You bastards!

You’ve hurt little Billy Dembski’s feelings! You keep promoting negative reviews of his book!

The Design of Life has 13 five-star reviews and 4 one-star reviews. None of the one-star reviews give evidence of the reviewer having read the book. Yet the three reviews placed front and center by Amazon are the one-star reviews and none of the five-star reviews appear there. That’s because the Darwinists keep voting up the negative reviews and voting down the positive reviews. Please go to the link right now, look at the reviews, and vote on them (toward the bottom of a review are “yes” and “no” buttons for whether a review was helpful).

Now Denyse O’Leary is urging all of her minions (“Fly, my pretties, fly!”) to rush over to Amazon and correct this deplorable situation. Why?

Like intelligent design? Hate it? No matter. This is a blow for civilization.

Gosh. I like civilization. Civilization is important. I scurried right over and voted the stupid reviews down and the smart ones up. I hope you do, too.

It is civilization’s only hope; our culture hangs by a thread on our ability to make thin-skinned Billy Dembski cry.

Uh-oh. The dembskyites noticed that all of their reviews were getting panned and that a host of new negative reviews have shown up. After Dembski had the gall to exhort his fellow creationists to get over there and pack the voting, after O’Leary begged them to help save civilization by skewing the Amazon reviews, they discover that their own ploy has rebounded against them and we get this amazing example of irony from the UncommonDescent commenters:

My suggestion is that we leave Amazon alone and let these guys freely post all the evidence any intelligent person needs to decide whether that line has been crossed. I’ve always found it deeply asinine and comical that such as Kwok consider the Amazon reviews to be so important. I don’t have any deep interest in joining them in any of their nursery school games. Victorious at Amazon? Only a loser would care.

Such deep, self-referential irony that my irony meter did not explode — it had an orgasm instead. Now it’s lying there snoring and absolutely useless.

That didn’t take long — I knew a poke at his ego would get poor tissue-thin-skinned Dembski fuming.

THE DESIGN OF LIFE is being shamelessly manipulated by the Darwinists at Amazon. Not only are they posting negative reviews that give no indication that the reviewers have read the book but they are also voting up their negative reviews so that these are the first to be seen by potential buyers.

Wait a minute…Dembski himself shamelessly urges his acolytes to rush off and manipulate the reviews because he doesn’t like the one-star reviews his book is getting, and now he shamelessly protests because we called attention to his shameless manipulation? My poor exhausted irony meter is stirring again.

Although I do think it’s pretty funny that the IDists can intentionally try to flog the vote, and all it takes is a casual mention of their games here to launch a juggernaut that easily overwhelms their efforts.

Is civilization safe yet?

I’m #3? Of what?

There’s this new service, Wikio, that is trying to rank various blogs. It’s very pretty, but I have to say that ranking is entirely the wrong approach — it simply perpetuates a falsely hierarchical view of the web and acts as a positive feedback system to reinforce popularity; blogs are promoted as popular because they are popular, making them more popular. It’s nerds with computers realizing that gosh, traffic and links are easy to measure, so let’s provide a pigeonholing service that sorts by the simplest, most basic tool we can invent.

This one at least tries to add a qualitative estimate of content by grouping the blogs into categories, like “science” and “sports” and “health”, but too often these are arbitrary and irrelevant, and rife with omissions. The blog listed just below mine is a car blog, for instance; Sandwalk is left out, and Wilkins is included. None of these are bad blogs, but I think it does no one a service to be jumbled up and stacked according to a number that is a sloppy proxy for the quality of the content.

You know what I’ve come to like? Tag clouds. At a glance, you can tell quickly what subjects have come to the fore on a blog that uses them, and you can spot blogs that might address subjects of interest. As for whether it is a good blog on those subjects, I determine that by actually reading a few entries.

Going caroling this year?

Amadan wrote this amusing Gilbert and Sullivan parody, I Am the Very Model of a C-Design-Proponentsist. Now you can actually hear it sung by Karl Mogel! (by the way, Karl, you know you’re a science nerd when you think the best way to tell people what the tune is is to mention that it’s the same as Tom Lehrer’s Elements song.)

I think this is one of those carols that is best sung drunk, I’m afraid; I’m picturing hordes of godless atheists and happy secularists stumbling into midnight mass on Christmas Eve and disrupting the services by trying to pronounce c-designproponents-ists very fast.

Another shovelful on Behe’s grave

It’s a strange thing to read another review of Behe’s Edge of Evolution. This one is by David Levin, and it strongly highlights the compromises and the irrelevancy of the book.

In the end, the most irritating aspect of this book is Behe’s selective use of the ever-expanding base of scientific knowledge as a soapbox from which to shout his embrace of perpetual ignorance. The better our understanding of the intricate details of complex biological systems, the stronger is his belief that they must have been designed and that science will never unravel how they came to be. This is a trend for him. As Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs at the Dover trial, observed of Behe’s claim that the immune system is irreducibly complex, “Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system … Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire “intelligent design” movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother.” Scientists have never listened to him. But with so many concessions to evolution mixed with his new message of God-as-mutagen, will anyone?

It’s a good review, but does anyone care anymore? His thesis is rejected by biologists and ignored by creationists, and the man is on his way to well-deserved obscurity.