I don't even know where to begin. I don't think I'm going to bother with a rebuttal since I'm sure Orac will surely get around do destroying him if he isn't too tired of feeding traffic to the guy. Orac also has a great review of the "proof" of DCA efficacy from the DCA site. The usual altie-woo, but nicely researched and dissected apart.

But what this is a good example of is the complete inability cranks have of maintaining any kind of consistency, and I'm not just talking about specifics of arguments, but more generally. In the specific sense, Egnor's latest rant appears to contradict several previous rants about what Darwinism, psuedo-Darwinism, and evolution are. None of his definitions is consistent across more than a couple of arguments and his current description of cancer as a Darwinian process seems to contradict the previous assertion of using Darwinism to study cancer as "psuedo".

Anyway, one of my points is that unraveling this kind of stuff can be very time consuming, and ultimately, not very rewarding, after all, it'll just be whackamole - tomorrow when the next riff off the top of his head needs to be shredded. I'll leave that to some of the other sciencebloggers who are more patient than me in that regard.

Instead let's talk about how generally cranks are very inconsistent. Notice, for instance, that the Discovery Institute doesn't seem to have a specific problem with Ken Ham or other Young Earth Creationists. A few weeks ago there was even a little mini-discussion about whether they should take a more aggressive posture towards YEC which they admit is inconsistent with ID. But they didn't. Are we surprised? Also look at the general willingness to accept all kinds of arguments, even ones that aren't consistent with other proponents of ID. Behe, for instance, doesn't argue that evolution essentially never occurred, his positions are often completely at opposition to Egnor's, and Egnor even makes Dembski look extreme. But they more than happily give Egnor a big loudspeaker, they're "big-tent" after all. They give a loudspeaker to Dave Scot, who levels pretty inane attacks on global warming science while talking conspiratorially about big pharma and DCA.

This is yet another reason why Denialism isn't real argument. Cranks who promote this stuff aren't inside of some actual "debate", in which data is important and various interpretations of that data are considered and discussed. Cranks sit outside a debate, and essentially shovel horse manure into the discussion. And if someone else wants to shovel in cow manure? Hell, they don't care, as long as it stinks and it's getting shoveled, they don't care what it is or who it is promoting it. It's pretty shameless.

So, what do you think a good description for this type of crank unity would be? That is, how would you simply describe the tendency of cranks not to care about the specifics of the denialist arguments being made, just as long as it creates confusion and sows doubt?

Labels: general discussion, Michael Egnor