Category Archives: Bad Math

George Shollenberger Returns to Prove his Innumeracy

A couple of weeks ago, I revisited George Shollenberger, the creator the alleged “First Scientific Proof of God”, and commented on his pathetic antics on amazon.com, trying to explain just why no one had bothered to post a single review of his book. (If you’ll
recall, according to George, it’s because everyone is too busy considering the impact that his proof is going to have on their activities.)

Normally, I wouldn’t revisit a two-bit crank like George after such a short interval, but he showed up in the comments again to specifically point at a post he made on his own blog, which he claims justifies his position that all of mathematics needs to be reconsidered in light of his supposed proof.

And it’s just too silly to pass up.

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More Stupid Tautology Arguments from Dr. Egnor

So over at the DI whiners blog, Egnor is, once again, trying to pretend that he’s actually making a case for why evolution is irrelevant to antibiotic resistance. It’s really getting silly; he repeats the same nonsense over and over again, desparately doing the rhetorical version of sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting “La La La! I can’t hear you!”:

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Casey Luskin Demonstrates Cluelessness. Surprised?

As usual, Casey Luskin over at DI’s media complaints division is playing games, misrepresenting people’s words in order to claim that that they’re misrepresenting IDists words. Nothing like the pot calling the kettle black, eh? This time, he’s accusing Ken Miller of misrepresenting Dembski
in a BBC documentary.

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Pigheaded Egnorance, Antibiotic Resistance, and Tautologies

So the Discovery Institute’s most recent addition has chosen to reply to my post about
tautologies.
(Once again, I’m not linking to him; I will not willingly be a source of hits for the DI website when they’re promoting dangerous ingorance like this.) Typically, he manages to totally miss the point:

Darwinist blogger and computer scientist MarkCC (why don’t they use their real names?) called me a lot of names a couple of days ago. The most profane was that I am a ‘bastion of s***headed ignorance.’ Profanity seems to be a particular problem with the computer-math Darwinists. A dysfunctional clad, perhaps. They’re dysfunctional because, as Aristotle wrote, effective rhetoric has three characteristics: logos, ethos, and pathos. Effective rhetoric appeals to the best in reason, ethics, and emotion. When I’m called unprintable names merely for expressing my skepticism about the relevance of Darwin’s theory to the practice of medicine, I’ve already won the ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’ skirmishes. I can concentrate on the logos.

Yes, Dr. Egnor. Let’s make sure that we focus on issues of style rather than substance. Because we both know that you have nothing to say in response to the substance of my criticism of your pigheaded ignorance.

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Basics: Tautology (with a free bonus rant!)

Today’s bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts that the theory of evolution has no relevance to antibiotic resistance, because what evolution says about the subject is just
a tautology. (I’m deliberately not linking to the podcast; I will not help increase the hit-count that DI will use to promote it’s agenda of willful ignorance.)

So what is a tautology?

A tautology is a logical statement which is universally true, by nature of its fundamental structure. That is, even without knowing anything about what the statement means,
you can infer that it must be true.

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What happens if you don't understand math? Just replace it with solipsism, and you can get published!

In the comments to another post, Blake Stacey gave me a pointer to a really obnoxious article, called “A New Theory of the Universe”, by a Robert Lanza, published in the American Scholar. Lanza’s article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.

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Let's Arrest the Discovery Institute!

This isn’t really math, but I can’t resist commenting on it. I was looking at Evolution News and Views, which is yet another “news” site run by the Discovery Institute, because the illustrious Dr. Egnor had an article there. And I came across this, which I found just hysterically funny:

If You Have Laws, Don’t You Have to Have Punish Lawbreakers?
Robert Crowther

The Advocate today gives a big hip-hip-hooray for Darwin’s “process.” They worry that the public doesn’t accept Darwinian evolutionary claims to explain the complex diversity of life and the universe. Must be that they just don’t understand. Their solution?

Perhaps the “law of evolution” would be more easily understood by the public than the “theory” of evolution.

It’s interesting that evolution is so solid, so proven, that it will only survive if it is declared a law. When evolution is the law of the land, what will happen then to those who dissent?

Yeah. The reason for talking about the law of evolution is so that we can throw anyone who disagrees with it in jail. Just like we do with the law of gravity, or the laws of thermodynamics.

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The Jackpot of Crankery: Woo Physics, Woo Medicine, Woo Politics, and Woo Math

Over in the thread about Engineer Borg and his wacked-out electromagnetic theory
of gravity, a commenter popped up and pointed at the web-site of someone named Tom Bearden, who supposedly has shown how to generate free “vacuum” energy using electronic and/or electromagnetic devices.

I hadn’t heard of Dr. Bearden before, and promised to take a look at his website.

So I went and took a look. And wow, I hit the jackpot! This is an absolute masterwork of crackpottery. Dr Bearden’s lunacy covers just about every conceivable topic, from conspiracy theories, to HIV denalism, to wacky physics, magical woo healing devices, post-Soviet KGB collaborations with the Japanese government to shoot down American planes and manipulate weather….

To give you a bit of flavor: he’s got a bibliography of information that allegedly supports his theories. If you take a look at it, the first thing you see is listed as “National Science Foundation letter favorably reviewing Bearden Paper”. The contents of that link consist of a scanned letter from the NSF replying to an email sent by Dr. Bearden, which consists of a basic standardized form letter inviting him to submit an actual proposal, and warning that he’d better include some proof that his perpetual motion machine really works, and an explanation of how.

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A Math Geek on Dr. Egnor's Evasions of Evolutionary Information

PZ has already commented on this, but I thought that I’d throw in my two cents. A surgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, posted a bunch of comments on a Time magazine blog that was criticizing ID. Dr. Egnor’s response to the criticism was to ask: “How much new information can Darwinians mechanisms generate?”

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Another Revolution in Physics Crackpottery: Electromagnetic Gravity

It’s that time again – yes, we have yet another wacko reinvention of physics that pretends to have math on its side. This time, it’s “The Electro-Magnetic Radiation Pressure Gravity Theory”, by “Engineer Xavier Borg”. (Yes, he signs all of his papers that way – it’s always with the title “Engineer”.) This one is as wacky as Neal Adams and his PMPs, except that the author seems to be less clueless.

At first I wondered if this were a hoax – I mean, “Engineer Borg”? It seems like a deliberately goofy name for someone with a crackpot theory of physics… But on reading through his web-pages, the quantity and depth of his writing has me leaning towards believing that this stuff is legit.

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