Bill Dembski is touting some strange ID-positive blog as a sign that there is a “growing number of non-religious ID proponents” — alas for poor Bill, when you glance at the blog, it’s some random guy making a post about once a month, whose background is as a musician and professional crackpot. His sole qualification as a “scientist” seems to be that he signed up to post on that ID web forum, ISCID. You should read more on Stranger Fruit, and Afarensis reveals that rather than touting his non-religious credentials, his unique claim to fame is as an “ID Pleasurian,” believe it or not. How will we ever deal with the growing number of sex-positive, porn-friendly ID proponents?
Oh, and he’s resentful that I actually have a blog category titled “Kooks.” Probably because he presciently knew that if ever I commented on William Brookfield, that’s the category I’d pick.
I like the terminology “ID-positive” — it makes the condition sound like the disease it is.
Chu-Carroll hurt Dembski’s feelings, and Dembski needs to find new groupies to make himself feel better.
In related news, DaveScot has just decided to chase after the low hanging fruit of evolution — Michael Ruse. Unfortunately, DaveScot is not chasing Michael Ruse with a grooming kit (nor would DaveScot know how to use it if he had one).
LOL!
LOL!
By accidentally forgetting the safety word?
There’s one seriously weird bit at Brookfield’s pages; where it says that as an “ID scientist” he supports the “wedge”, and links to a sex pillow. This is followed by a link to the amazon pages for “Creationism’s Trojan Horse” by Forrest and Gross.
I’m guessing those links were by Brookfield’s partner Steve Saba, who probably doesn’t care much one way or the other and has a wicked sense of humour. But wow… I’ve put up pictures of the wedge at Duae Quartunciae.
I am a little suspicious of this, seems to good to be true…
I think it is legit. Brookfield has been around for quite a while. His blogg got some comment at another blog when it started up back in Oct 2006. He’s been a commenter at Telic thoughts and the ISCID forums for a long time. His papers are all up at the now virtually defunct ISCID site. The commenters at Dembski’s own blog seem to be taking it all very seriously.
The link to the wedge sex pillow and to Trojan Horse could possibly have been intended as a kind joke on Brookfield by his own partner Saba; that’s my guess.
[blockquote](just as with PZ Myers term {and category} “Kooks”)[/blockquote]
[blockquote](they will just dismiss you as a “kook”{PZ Myers} [/blockquote]
Bravo
Theres no way these are real ID supporters. The link with the couple using the ‘wedge’ clearly showed two individuals doing some actual ….errr…’research’.
When was the last time you heard about an IDiot actually doing research ?
I post this link to the comments of pharyngula every few months, just as a reality check:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=intelligent+design
I like this reality check better.
Intelligent Design: Less Popular than Nixon.
Dustin, your evil plan to ruin my keyboard has failed… I wasn’t drinking when I clicked that.
Dustin, Graculus:
It’s even better with cheese.
Ahem. I beg to note that he is a Canadian kook. You Yanks can’t have ’em all!
I see that a few t.o folks have been engaging him in comments, a while back.
“Pleasurian?” COUNT ME IN! COUNT ME IN! This is the first, er, testable hypothesis I’ve seen!
And I’m sick enough to want to learn it!
Dembski, here I am! Shimmies in upright position as your new assistant for your secret research!
*Finger quotes* “RESEARCH!” :-D
Goodness, Kristine; don’t limit yourself to an upright position. Thanks to the WEDGE recommended at this ID Pleasurian scientist’s pages, researchers have available a host of “positions never before possible”.
Oh gad, no one, anywhere in the world, searches for Intelligent Design more than they do here in Madison WI. Yeesh.
And apparently they do it in Danish.
Mmmm, danish…
or then there’s this.
Better watch out. With 5 posts and about 20 comments in total, this guy is clearly hot on Pharyngula’s heels.
It’s sort of ‘What if you gave a blog and nobody came, not even the blogger?’
I thought that his point on ad hominems was humorous, in that calling someone a kook is a logical fallacy. What he leaves out is that if you can back up the description with facts, it ceases to be a fallacy!
That said, Liberator’s wedge is something I can, umm, get behind.
I checked the Wedge link. It does seem intelligently designed, but ye goddesses, $85 for a pillow? It’s not irreducibly complex – a competent seamstress/seamster could evolve it from a block of foam and some nice washable fabric for a lot less than that.
WRT the “growing number of non-religious ID proponents”, I suspect that Dembski could count them on one hand. I suppose this kind of puffery is typical in blog posts, but Dembski is just as dishonest in his legal and technical work.
In his Dover expert report, he stated:
If Dembski had been deposed or cross-examined, a smart lawyer would have forced him to admit that, in fact, there are no IDists who study instances of “specified complexity” “formally, rigorously, and scientifically”.
And in Dembski’s latest foray into the technical world, he and a Baylor professor concoct Yet Another Information Measure that they call “active information”. In a this paper, apparently targeted for publication, they say that this information is “increasingly referred to as ‘active information'”. But the fact is that nobody uses that phrase, at least not in reference to Dembski’s new concept.
Deepak chopra sights more evidence for the plausibility of his mind field.
