Ray has always been good for hours of hilarity — he writes amazingly stupid stuff. But now Ray has competition: Eric Hovind has a blog! It’s not quite as insane as Ray’s, but it does have more evil and stupidity.
For example, Eric likes a poem that he quotes — it’s a crude racist ditty that, I’m told, you can also find on the Stormfront web site. It’s written as if by some caricature of an immigrant, and ends like this:
We think America darn good place!
Too darn good for the white man race.
If they no like us, they can scram,
Got lots of room in Pakistan ..
Hovind has been shown that some of the statistics he used to justify vilifying immigrants were wrong, he’s admitted it, but he still likes the poem. That tells you a lot about him, right there.
On the evil side, he has a post called “The Evoluiton Hypothisis” [sic, sic]. He uses a diagram of what he calls the scientific method to argue against evolution’s status as a scientific theory.
I don’t much care for the diagram — it’s too rigid in its simplistic model of how science works, and it perpetuates the misleading idea that hypotheses gradually become theories (usually, theories emerge to explain large bodies of information already accumulated, and don’t slowly expand up out of single hypotheses) and that theories become laws if they’re confirmed enough. But I’ll let it slide… you’ll find many similar diagrams in introductory biology texts.
Where Hovind is stupidly wrong is that he looks at that diagram, and baldly claims that the “concept of evolution has never gotten passed the Hypothesis stage”. Ridiculous. All those papers being constantly published in the scientific literature are tests of the theory. The primary research literature is crammed full of tests of evolution, and more keep coming. You have to be profoundly ignorant of the state of biology to be able to make such a ludicrous claim. Oh, wait…he’s a Hovind. Of course he’s deeply ignorant!
Oh, if any of you decide to hang about and laugh at Eric Hovind’s goofy claims, would you mind reminding him now and then that I’m waiting for my iPod Touch?