Category Archives: Pseudoscience

Epic Horse Exhaust

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OK, it took me a while to get to it but I am, as promised, responding to creationist Arthur Biele’s lengthy comments left in response to my criticisms of his writings on horse evolution. For those interested I suggest you go back and read Mr. Biele’s article and my original critique first. Those that do I think will find that his response didn’t really answer any of my original criticisms. Instead what he did was dump a new load of barely coherent nonsense on me.

A warning though, this goes on for quite a bit (it sure felt like it while I wrote it), which is of course due to the well known fact that accurately and substantially responding to horseshit takes considerably more time and effort than it does to spewing it.

Biele: With regard to Eohippus, If you knew anything about the actual fossil record, Eohippus finds are many and that category has been a dumping ground for certain archaic partial skulls that defy any specific classification, nor are they known to be ancestors of any known ‘evolved’ descendants, and they are mostly from Europe.

While apparently attempting to impugn my knowledge of the “the actual fossil record” Mr. Biele clearly demonstrates his own ignorance of the subject at hand. Let’s break this down in order:

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How CvE debates often seem to go

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Though I doubt there are many evolution defenders who would be that ignorant of basic Judeo/Christian theology.

[Via Pharyngula]

The Hovind dissertation

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Someone has finally gone and done it. Someone got hold of a copy of convicted felon “Dr.” Kent Hovind’s doctoral dissertation and posted it on the interwebs for all to laugh at. I’ve read it before (no, I wasn’t the one who leaked it) but now at last we can all share in the hilarity.

Myself and jail-bird "Dr." Dino.

Of course it represents exactly the sort of scholarship one would expect from a high class educational establishment like Patriot University (Hovind’s alma mater) seen here in their latest location:

Go. Read. Laugh. Or for an excellent overview see Karen Bartlet’s review. And here is John Lynch’s take on it.

Metal Crocoduck!

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Two things I enjoy: Heavy Metal and mocking clueless antievolutionists like Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron.

[Via Pharyngula]

A good primer on skepticism and “open mindedness”

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Learn it, know it, live it!

[Via Pharyngula]

“If Atheists Ruled the World”

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And now, a little bittersweet humor.

All the comments in this video are said to be taken verbatim from Christian fundamentalist online discussion boards. I tend to believe that this is true.  Most of it is actually about creationist attacks on evolution.

Ray Comfort’s appalling ignorance

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Both P.Z. Myers and Larry Moran have commented on this but I want toget my own licks in. Ray Comfort (AKA Banana-Man) has squatted down and grunted out a fresh piece of “literature” attacking atheists (whatever) in which he also goes after evolution (which he mistakenly considers to be synonymous with atheism). Apparently his tripe isn’t selling as well as he thinks it should and so he gone on a whine-fest about how this is due to some sort of atheist conspiracy in a posting over at WorldNutDaily.

The article quotes him on one of his reasons for believing that evolution is an “unscientific fairytale”:

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse , elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

Ye gods! Folks, this is a discussion stopper. It is beyond the pale. It is stupidity squared.  If you are someone who thinks that evolutionary theory requires that the origin of new species involves the separate, independent, origination of each sex of said new species, that this must happen each and every time a new species evolves, and further that this is to happen by coincidence, then you are far, far, too ignorant of the subject to even think about criticizing it.

Let me try and reformulate this in theological terms for anyone out there that might harbor some misguided sympathy for Mr. Comfort’s views.

Imagine if someone came into your church (to put it specifically in Christian terms) and said, with all seriousness, that they thought Christianity was a fairytale: “Because I can’t believe in this Jesus guy with his blue skin and eight arms. Nor can I accept his teaching that the only way to get to heaven was to die bravely in glorious combat.”

How seriously would you take such a persons critiques of the Christian faith?

Well that’s exactly how Comfort comes across to anyone with even a basic understanding of evolutionary theory when he utters nonsense like this. He either has absolutely no clue as to what he’s talking about, or he is deliberately misrepresenting things (lying) to score rhetorical points.

Either way he has disqualified himself from participation in any serious discussion of the subject (not that anyone was taking him seriously to begin with).

Intelligent design creationism playing the racism card… again

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Andrew Sibley, who I recently used as an example of the two faces of intelligent design creationism, has gone on another ‘Darwin was a racist/evolution leads to racism’, tear over on Uncommon Descent, basing his comments this time largely on an article (“What’s wrong with Darwinism?“) by another character by the name of Tony Campolo on a site called Christian Today. I was going to rip into Campolo’s piece given it contains outright falsehoods about Darwin, but my colleague Jason Rosenhouse has done an excellent job of doing so already over on Evolutionblog, so time saved.

However since Mr. Sibley has my attention once again I want to address his contribution to this steaming pile:

Campolo acknowledges that Darwin was a product of his time, and clearly Darwin did not invent racism with some of his relations for instance taking an interest in abolishing the slave trade. Darwin too in his early life questioned slavery, but what happened to lead him to embrace ideas where Africans and Aborigines were considered closer to apes than Caucasians? Instead, a plain reading of the Bible teaches that all mankind are related and are of common ancestry.

Darwin “questioned slavery”, “in his early life”, really? Well, now that we’ve had the ‘good facts‘ version let’s look at the actual facts.

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The two faces of intelligent design creationism

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Over at Uncommon Descent they are taking advantage of the brouhaha over the New York Post’s ‘gunned-down chimp’ cartoon (which many have taken as a racist slur against President Obama) to take their own pot-shots at evolution and in the process they have served up another example of the two faces of intelligent design.

This particular snark (“Is this Darwin’s legacy?”) is brought to us by UK weather-guy/meteorologist Andrew Sibley:

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A little pictorial sleight of hand

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This is something of a followup on my previous post on bird hips and the place of the sauropods in the dinosaur family tree.

In that post I linked to an image of the dinosaur family tree I had found on the creationwiki web site:

After a commenter (Moth Eyes) noted, in so many words, how it was odd that a creationist might label this illustration a “family tree” given that they don’t believe there is such a thing. This led me to look at where creationwiki might have gotten this illustration.

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