Denialism Blog

Category: Evolution Denialism

  • Ben Stein read the HOWTO

    Reading You Are Dumb’s take on Ben Stein and expelled, I found out they have a blog for the movie! I’m so excited, because it’s clear that Ben Stein, in his introductory post, shows he’s done his research and read the Crank HOWTO. Check it:

    Some of the greatest scientists of all time, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, operated under the hypothesis that their work was to understand the principles and phenomena as designed by a creator.

    Really? Their hypotheses included God each time? That’s shocking. Continued.

    Operating under that hypothesis, they discovered the most important laws of motion, gravity, thermodynamics, relativity, and even economics.

    Now, I am sorry to say, freedom of inquiry in science is being suppressed.

    Under a new anti-religious dogmatism, scientists and educators are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator. Do you realize that some of the leading lights of “anti-intelligent design” would not allow a scientist who merely believed in the possibility of an intelligent designer/creator to work for him… EVEN IF HE NEVER MENTIONED the possibility of intelligent design in the universe?EVEN FOR HIS VERY THOUGHTS… HE WOULD BE BANNED.

    Darwin mind-reading! We are powerful evilutionists after all, why wouldn’t we have mind-reading technology? But what a great example of crank persecution!

    In today’s world, at least in America, an Einstein or a Newton or a Galileo would probably not be allowed to receive grants to study or to publish his research.

    They cannot even mention the possibility that-as Newton or Galileo believed-these laws were created by God or a higher being. They could get fired, lose tenure, have their grants cut off. This can happen. It has happened. EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed comes to theaters near you in February 2008. To learn more, check out my blog here often … and explore the rest of our site for new developments, or to volunteer to help spread the word.

    And there we have it! A Galileo reference, perfect. I’m not sure why they think Newton is helpful for the crank. Newton, if anything, was an evil bastard who would attack anyone who was seen as a threat to his supremacy. But either way, great first blog post Ben. You’ve done your research and you’re going to fit right in with all the other cranks.

  • Premise Media Loves Cranks

    Anyone who has been reading Scienceblogs knows that the creationists are all in a tizzy over their new movie expelled, which plans to unite the superstar power of Ben Stein with the superscience power of creationism.

    My favorite part of the whole thing, based on my appreciation for quality crankery, is the built-in persecution.

    You see, it’s not enough to make a movie about the supposed persecution of people like Richard Sternberg (who clearly was not persecuted despite unethical behavior). They have to be persecuted for even coming up with the movie. They have to be persecuted for everything they do, 24 hours a day, because to be a crank, one has to be like Galileo.

    Hence we have headlines like:
    Hollywood Gets the Message About Suppression of Intelligent Design
    New Ben Stein Flick, Expelled, Blows the Whistle on the Darwinist Inquisition. (an Inquisition!)
    Can Ben Stein’s Expelled be sued by angry Darwinists?
    What Happened to Freedom of Speech?

    It’s really amazing the gall of people who promoted a textbook, in which they did a find-and-replace of “creationism” and “Intelligent Design”, who admitted in a federal court that ID is no more scientific than astrology, complain that they are being suppressed for “free speech”. They’re being suppressed because they don’t have any science to back up their claims – just the classic nitpicking of denialists – and because they are liars. It’s just that simple.

    This new push for their movie is great stuff though. Classic crankery. Which brings me to my next point. The money behind this silliness is Walt Ruloff’s Premise Media and promotion by Paul Lauer’s Motive Entertainment. So, they’ve gone from Mel “the Jews cause all wars” Gibson, to the DI. Maybe some crank magnetism here? Or just a fondness for those with a persecution complex?

    Next they should do a movie on Peter Duesberg. They can call it “Intolerance: The true story of how science can’t stand bullshit.”

    Any other suggestions for future titles? Think of your favorite crank, or your favorite denialist topic, and then what Premise Media would title a movie about their crankery.

  • Vox Dei Bait

    The debate is churning along at Monkey Trials, and I have to say it’s pretty interesting. Hatfield is doing a great job in this titanic struggle between data and “raw intellect”.

    Check it out.

