Intelligent Design, started a blog of his own, titled Prescribed Evolution, back in November of 2005. It generated a lot of hilarity because it consisted of one post. This is it.

I have my own blog now, only because I have been banned from just about all the others. Since I am computer illiterate, don’t expect very much from me. I welcome any comments about my published papers including my unpublished “An Evolutionary Manifesto: A New Hypothesis For Organic Change.” I will tend to ignore any denigrations either of myself or my distinguished sources. I will also not take seriously comments from anonymous posters although I will respond provided they are civil.

There follows a comment thread. It’s up to 847 comments now; it consists of Davison wondering where all the commenters are, lots of bickering, Davison threatening to ban DaveScot, DaveScot threatening to ban Davison from his blog, waa waa waaa, on and on. If I were trying to parody the inanity of the Designists, I couldn’t have topped this.

But Davison could.

He has started a new blog, New Prescribed Evolution. Again, it consists of one post.

The original Prescribed Evolution blog got pretty cluttered so I am starting a new one. Hopefully I will be able to better manage this one than the original.

<snort>

That post has 157 comments right now. Almost all of them are by…John A. Davison.

This is hilarious.

It’s called development, Mr Dembski

I’m going to link to a post on Uncommon Descent. I try to avoid that, because I think it is a vile harbor of malign idiocy, but Dembski has just put up something that I think is merely sincerely ignorant. That’s worth correcting. It also highlights the deficiencies of Dembski’s understanding of biology.

Dembski makes a strange argument for ID on the basis of a certain class of experiments in developmental biology.

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Minnesota lawmakers jump the gun

It’s true: the Minnesota Senate has passed a modification to an education bill that would prohibit the teaching of intelligent design.

16.12 Sec. 4. Minnesota Statutes 2004, section 120B.021, is amended by adding a
16.13 subdivision to read:
16.14 Subd. 2a. Curriculum. Notwithstanding any law to the contrary, the Department
16.15 of Education, a charter school, and a school district are prohibited from utilizing a
16.16 nonscientifically based curriculum, such as intelligent design, to meet the required science
16.17 academic standards under this section.

This is not a law yet, and I don’t expect it will be. The senate version of the bill has to be reconciled with the house version, and the house version does not include this addendum. It will probably vanish without comment.

I have mixed feelings about it. It’s reasonable to expect that science requirements cannot be met by non-science curricula, and on that principle, the limitation is reasonable. However, I don’t like the idea of politicians with little training in the subject trying to dictate what is and isn’t science. Just say that a course should address the content specified by the state science standards, which were written by a committee of citizen educators and scientists, rather than trying to specify details by way of legal statutes.

Besides, maybe the intelligent design crowd will get off their butts and do experiments and develop evidence that actually makes their wild-ass guess scientific, and then this law would look awfully silly.

(Yeah, I’m smirking cynically and laughing as I write that.)

Plain-spoken Ken Ham

Sometimes they do tell the truth, but when they do, they just reveal their fallacies.

Perhaps the most interesting thing to come from the article was a quote from Ken Ham, the founder of AiG:

All scientists start with presuppositions. If you’re starting point is ‘we can explain the origin of the universe without the supernatural,’ that’s a bias.

Of course, what that bias is called is “science” and Ham is ag’in it. That he claims he isn’t tells you all anyone needs to know about his version of science and maybe all you need to know about his religion as well.

Someday, I want one of these guys to explain to me how they propose we do supernatural science.