It’s tough being Denyse O’Leary. She’s one of the loudest voices for Intelligent Design on the net, and she has to perpetually struggle with her own ignorance in order to come up with new excuses to deny evolution, and all she ever accomplishes is to briefly dazzle us with her incompetence. She has come up with two new problems with evolution lately. Brace yourselves, put your coffee down, and swallow before you read them. I’ll will not be held accountable for damaged keyboards!
How about this? Macroevolution is about changes in form and size, which kittens do routinely as they grow up. Therefore, evolution is trivial. And false? I’m not sure where she’s going with that. I wonder if she’s been consulting with that JohnHamilton wanker on this thread.
And here’s another one: if chimpanzees and humans are 98% identical genetically, why are spinsters so picky about marrying humans? Seriously: she’s proposing a “Would Denyse O’Leary marry it?” test for speciation.
It’s so sad. The only cheerful news here is that Ms O’Leary is completely unaware of the scrambled state of her brains, which is a small mercy.
Suddenly Deepak Chupacabra makes sense!
(Or was it D’Dinesh D’Sousaphone? Eins Bier.)
Stupid. Just plain stupid.
No, no, she has it all wrong. “Fit, form or function” is the way engineers decide whether a product should be revised to the next version letter/number (i.e. the design drawing gets marked with a sequential figure indicating how many times it has been changed).
I am pissed off at my engineer students right now anyway. In my last use-of-engineering-database training class, the office building was felt to shimmy a bit. A couple engineers freaked out. I told them to calm down, that buildings were engineered to absorb and transmit normal stresses in the course of weight shifts in use as well as wind pressure and minor ground shifts (no, there was not an earthquake). Didn’t they understand that, I asked, they were the engineers, not me? They looked at each other dully for a few minutes and then one of them sulkily muttered, “OK, well, we aren’t civil engineers.” Aggggh.
I wonder how long until this thread attracts its first creationist defender…
*gets beer and popcorn*
Actually, bringing kittens onto the creationist side is a brilliant strategy.
Everyone likes kittens.
Damn you, Denyse. Damn you.
I CAN HAZ INTELLYGENT DEZINR?
It’s people like Denyse who give stupid a bad name.
Gets leftover Easter grog for the regulars, first come, first served*
Thanks for the coffee warning. I already lost a MacBook to excessive fluids last year.
Looks like a classic case of Dunning-Kruger Effect A great vid about it here
Of course it’s a fact that vertebrates go through some of the ancient evolutionary stages during development. So while kittens are not “evolving” as they develop, their development points to evolution happening, particularly in pre-natal stages.
A fact lost on that ignoramus.
And I think it’s the cost that likely keeps Denyse from marrying a chimp.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Sounds more like an IQ test. I wonder if Less-Brains-Than-a-Stuffed-Turkey lacks enough to pass Dense Oh Lordy’s test?
Considering the lady is a staunch dualist, it’s rather impossible for her to associate scrambled brains with mental deficiency.
Denyse already melted my brain on this a little while ago: http://www.naontiotami.com/?p=1325 Seriously, reading her entire article makes you want to commit part of your brain to an apoptotic process. Especially the last sentence… Oh, that last little sentence…
Well, that’s too strong. All we can say is that some of the older genetotype and phenotype is adapted to other uses, and appear more like the older phenotype during the development processes, notably pre-natally.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
You think thats bad look at this.
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/michael_coren/
This boob is nationaly sindcated ‘his latest column “have a little faith” He completley dismantels atheism ……or so he thinks.
Yes Canada has nuts
We spinsters are veeeery picky :-)
COFFEE!!!
Oh, Denyse O’Leary, I know you live way up there in Canada where there isn’t much which either isn’t frozen or speaks French. But don’t give up, and don’t settle for 98%. I’m sure that there is a guy named Doug, who has not only 99% similarities with you, but might also have the same haircut. He might even have a little brain damage, so you can be the smart one in the relationship. You can have a whole litter of children and watch them evolve as they grow old. You can name them Doug jr, and Doug jr. ii, or if it’s a girl, Dougette. You can even go for broke and wait for cloning to become real. That way you can marry someone who’s 100% similar and I believe that it’s legal in Canada.
Pac-Devil
Chimps everywhere breathe massive sighs of relief.
“Consigned to being a spinster?” Spinster?? In this day and age?
Must be a play on words. A “spins-ter.” Someone dedicated to spin doctoring the facts to fit a preconceived conclusion — such as Intelligent Design.
So the choice is between being an ID spin-ster — or marrying a chimp? That does make it tough.
“Seriously: she’s proposing a “Would Denyse O’Leary marry it?” test for speciation.”
Still not as useless as the “Would it marry Denyse O’Leary?” test, because it’s difficult to imagine any primate passing that one.
If women everywhere want nothing to do with Nobby Nobbs, he has papers that says he is probably human, why would one want to snog with a chimp?
Besides, I have the reasonable fear that the chimp will not appreciate my flirting and eat my face.
Coffee indeed
Tried to go to Denyse’s article (http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2010/04/coffee-evolution-in-action-check-with.html) but got this:
Page not found
Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog Post-Darwinist does not exist.
