Kooks
pharyngula | August 8, 2007Here's an odd correlation for you: whenever I take a swipe at the foolishness of Scott Adams, I get a major uptick in the usual trickle of Christian email. I don't quite see Adams as a friend to Christianity, although he does seem to foster the kind of shallow thinking on which religiosity thrives. Anyway, for your delectation, I've put a couple of samples below.
First, here's something we can expect to see lots of in the next year. I'm no fan of Obama myself, but this kind of silly slander is contemptible.
Who is Barack Obama?
Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was…
pharyngula | August 7, 2007Fred Phelps is coming to Minnesota to protest the funerals of those killed in the 35W bridge collapse. This is more than a little ridiculous, besides being hateful. Apparently, any death for any cause is actually the result of a vengeful act of God, and is a message against gays.
I wonder what happens on the day a blood clot stops Phelps' black and shriveled lump of cardiac muscle. Will his followers stand around at his funeral, howling about damned fags and fag enablers?
pharyngula | August 7, 2007Scott Adams makes his argument against atheism. Let's just say that Adams makes McGrath look like a brilliant, nuanced genius by comparison. All he's got is the cartoonist's version of Pascal's Wager, and his own profound misconceptions about what atheists are.
In order to be certain that God doesn't exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity — the ability to be 100% certain. A human can't be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren't that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn't exist: God.
Ummm, he forgot to…
pharyngula | July 30, 2007And I do mean dys. What a horrible scene to come upon, and even worse, what evil chaos to have lived it:
A bed had been pushed up against the door; the officers pushed it open a few inches and saw Marquez choking his bloodied [three year old] granddaughter, who was crying in pain and gasping, Tranter said.
A bloody, naked 19-year-old woman who police later determined to be Marquez's daughter and the girl's mother was in the room, chanting "something that was religious in nature," Tranter said.
The elder Marquez was tasered to stop him from strangling the child, and later died of unknown…
pharyngula | July 27, 2007We were just womping on the new president of the Texas State Board of Education for his foolishness about evolution, but it turns out he's got the all the symptoms of full wingnut syndrome: he's also a proponent of ignorance-only sex education.
It is strange that there's this whole suite of positions that would seem to be unrelated, but almost always seem to be adopted wholesale. If you know someone is against evolution, you can pretty much predict their positions on abortion, stem cells, the death penalty, education, GW Bush, and homosexuality. I wonder what common force ties all those…
pharyngula | July 26, 2007Those European countries seem to have relics of old feudal hierarchies still prancing about, which we (and they) mostly seem to ignore except when they do something amusingly silly. The latest royal clown is Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, who is opening an "alternative therapy center," which is loony enough, but now we learn that this particular center is going to specialize in harnessing the power of angels. She claims she got in touch with the angels through her experience with horses.
I hadn't known there was a connection. This makes My Little Pony look a little more ominous.
She's…
pharyngula | July 25, 2007The creationist fruit-loop du jour left another comment here in which he tried to taunt me with his proximity ("is Minneapolis-St. Paul close enough to Morris for you?") which wasn't very effective, since his IP address said he was commenting from a community college in North Carolina. And then he replied with more wacky comments:
very good. you know how to analyze an IP address.
you seem to think that i need to personally track you down. but no, its much simpler. i can rely on prayer to motivate the God you hate to destroy the godless heretic He hates.
your name is jewish. thanks for being…
pharyngula | July 24, 2007Perhaps I was a little too surprised at the utterly bizarre criticisms Michael Egnor made of my talk at the Minnesota Atheists this weekend — he wasn't there, he didn't know what I said, but he went ahead and tried to rebut what he thought I would have said anyway — that I was more interested in spelling out what I did say than in wrestling with his absurd arguments for a magic invisible ghost that lives inside his cranium. Fortunately, a few other people found Egnor's flailings sufficiently entertaining that they took a few shots at addressing them: you'll find more discussion on dualism at…
pharyngula | July 23, 2007We should be quaking in our jackboots: a media counterattack is being launched against us wicked atheists. They have a website!
