Posts Tagged ‘ Discovery Institute

Uncommon (Commenting) Dissent

A warning to people posting comments at the pro-ID blog Uncommon Descent – you’ll probably get your comments deleted if you say anything slightly humourous or provoking. Now, I know they have the right to delete whatever comments they want to on their own blog, but isn’t this pushing it a little far?

On Denyse O’Leary’s most recent UD post, the one where she talks about evolution being false because kittens grow into cats (I’m not making this stuff up), I posted a comment about O’Leary metaphorically blowtorching people’s heads through the brain-melting stupidity of her last two posts (the other one being this monstrosity). I wrote it in jest, without any sort of violent wording. It was merely to poke fun at her – she’s fun to poke.

But apparently, I was too raucous, because it got deleted. “But ah,” you say, “how do we know you posted the comment at all?” Well, Denyse replied to the comment before she (or someone else) chucked it out. Clearly, at the time, she didn’t think it was too bad – why respond to a trolling comment in this fashion:

nanontiotami [note the spelling] at 1: Much thanks. It wasn’t my purpose to blowtorch anyone, but simply to address obvious failures.

Lenski simply failed to show that Darwinism explains evolution.

If we could just accept that, we could get on with science.

Whoopsy-daisy!

Excellent comment on the “Tetrapod Tracks” issue from The Panda’s Thumb

I think this comment on “Casey Luskin embarrasses himself again” on The Panda’s Thumb blog perfectly summarises the entire tetrapod-tracks-20-million-years-before-Tiktaalik-disproves-evolution argument that the Discovery Institute has recently been pushing around:

Leszek wrote:

So basically the “great minds” of creationism have come up with the argument:

If tetrapods evolved from Tiktaalik, why are there still tiktaaliks around [10 million years later]?

It seems to me I have heard this before somewhere.…

Oh Leszek, how very, very true that is. *chortle*

Stephen C. Meyer cracks Science Best Seller List on Amazon

In a “shocking” turn of events, Discovery Institute fellow Stephen C. Meyer’s recent book, Signature in the Cell, has broken through to the Best Seller List in Science on Amazon.com, according to Uncommon Descent.

What does this tell us? Well, for one, Amazon has a very broad definition of what constitutes a “Science” book – I haven’t read the book, but from what I’ve heard, yes, it is pro-intelligent design just a little bit; two, lots of people are buying  Signature, which tells us nothing of its scientific accuracy; and three, Clive Hayden, Uncommon Descent writer, loves his Caps Lock.

I mean, with a title like “INTELLIGENT DESIGN BOOK DELIVERS BLOW TO DARWIN; CRACKS AMAZON.COM BEST SELLER LIST IN SCIENCE”, how could I think otherwise?