  • Scott Hatfield to debate Uber-Crank

    Responding to an idiotic challenge from Vox Day Scott Hatfield has chosen to debate Vox at some point after August 15th.

    I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, debating a crank like Vox day is unlikely to do anyone any good. It’s not like a guy who doesn’t think that science is valid (all science I know, he’s crazy) is likely to be receptive to anything but their pre-formed worldview. On the other hand, it may help people see just how much of a lunatic crank Vox Day is. Although I don’t know that we need evidence beyond the fact he writes for World Nut Daily.

    In the end, I think it’s worth it for the sheer humor value of such an exchange. We have an early hint from Vox that this is going to be a side splitter. He writes:

    “Since biology is entirely outside my areas of both interest and expertise, I think this should be an interesting experiment as to whether decades of science is enough to trump raw intellect.”

    Ha!

    Scott is sharpening up his arguments in preparation. Drop by and give him some moral support.

  • A big day for cranks

    Today is a big day for cranks in two separate areas, but the interesting thing is the similarity of the responses.

    First we have Casey Luskin of the “top think tank” the Discovery Institute (wow, they must be right up there with Cato and CEI!) blathering about paleontologists don’t know anything because of the self-correcting nature of science.

    After this latest find, one researcher realized its implications and was quick to quash any doubts this may spark regarding human evolution, stating: “All the changes to human evolutionary thought should not be considered a weakness in the theory of evolution, Kimbel said. Rather, those are the predictable results of getting more evidence, asking smarter questions and forming better theories, he said.”

    I’m all for “asking smarter questions and forming better theories,” and it logically follows that I therefore must also favor abandoning theories that aren’t working. The aforementioned Harvard biological anthropologist, Daniel Lieberman, apparently did not get the memo about refraining from making statements that might lead to doubts about evolution: he stated in the New York Times that these latest fossil finds regarding habilis:

    “show ‘just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.’” (emphasis added)

    Indeed, as explained here, the first true members of Homo were “significantly and dramatically different” from our alleged ape-like ancestors, the australopithecines. So far, the data isn’t doing a very good job of explaining precisely from what, if anything, did our genus Homo evolve.

    Well soooorrrry for actually looking for answers rather than stopping at, “a magic man done it.” Or rather, “I see design, therefore a magic man done it!” It’s really tiresome when denialist cranks like Luskin attack science and scientists because we’re self-correcting and willing to revise theories based on new evidence. That’s science people. I would hardly say looking for “smarter questions” involves dropping evolutionary theory, which is unaffected by this result as PZ has noted, to search for a magic man.

    Anyway, that leads me to the second group of cranks dancing around a new result today. In this case it is global warming denialists like Steven Milloy, Tim Blair, Joseph D’Aleo at Icecap, NewsBusters (It’s a scandal!), etc. jumping up and down because of an error found in a dataset of US temperature that revises the records to show that 1934 was actually hotter than 1998. The chart and more below the fold.
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  • Genomicron wants to help ID out

    We’ve discussed the incompetence of cranks in their critical reasoning skills, and their inability to think about science in a lucid or productive fashion. But have we tried to help them? Have we moved beyond caddy criticisms and actually bothered to extend a hand to our fellow man? Clearly not. Rather than continuing to mock ID for being the intellectually-dishonest, crank-laden nonsense that it is, why don’t we help them become a real science?

    Genomicron has some suggested experiments to help ID get on the right track. Maybe, if they are legitimately interested in science, we’ll be able to direct them towards some productive research, since they can’t seem to figure out how to get beyond their current promiscuous teleology and crank arguments without help.

    Here are some of the suggested experiments:
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  • Now this is the genetic fallacy

    Hey Luskin. This is what a genetic fallacy actually looks like.

    The Darwinists devoutly desire to avoid the true history of their creed, and usually the media assist in the cover up–unknowingly, I would like to think. The “Inherit the Wind” trope that is monotonously employed by journalists–not to mention Judge Jones of Dover, PA fame–derives from the play and movie of that name. But this cliché, which is the source of what many journalists think about the subject, was fiction and not even aimed at the evolution issue so much as the danger of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The real Scopes trial in 1925 was rather different. And so was the biology textbook that was at the heart of the Scopes trial.