American Vision is launching a relentless and systematic response to militant atheism. We've produced a brilliant 2-minute commercial that we plan to broadcast globally via the Internet and Television. Atheists present themselves as enlightened and civil. But this new commercial will reveal the shocking truth to viewers. The French Revolution, Communism, Nazism, etc. have taught us that the atheistic worldview will inevitably lead to the persecution of Christians and…
pharyngula | July 23, 2007The first review of my talk yesterday is in! Too bad it is from somebody who wasn't there and who is a world-class fool. Yes, it's Michael Egnor again, and he's got a lengthy post up with the pretext of giving me advice on future talks, but is really an attempt to preempt my arguments and chide me for my crazy materialist position. He doesn't even come close to any of my arguments, and he makes false assumptions all over the place about what I and the audience think. I'm used to straw men from creationists, but this is ridiculous.
Here's what I actually said at the talk.
The first half was…
pharyngula | July 22, 2007It's a personal tragedy that Tammy Faye has died, but someone else will have to let their mascara run. She and her husband bilked thousands of people, lied lied lied, perpetuated superstitious myths, lived lives of gag-inducing hypocrisy, and wallowed in outrageous self-pity when their empire of corruption crumbled. I'm sorry she lived a wasted and deluded life, but beyond that … good riddance.
It's a good thing I'm traveling today and will have to miss the sanctimonious, dishonest media accolades.
pharyngula | July 18, 2007Of course Denyse O'Leary defends Pivar — any crackpot in denial about evolution is a friend of the IDists. They do point out a bizarre flaw in Wikipedia, though, and a common mangling of a concept.
There is an idea that's been around for almost a century, the morphogenetic field. This is a concept in developmental biology that refers to a local domain of interactions that work independently of more global factors to assemble an organ. For instance, we can talk about a limb field or an eye field, and it identifies a patch of tissue that is dedicated to a particular developmental task, and that…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007One other thing about Stuart Pivar's book: he has collected a few endorsements. They are a little strange. One is by Robert Hazen, a chemist, and if you read it, it's more like a review of a paper in which the reviewer is trying to state some things he finds plausible about the work. In this case, he likes the idea of the fluid-filled plastic models for making "a more rigorous mathematical exploration of the relationships among such variables as length, width, viscosity, forces, and resultant segmented morphology", which is fair enough. I don't think Pivar has demonstrated the competence to…
pharyngula | July 18, 2007Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself "Concerned American-Christian" <geologists4truth@yahoo.com>, and I have a suspicion that it's Krazy Korn himself, since he's so obsessed with the subject.
And of course Korn is free and able to fire off these crazy diatribes—the police aren't sure he constitutes an official threat. I bet the Boulder biology faculty are especially careful to lock their doors at night, and are feeling a little jumpy about sudden loud noises, too.
why did you remove my two comments from…
pharyngula | July 17, 2007I don't think creationists are necessarily stupid (just ignorant, misinformed, wicked, or … but let's not start that again), but I do make exceptions for individuals. There are some that say things I find incredibly stupid. Here's an example.
In WWII, there was an advisor to Churchill who organized a group of people who dropped what they were doing every night at a prescribed hour for one minute to collectively pray for the safety of England, its people and peace. This had an amazing effect as bombing stopped.
And the brave pilots of the RAF, radar, cracking of the German codes, the…
pharyngula | July 13, 2007Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron's math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show's statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski's got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he's got to make this ridiculous taunt:
Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I'll give 10 to 1 odds that they won't. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that…
pharyngula | July 12, 2007I just had to repost my review of Lifecode because the author, Stuart Pivar, is pushing the book again. Here's the press release, shocking in its pretentious flapdoodle:
Prominent Scientists Reject Mainstream Genetics, Support New Theory of How the Human Body is Formed
New York, NY: In the foreword to the new book Lifecode, From Egg to Embryo by Self-organization, by Stuart Pivar, (Ryland Press), Darwin scholar Richard Milner* directs attention to the recent landmark ENCODE report (June 14) in which Human Genome Project Director Francis Collins calls the long-accepted model of genetics “badly…
pharyngula | July 12, 2007
I've been reading a strange book by Stuart Pivar, LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which purports to advance a new idea in structuralism and self-organization, in competition with Darwinian principles. I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery of the book.
There exists a real difference of opinion between two approaches to biology, the functionalist and structuralist views, and it influences how we look at evolution. The functionalist position is the one most people are familiar with:…
pharyngula | July 10, 2007How do you know Egnor is crazy as a loon? For one thing (among many), he lashes out at both Orac and me. Triggering a response from one wordy skeptical woo-woo-basher should be enough for any semi-sane kook, but his last little screed tried to trawl both of us up in the flimsy net of his delusions. I already swiped back, but now Orac rips him and Pat Sullivan apart. Dumb move. He really should just try us one at a time — his struggles last a little longer that way.