Is it my browser, or did she remove the article?
Sorry, nevermind.
Didn’t read all of Shallitt’s blog, which concluded: “Update: O’Leary’s posting was apparently too stupid even for her. It now seems to have disappeared from her website.”
Shallit wrote that by at least several hours ago.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
“Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.”
Glen D> Given their track record, they’ll pick up a copy of Haeckel and start using pieces from that as an argument.
Sastra @#5 wrote:
ONTAHJUNEE REKAPICHULAITZ FYLAHJUNEE!
I had a vision of a couple of chimps sitting around the zoo and Denyse turns up:
Chimp 1: “Don’t look now man but that human is back, the one that wants to get it ON with one of us. Comes here every day with her flirty, flirty eyes, sizing us up like meat, trying to work out if any of us are the marrying kind”
Chimp 2: “Damn”, *cowers*,..”waddya say that for ? Now I’ve looked and she’s coming this way. I wouldn’t hit that EVER, not if she was the last primate on Earth.”
Chimp 1: “You could always try the good old ‘give her a fake phone number then avoid her for ever’ trick”
Chimp 2: “Hopeless, she knows where I live, she’ll just keep coming back, stalking me with that creepy talk about the kittens”
Chimp 1: “Just fling some poo at her then”
Chimp 2: “That could work..”
You’ve probably all seen this poem before, but if not…….enjoy!
(Sorry, can’t credit the author, the version I saw was signed by that prolific poet, Anon.).
Darwins Mistake…A Poem
Three monkeys sat on a coconut tree,
Discussing things as they’re said to be.
Said one to the other,
“Now listen you two,
There’s a certain rumour
That can’t be true …
That man descended from our noble race.
The very idea is sure to disgrace.”
“No monkey ever deserted his wife,
Starved her babies and ruined her life.
And you’ve never known another monk,
To leave her babies with others to bunk,
Or pass them on from one to another.”
“And another thing you will never see …
Is a monkey build a fence around a coconut tree;
And let the coconuts go to waste,
Forbidding all the other monkeys to taste.
“Why, if I put a fence around this tree,
Starvation would force you to steal from me.”
“And here’s something else a monkey won’t do …
Go out at night and get in a stew;
Or use a gun or club or knife,
To take some other monkey’s life.”
“Yes, man descended … ornery cuss,
But, brother, … he didn’t descend from us.
Nope, I’d say these monkeys are too far along the evolutionary path to want to bother with an inferior species such as Ms. O’Leary!
Does Intelligent Design have a Tyler Hicks somewhere from which its Denyse O’Leary steals all her material?
No doubt she deleted it out of embarrassment, but not before Google grabbed a copy:
http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2010/04/coffee-evolution-in-action-check-with.html
‘If you have any poo, fling it now.’
Posting my usual cut-and-paste, on the off chance someone wants to kvetch about it to refine my enlightenment.
I’ll also note in passing I recently added the Horizontal Evolution page to Wikipedia; since the entry on “Concerted evolution” needs significant work (=is incomprehensible to even a moderately well-read layman), so does Horizontal Evolution.
How about we remind Denyse that about 1.2 million years ago are the mutual ancestors for humans and chimpanzees *could* get it on?
My suggestion: let’s ask the guys at the LHC if they can whip up a time machine and send her back to do some speed dating.
The Humanzee is well within reach!
I’d have to see her husband before I’d definitely commit myself, but perhaps she has married a chimp. Lots of people look for an intellectual equal when selecting a mate.
You know you have come up with terrible points if professor Myers doesn’t even bother to explain why you are wrong
Peter G, are you suggesting that Denyse is the intellectual equal of a chimp? I’ve got a feeling that the chimp could sue for defamation!
It’s not about making sense.
It’s a game where the only rule is to distract yourself and your readers long enough that you can put “God wins!” at the end without it being too obvious that everything preceding it carried no actual content. Anything, anything whatever, can be written in between as long as it doesn’t break distraction.
If you want to shed even more tears this happy Eastertide, read Madeleine Bunting, to whom the Grauniad has given space so that she may mount an unprincipled, dishonest and shoddy assault on the ‘New Atheists’… Among other illusions she suffers under, she believes that Terry Eagleton (who she seems to think is a philosopher and not an eminently forgettable literary critic) ‘skewered’ Dawkins. I wonder why the editors at the Guardian insist on giving so much space to people who coyly refuse to actually address the arguments of the people they try to attack and resort, really, to what amounts to slander.
I am quite certain that Ms. O’Leary’s underlying message here is, as always, “buy my book.”
Apparently it really is that difficult to comprehend that evolution occurs in species, not individual organisms.
Kitten-mon does not evolve into Cat-mon.
Good Lord (pardon the expression)…
Are you sure this person isn’t from Minnesota, where the State Bird is the mosquito and the motto is “There’s not much to do here, but it’s cold”?
That could explain part of the vacuum between her ears (I’m from MN too, by the way, but from the relative tropics way down by Minneapolis).
Poor Denise. It’s not true that she’s an idiot from being dropped on her head when she was born. The doctors were actually making a last ditch effort to jump start her brain.