    Hunter’s A Civic Biology was racist. It advocated therapeutic eugenics–and it was widely used in schools around America, not just in Tennessee. John West’s forthcoming book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, includes an extensive examination of the subject as it relates to the popularity of eugenics in general.

    …

    Congratulations therefore go to Garin Hovanissian, who brings up the topic of the Hunter biology textbook in The Weekly Standard. We are coming up on the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s birth in 2009, so you can be sure that Inherit the Wind will be shown in thousands of high school and college classrooms, where it will be lovingly presented as an approximation of the truth. It might be useful before then to dig up all the speeches of William Hunter, the racist and eugenicist, and of his champion, the great H. L. Mencken. The fullness of the truth will be found there. How hard will the Darwinists fight to keep the students from learning about that?

    Just thought he might like to know what one looked like. “Darwinism was once used in a racist textbook and racist people liked it – therefore there is something wrong with the science and you should believe ID”. He’s got some poisoning the well there too, going after H. L. Mencken and Hunter for being bigots. It has nothing to do with the validity of the science of course. And Mencken wasn’t just a racist and eugenicist, he was also sexist, anti-semitic, anti-woman, anti-child, anti-foreigner etc. Mencken pretty much hated on everybody. It’s not exactly a secret you know. It’s also totally irrelevant to the validity of the science.

  • Crankery is caused by a fundamental defect in reasoning

    Casey Luskin doesn’t like that evilutionists equate Intelligent Design Creationism with, well, creationism. I’m sobbing.

    But in a perfect example of how cranks like using the tools of logic to make their point, and then fail, he suggests that the assertion that ID = creationism is an example of the genetic fallacy. Well, that’s interesting. What’s his reasoning?

    Darwinian logic often contends that because a given proportion of ID proponents are creationists, ID must therefore be creationism. It’s a twist on the genetic fallacy, one I like to call the Darwinist “Genesis Genetic Argument.” As noted, it implies that each and every argument made by a creationist must be equivalent to arguing for full-blooded creationism. This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion. Thus something other than creationism or religion must be fundamental to the set of views underlying ID (big hint: it’s the scientific data indicating real design in nature)!

    First of all a big belly laugh from the “scientific data” point. But anyway, is this actually a case of the genetic fallacy? And even if it were fallacious, is it really an example of an argument of irrelevance?

    Luskin links the wiki as well in his post, but it’s clear he didn’t read it (correctly).

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  • I know I shouldn't find this funny

    It’s Ruthless Reviews coverage of the Creation Museum’s opening.

    I’d just like to say that I don’t condone dressing up like a mentally disabled person before interviewing Ken Ham. And I don’t find it funny, at all, to mock somebody for their religion. Even if they think dinosaurs are vegetarian, they don’t deserve mockery from pill-popping investigative reporters going undercover with “Asperger’s by proxy”. I especially don’t find it funny that they created a fake website, the “Special Times”, to gain press access to the Creation Museum’s opening.

    And this youtube video of the interview? Not an ounce of humor there.
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  • Crank Magnetism

    Back when we wrote the Unified Theory of the Crank one of the main things we discussed related to crankery is their inability to recognize competence in others. As a result, cranks tend not to mind the crankery of others, since they see themselves as opposed to a scientific orthodoxy. Consistency be damned, they just want to see science with egg on its face so they can prove that they are being persecuted.

    Well lately, Uncommon Descent has been doing a pretty incredible job of sticking to this script. First we have Dembski, insisting upon the persecution of ID abroad, because the Germans jailed a holocaust denier who happened to be a creationist. Dembski, not being the sharpest tool in the drawer, didn’t think to look to closely at the story and, well, played the persecution card a little too soon.

    Now Uncommon Descent, aiming for a trifecta of denialism, is using HIV/AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg to attack the orthodoxy. It really is true, cranks are so incompetent at reason and logic they simply can’t see that they’re making a terrible case. In this instance, they’re using Duesberg’s Chromosomal Chaos hypothesis to suggest that science is so addicted to Darwinism we’ve been getting not just cancer research, but bacterial resistance wrong for decades.

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