[Establishing shot: pan over cityscape, somewhere on the Great Plains.]
THIS IS THE CITY: Dembskiopolis, Kansas.
There are 2 million people in this city, most of them Second-Thermodynamic-Law-abiding.
Some are not. They say we’re just monkeys.
That’s when I step in.
My name is Sunday. I carry The Book.
[Music: Dum-dee-dum-dum. Dum-dee-dum-dum-DUM!]
THE ALL-SEEING, ALL-KNOWING intelligence arm of Darwin Central*, the Conspiracy that Cares, has discovered something very curious indeed. Phyllis Schlafly, soundly mired in the early 19th century, wrote this stupefyingly conventional anti-Darwin diatribe last week. It was published on her own Eagle Forum website. Then, mysteriously, the exact same column appeared on the townhall.com website a couple of days ago, but under Jack Kemp’s byline. Well OK, maybe townhall.com made a mistake. But now, even more mysteriously, the same column is on David Horowitz’s frontpagemag.com, today, again under Kemp’s byline.
“THERE IS AN INVISIBLE, INTANGIBLE, ODOURLESS ELEPHANT standing in this room, and that is why you are feeling cold: True or False?”
So the Professor wrote on the chalkboard not five minutes into the first session of an “Introduction to the Philosophy of Science” course in an icy lecture hall. It was enough to persuade me I had made a serious error in my selection of a freshman elective course. Maybe I really should have gone for Music Appreciation instead, which now sounded more intellectually engaging.
Continue Reading »
IS THERE ANYONE WHO DOESN’T have a finger in this pie? This half-baked Hitler-Darwin concoction, that is. First it was Harun Yahya, now Coral Ridge Ministries is following in the footsteps of their apparent ideological soulmates, with their own production of…well, exactly the same thing. Okay, maybe it’s not so obvious with that short blurb, but bear with us.
AS YOU’VE PROBABLY ALREADY SEEN, the New York Dolls came out last month with a cute song, Dance Like a Monkey, complete with matching video. In it, the lead monkey seduces a prim & proper woman carrying an “Intelligent Design” picket sign into freeing her inner simian and accepting evolution.
This inspired Rob Crowther, PR specialist at the Discovery Institute, to pen a desperately hopeful item, eagerly pointing at the fact that the “chorus … proclaim[s] evolution is so obsolete”.
WHILE DARWIN CENTRAL has usually concerned itself with the bloviations of politicians who say silly and stupid things about science, we should stop and note that this is, in fact, very much a two-way street. You don’t have to look very hard to find scientists saying silly and stupid things about political matters — hell, you’ve got a 50-50 shot with any random Pharyngula post — but today we at least have something fresh.
SURE, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION may have done a good job of shooting themselves in the foot lately. However, before Terri Schiavo, the Medicare fiasco, and support for ID, there existed and still exists the administration’s terrible PR, not helped by the leftist so-called mainstream media (MSM) as exemplified by Dan Rather. Continue Reading »
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HERE WE GO AGAIN) is a brilliant political commentator, but really should keep his mouth shut when it comes to matters science. Continue Reading »
WE VETERANS OF THE CREVO WARS often hear creationists triumphantly crow, “evolution is just a theory; it’s never been proved!” Well, it’s true evolution has never been proved — indeed, nothing in science is ever proved. Proof is something that can only be found in the realms of mathematics. And, even then, proof might equal “True” but it doesn’t necessarily equal “Correct.”
WE TRUST THAT OUR READERS are familiar with the basic informal logical fallacies. Our occasional favorite is the argument ad verecundiam, or as it’s often translated, the appeal to authority. This is, of course, not an entirely correct rendering of the fallacy — a more correct label would be the appeal to inappropriate authority.