“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.
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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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THIS IS THE SECOND OF A CONTINUING SERIES examining what is being passed off as science on creationist websites.

The topic of this essay is “baraminology,” as discussed in the article Baraminology–Classification of Created Organisms, by Wayne Frair, which appeared in the Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 82-91 (2000), and appears on the christiananswers.net website.

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RUSH LIMBAUGH DEVOTED HIS JULY 11 “Morning Minute” to an attack on Rachel Carson and her 1962 book, Silent Spring. According to Limbaugh, Carson is responsible for more human death and misery than Stalin or Mao, claiming that the environmental backlash generated by her book led to the banning of DDT, which until then had been used to eradicate Malaria-bearing mosquitoes.  Malaria, Limbaugh claimed, now infects upward of 400 million people every year, and claims some 2 million souls each year (a death rate of 500 per 100,000 — or about 0.5% of those infected).

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COMMONLY, IN THE UNENDING Creo-Evo debates, we are confronted with those who (when they’re not denying that any evidence for evolution exists) claim that it’s the “interpretation” of the evidence that counts. That, given the same evidence, one can interpret it to come to differing conclusions, and therefore come up with a “theory” that is of equal validity. They then go on to explain that this “equally valid” theory should also be taught.

This tactic fails on multiple levels.

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GOOD MORNING, MR. FILKS. ONE OF OUR TOP AGENTS, Codename ‘Cora Tunnel’, has recently filed a profoundly disturbing report entitled Codpiece: The Protocols of the Elders of Darwin. Her account, now published under statutory provisions of the Freedom of Misinformation Act, chillingly reveals the existence of a brutal junta, relentless in its quest to extirpate morality and presiding over the most vile and ruthless conspiracy ever devised since the creation of the world late in the evening of October 4^th, 4004 BC.

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