This scientist spotting quiz has me wondering — has a Peterson’s Field Guide on this subject come out yet? Creationists apparently need one, although I’m not too keen on being ogled by weirdos with binoculars.
(By the way, I got a perfect score on the quiz.)
I got 50% but to be fair, I lost my lunch after Behes face showed up-he was #2.
Yes, you may have, but you obviously had an unfair advantage (unless you don’t own a mirror).
I should have known Behe was number #2: the background of books to confer an aura of legitimacy is a dead giveaway.
100% — but Michael Behe? Fuck the heck is up with that?
100%. That was easy.
Where are the pictures of legendary scientists such as Ed Conrad and John Davison?
damn my open tag
Easy, PZ.
(not)
Well, if Behe had to be on the list, you must admit it’s appropriate that he’s #2.
Well I got them all right except for mixing up you and Beheehee. Only joking :)
I got 100%, but I can’t help feeling that it’s kind-of sad that I should recognise a crackpot like Behe more readily than, say, David Sloan Wilson or Steve Jones.
Well I can now put a face to the idiotic words of Behe. So I got that going for me…which is nice.
It reminded me of that old Sesame Street – “one of these things is not like the other”.
I did rather poorly – but I did correctly pick you and Dawkins out of the lineup, which still puts me ahead of the folks at the theater. (Setting the bar low, I know…)
xkcd had a sort of a variant on the topic: http://xkcd.com/356/
PZ, Venter and Behe were easy. I wasn’t sure about Dawkins from that angle. Jones was just a guess (I had no idea what either he or Wilson looked like), although Wilson actually looked a lot like I expected him to look, which is kinda cool.
Ahh, but would you have done so well without a mirror? :)
Too easy!
It was like an ‘Odd One Out’ round with Behe in there though…
Damn, I only got 83.33%
Remindes me of this quiz..
Slightly harder!
Missed two. Not bad.
It would’ve been nice if he had thrown Eugenie Scott in there for another easy point and some props to the lady scientists out there…
I missed Wilson and Jones (I had no idea, and so I was actually within a 50/50 chance of a perfect score. That would have been misleading).
#15
#20
True, true. Accordingly, I propose an alternative title for the quiz: “Spot the Mendacious Asshole”.
Hasn’t R. T. Peterson been dead for quite awhile? Kinda hard for him to have a field guide that way, if you ask me. No offense. :)
Edited because FTK didn’t even know Peterson was sick. :)
I got Michael Behe, but who were the rest of those guys?
…
Ooh, now I feel dirty. Gotta go wash my hands…
100%, but I got sick after looking at Behe’s theistarded, fucktarded, Intellectually Dishonest (ID) face.
Dawkins…you’re in…Ventner…you’re in…Wilson, Jones…in…Myers…in…but be nice…Behe!!you’re so outta here…
vengeance is mine!!!
I got four right – Myers, Dawkins, Behe and a guess at Wilson.
Behe was on the Colbert report, the other three I wouldn’t recognize by face.
I got 100% correct. Recently I read David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution for Everyone so I was able to ID him correctly. Had to guess at Vintner and Steve Jones–I suppose I’m the only for whom the name “Steve Jones” means a certain guitar player?
I recognised David Sloan Wilson from his talk at Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 where (as a leading proponent of group selection) he was pretty hard on Richard Dawkins (who, in turn, is pretty hard on group selection). I recognised Craig Venter from his 2007 Richard Dimbleby lecture.
100%
that was easy
i see behe still likes large lenses
Will @32,
I suppose I’m the only for whom the name “Steve Jones” means a certain guitar player?
Not at all. In one of his books (Y: The Descent of Men), Prof. Jones mentions several of his namesakes, including (and not, I think, without a touch of pride) that Steve Jones.
I got all of them right as well.
The only person I did not recognise was Sloan, but I could identify him by a process of elimination as I knew what all the other looked like.
They made a mistake. They had some Behe guy listed as a “scientist”.
I took the quiz. To my embarrasment, I only recognized PZ and Dawkins. But then I tried to comment on the quiz site. The response was essentially that since I was an unknown, I should try again later.
Whoa. Since when did I become somebody without a voice just because I’m a layperson?
This smacks of prior censorship to me at worst, snobbery at best.
