My friend Razib, who is one of my
fellow ScienceBloggers sent me a
link to an interest attempt by creationist at arguing why evolution can’t
possibly work.

I say interesting, because it’s at least a little bit unusual in
its approach. It’s not just the same old regurgitation of the same talking
points. It’s still not a great argument, but it’s at least not as boring as
staring at the same stupid arguments over and over again. Alas, it’s not entirely
new, either. It’s an argument that the mutation rates required for humans to have evolved from a primate ancestor would have to be impossibly high.

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It’s always amusing to wander over to the Discovery Institute’s blogs, and see what kind of nonsense they’re spouting today. So, today, as I’m feeling like steamed crap, I took a wander over. And what did I find? High grade, low-content rubbish from my old buddy, Casey Luskin. Luskin is, supposedly, a lawyer. He’s not a scientist or a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination. There’s nothing wrong with that in the abstract; the amount of time we have to learn during our lives is finite, and no one can possible know everything. For example, I don’t know diddly-crap about law, American or otherwise; my knowledge of western history is mediocre at best; I don’t really speak any language other than english. I know some physics, but my understanding of anything beyond the basics is very limited. Even when it comes to the topic of this blog, math, I’m at best an enthusiastic amateur.

The problem with Casey, and people like him, is that they’re ignorant of a topic where they believe that they’re experts. Growing up, I was taught to call that kind of behavior not just
ignorant, but pig-ignorant. It’s a foolish kind of arrogance, where you believe that you know as much as people who’ve spent years studying something, even though you’ve never even read an elementary textbook. It’s like the dozens of people who’ve emailed my “disproofs” of Cantor’s theorem, when they don’t actually know what “cardinality” actually means.

In this instance, Casey is annoyed because a group of people at NASA used evolutionary algorithms to create a better antenna.

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So I hear, via the Panda’s Thumb, that Uncommon Descent has a new
poster. And he’s off to a rollicking good start, with a post
explaining why Christians who accept the fact of evolution are
incoherent and deluded. (As usual, I don’t link to UD, due to their rampant
dishonesty in silently altering or removing links.)

I am, perhaps, not the best person to respond to his claim, given
that I’m not a Christian. But his argument is so inconsistent, and so
typical of a type of argument that constantly occurs in fundamentalist
gibberings that it doesn’t take a Christian theistic evolutionist
to point out its glaring errors.

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Bad from the Bad Ideas Blog sent me a link to some clips from Ben Stein’s new Magnum Opus, “Expelled”. I went and took a look. Randomly, I picked one that looked like a clip from the movie rather than a trailer – it’s the one titled “Genetic Mutation”.

Care to guess how long it took me to find an insane, idiotic error?

4 seconds.

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Granville Sewell, over at UD, has decided to pretend that he just discovered my earlier critique of his “though experiment” where he claims to simulate the universe. The reason that I say “pretend” is that Sewell originally edited the article that I was mocking in response to my post; now, months later, he’s pretending that he just found it. Uh, yeah, sure, Gran, whatever you say.

(In keeping with my practice, I no longer link to anything at UncommonlyDense; since they feel free to lie, alter posts, and remove posts, there’s no way of knowing what my link will point to tomorrow. Similarly, I’m responding here rather than in a comment there, because UD feels free to censor, edit, or delete comments for any or no reason at all, without notice.)

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Astute readers will remember a couple of encounters I had with Sal Cordova from Uncommon Descent a few months ago (here, in the comments, and here). Not too long after that, Sal made a fairly big deal about the fact that he was returning to grad school, and had to stop blogging at UD because the dastardly darwinists would damage his academic prospects if he continued. He played the standard creationist-martyr role, poor guy, persecuted by
all the horrible non-believers. Naturally, it didn’t last long. He’s got his own blog now, called “Young Cosmos”, where he writes his usually pathetic quote-mining, plus what he calls “Advanced creation science”. Naturally, advanced creation science involves doing very, very bad math. In fact, so far, he’s doing the worst math – which, as you’ll of course recall, is no math. To be specific, he’s spouting off about math, without actually doing any.

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An alert reader pointed out that William Brookfield posted a response to
my two part debunking of his argument for design based on a mangling of the second law of thermodynamics. I debated whether it was worth responding to; Mr. Brookfield’s got so little readership that I never noticed his response in my referals, even though it was posted on July 3rd! I check my referals regularly (I’m obsessive about seeing who is linking to my blog), and I’ve never seen ICON-RIDS show up.

But, today, I’m sitting in the hospital while my mother has knee surgery; I’m bored; and I have a throbbing headache. So I’m not up to doing much that requires any serious exercise of my brain. So mocking a moron seems right up my alley this afternoon.

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