The Mind Outside the Brain
“With the discovery of mirror neurons, another piece of the puzzle was added, the puzzle being how we learn and understand others. Learning occurs in the animal world largely by imitation, it is thought. Recently whale researchers were startled
when a group of humpback whales learned a new song form other whales that had intruded into their territory. ”
“The same mysterious mix of free will and determinism holds elsewhere. It has been observed that when new mothers are away form home, their milk flow will start when the baby at home cries because it is hungry. Shared rhythms exist everywhere in nature. College women living together in dorms are known to have their menstrual cycles begin to synchronize. Whenever there is synchronicity without contact between the two events, only mind outside the brain offers an adequate explanation. The phenomenon of identical twins being in communication is one example. One twin will sense the exact moment when the other is injured or dies, often feeling a mirror image of the trauma in their own bodies. (I personally witnessed one such example: a twin had an abdominal attack in my presence at the moment when the other twin was mugged and stabbed in the stomach in a distant city.)”
The Mind Outside the Brain (Part 5)
http://tinyurl.com/23gesb
http://tinyurl.com/ypmxj7
What absolute crap!
Need more be said?
#23 quoted:
Uh, maybe because that’s the time the baby gets fed normally?
These people are hilarious, in the way that’s also pretty depressing.
Uh, or maybe it’s a crock of shit?
You know, like 90% of all polution comes from trees, according to the law of aerodynamics bumblebees can’t fly, if an organism is shown to be irreduciably complex evolutionists will just dismiss it outright, mothers lactate well their babies cry even if they are miles away. Just say these with confidence and your oponent instinctively try to come up with logical explanations which will make them look ridiculous. It won’t occur to them to that you were simply out-right lying. And if it does; well it’s your word against theirs and nobody wants to support a bully acusing you of lying.
Um, where the heck did this idea about sympathetic lactation come from? Reminds me a bit of the “empathy powder” of the 18th century, where it was suggested if you whip a dog at noon in london, another dog on a ship half way around the world will yelp in pain. (Thus allowing you to figure out your longitude! Simple, right!)
@Evan:
What is interesting about your trend link is that shortly after the search for free porn peaked in December 2005 the search for ID peaked. Similarly, throughout the graph, generally, some time after a search for free porn peaked or rose so did searches for ID. I wonder what could be the causation there :) After all there must be a causation as there is a graph showing one :) Maybe viewing too much porn makes you dumbskier and open to such dumbski IDiotism or maybe they were looking for the designer/creator of the free porn. Hey it has more logic behind it than anything that Dumbski and his cohorts have ever posited.
Um, where the heck did this idea about sympathetic lactation come from?
spontaneous lactation is not uncommon amongst mothers.
babies crying is certainly not uncommon.
that one overlaps the other, even when the two are apart is certainly of no cosmic significance.
I rather think the best explanation is an overestimation of the significance of the coincidence.
which also, is not an uncommon thing.
..and Chopra is nothing more than a huckster that likes to play on people’s natural tendency to overestimate the significance of coincidences. the same thing that John Edwards does, btw.
they should call him:
Deeply-packed-woo.
Well, one of my predictions may be falsified then–I’ve always thought the alties were extremely fertile ground for ID to be recruiting, but I expected Dembski to turn up his nose at them–kind of that “too big a tent turns into a 3-ring circus” attitude that I’ve heard Republicans express on more than one occasion.
So if Dembski’s willing to get in bed with “Pleasurians”, then I don’t see any reason alties shouldn’t be right behind.
But I *will* vent my spleen once more over this (sorry; I’ve already gone on about it at Orac’s, but this really chaps my sun-bear-endocrinology-voyeur-by-way-of-cytology ass, so feel free to skip if I’m growing tedious…)
The man is purported to be an MD, practicing endocrinology. You would expect him to understand basic concepts. I know zookeepers* with a better comprehension of basic endocrinology than this purported endocrinologist.
* no offense to zookeepers; I mean that quite literally. The zookeepers understand endocrinology better than he does.
Not even to address the question of why a “mind outside the brain” spends its time on syncing up women’s periods, rather than, I don’t know, ending hunger or something?
Well, my sister and my mother both said hearing a baby cry or seeing a cute baby triggered spontaneous lactation in them and I believe them. Nothing mysterious about that.
It’s lactating across town at the same time their baby cries that I don’t believe has ever been actually been observed.
How would anyone know? Do people make a habit of recording the time of their lactations to compare to the baby-sitter recording the time of the baby crying? Has anyone ever made a formal study?
True, but I’m not sure we should even give it the benefit of calling it a coincidence. I mean, how often has it actually been observed considering the observers or across town and out of contact. Unless they were trying to measure precisely this there’s no way they can be certain they occured at precisely the same time. If they are ten or fifteen minutes off this isn’t a coincidence considering how often the two events occur.
Re. the coincidental lactation thing:
It reminds me of the myth of dogs who supposedly know when their owners are coming home. That is, it was claimed that certain dogs somehow knew when their owners, across town, decided to start the journey home; this knowledge was indicated by their going and sitting next to the door.
Richard Wiseman (IIRC) tested this by putting a camera in the room with the dog, while keeping someone with the owner to record the time he decided to go home. They found that the dog did indeed go sit at the door around the time the owner decided to come home – but this was because the dog went to the door at approximately five-minute intervals for the entire day.
If this is for real, it illustrates quite well the principle that “any sufficiently crazy kook is indistinguishable from a parody”.