Comment 13 says it best for me — I had to guess at Wilson and Jones and got them wrong. Venter looks like he’s called Craig, so that was easy :o)
And the quiz uses by far the dumbest photo of Behe I’ve seen so far. Does he often look that silly, or was that a deliberate choice?
BTW, thanks for comment 17. Thanks for warning me, I mean. At such a physics problem, my brain simply switches off instead of using 100 % of CPU resources like my IE7 just did on icanhascheezburger.com, but…
Comment 13 says it best for me — I had to guess at Wilson and Jones and got them wrong. Venter looks like he’s called Craig, so that was easy :o)
And the quiz uses by far the dumbest photo of Behe I’ve seen so far. Does he often look that silly, or was that a deliberate choice?
BTW, thanks for comment 17. Thanks for warning me, I mean. At such a physics problem, my brain simply switches off instead of using 100 % of CPU resources like my IE7 just did on icanhascheezburger.com, but…
Test?
This was the stuff that one would expect from Woman’s Weekly or similar intellectual pornography!
Yack!
Woohoo! 100%
To be fair, I did right-click and select properties on the images–otherwise I would only have gotten 2/6.
Off-topic, nice pics of the kind people here would like.
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/629162
(wrestling green anoles).
I’m very embarrassed. I didn’t do well. I only absolutely recognized PZ and Dawkins. I’m a lay person when it comes to science, and those are the two people I see communicating the most with people like myself. I love their “tell it like it is” style and great sense of humor.
I only got PZ, Dawkins and Venter. The scary thing is I went to Liam #22’s link and got 9/10. Without recognizing anyone and just guessing.
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling everyone about that part of it. . . .
PZ cheated! There’s only 5 scientists in that quiz, so 80%’s the best you can do.
Err… I suppose that’d be 83%. But you see my point. Cheater!
Woohoo! Scored 100% :::doin’ PeeWee Herman victory dance:::
I only got three right. One problem was that Ventner’s name didn’t show up on my screen–there was just a blank bubble. I still wouldn’t have had it right, but damn.
I missed most of the scientists’ quiz– I got Dawkins and PZ.
But, for the alternate quiz #22, I got 10 of 10… I guess I can spot a serial killer well enough.
I got Venter and Wilson the wrong way round, but I was fairly sure I had when I got to the second of the two.
Steve Jones is fairly well known, as scientists go, within the UK but I suspect he doesn’t have the international recognition of somebody like Dawkins. As a geneticist named Steve he is, of course, one of the good guys–I remember a public lecture of his at UCL (must be some years ago now) where he joked about having a special Kansas edition of his “Almost Like a Whale”, impregnated with pitch so it would burn better. Apparently the publishers didn’t go for it though.
I got 5/6 as I initially mistook Michael Behe for Craig Venter. For some reason I thought that Behe had a much bigger, old-testament style beard so I thought I must be looking at Venter when he came up.
*Embarrassed apologies to Craig Venter*
Looking at that quiz, I was struck by one fact — Take note PZ — the beard issue. Most scientists are clean shaven. The non-scientists, have beards. My conclusion, scientists of the world unite! Lose the beards….
The obvious counterpoint, science is not a “majority rules” endeavor, and with that fact firmly in hand, then you could claim to keeping the beard. (But a little solidarity would be nice.)
–tongue firmly planted in cheek here —
Kicked ass. I took DS Wilson’s Evolution course decades ago at Michigan State, and got Jones by process of elimination (still haven’t gotten around to his Origin updated).
Beards are standard issue in some fields of biology–especially those that actually involve fields.
Arun (#42): excellent–and rare–photos. Note the black spot behind the eye of both pugilators–that spot is directly sensitive to circulating corticosterone, showing that both territory owner and would-be-usurper are highly stressed by the encounter!
I don’t know what David Sloan Wilson and Steve Jones look like. I would have missed 2 but I used an old trick from my student years and selected David Wilson for both faces I didn’t recognize. So I really missed only 1.
i got a 100% but some of that was luck. i guessed between Venter and Wilson.
How did any of you get 5/6? The only way to get 1 wrong is to put the same answer twice. Unless of course you noticed your mistake and corrected it when the latter photo appeared.