She would be SO LUCKY as to marry someone with the intellectual agility and moral integrity of a chimp.
So what’s not important is that a person find a mate based on personality, compatibility, intelligence, understanding, and pleasure in each other’s company.
What’s important is that a single woman needs a man! Any man! Right now! That spinster isn’t getting any younger!
I doubt she deleted it. That’s got so much wrong with it, it probably just deleted itself.
*speechless*
That’s absolutely stunning in the “just how stupid can a person be?” department.
My lady wife pointed out to me that back in the Regency period in England, it was apparently greatly feared that unmarried women were doomed to lead apes around in Hell. Women in “danger” of dying unmarried were sometimes referred to as “ape-herders”!
Sounds like Denyse may be adding in another old fairy-tale to the pile of crappy stories that is ID….
The spinster – chimp alliance reveals rather too much of Denyse’s subconscious for my liking.
Perhap’s she would like to read Peter Goldsworthy’s ‘Wish’, in which a man falls in love with a female gorilla and consummates the relationship.
Actually, I won’t weep for Denyse. She found one of the sections of woo where you can be one of the primary spokespersons while being generally ignorant of all science.
No one as pig-ignorant as she could possibly be one of the major “experts” on anything having to do with science. But with ID, it’s “praise Jebus” and hate Darwin, and you’re a prime “thinker” for said babble.
Sure, she’s laughed at by anyone with a smattering of education in science. Yet among a number of ignorant rubes, she’s an expert who makes “valuable contributions” to, well, Jebus and his religion.
She’s really done quite well without understanding science (as a system, I think she’s completely in the dark about it). Sure, she’ll die and be forgotten as the worthless blabbermouth that she is, along with Dembski, Behe, and JAD.
She and they won’t know it, though, and will continue to believe that they are brave fighters against dogma (science) and able to come up with fabulous ideas (tripe we were through with by the end of freshman year of college, if not earlier) that evade us, either because we’re stupid, or because we’re so committed to debauchery that we prefer it to eternal life.
As long as they’re oblivious to their delusions, they’re wonderfully heroic thinkers. Much more than Denyse deserves.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
By the same logic, spinsters ought to prefer marrying other women ahead of chimpanzees. (And in fact we know lesbian couples can bear and raise children successfully, something which is probably not true of a human-chimp couple.) Perhaps someone should point this out to her …
Here we go again. Creationists who pride themselves about knowning nothing about evo-devo. Perhaps she’s the of the creationists.
Slight correction to #51:
Presumably Denyse would have no reluctance marrying a man with an IQ of 75, since he is 99.99% similar to her.
They’re not even trying anymore, are they?
No doubt she deleted it out of embarrassment
I very much doubt that that has ever been a motivation of hers.
So what’s not important is that a person find a mate based on personality, compatibility, intelligence, understanding, and pleasure in each other’s company.
What’s important is that a single woman needs a man! Any man! Right now! That spinster isn’t getting any younger!
I doubt she deleted it. That’s got so much wrong with it, it probably just deleted itself.
That article hasn’t been deleted:
http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2010/03/just-hack-writer-but-question.html
God damn it. That Coren guy from the link @15 promised to totally dismantle atheism and all he can come up with is Bertrand Russel on his deathbed?
Just once couldn’t one of these nuts come up with something reasonable? My question to god would be: why did you hire a bunch of injits to be your spokespeople?
And here is a surprise – that Coren guy thinks that Canada treated Ann Coulter badly. Ah, yes god – you need better screening during the hiring process and better people working in HR.
Is a monkey build a fence around a coconut tree;
And let the coconuts go to waste,
Forbidding all the other monkeys to taste.
Why, if I put a fence around this tree,
Starvation would force you to steal from me.
I don’t know about letting the food go to waste, but alpha chimpanzees (and to a lesser extent, bonobos) do withhold food from others of their clan, and make the others beg for food from them.
“And here’s something else a monkey won’t do …
Go out at night and get in a stew;
Or use a gun or club or knife,
To take some other monkey’s life.”
No, they’ll just hunt down a chimp and tear him to pieces. Literally.
Oh my nonexistent deity, the stupidity of her “science” arguments aside, I was not aware that anyone could still write the word spinster without having tongue firmly in cheek. No wonder these people get the vapours over issues – they are still stuck in Victorian/Edwardian times. Denyse, they have discovered this thing called a clitoris and females have been proved to have orgasms. Yes, it is true, even the lower classes and the criminal class have them. Next time you have a delivery, go back to the tradesman’s entrance and talk to the draymen and carters. You may be surprised that they no longer tug their forelock before speaking to you and they are actually rather articulate. Try not to break your pearls when clutching them.
I am not familiar with the opus of O’Leary, but then, I dont have to know each and every nutcase on the planet.
JeffreyD @ 60,
Lack of class and way too many classes in that sentence….;)
I just realised that Denyse O’Leary and Ann Coulter are two different people. It would seem I’ve been conflating them in my mind.
I will not be thanking kantalope for suddenly doubling the amount of stupid in my world …
@kantalope#58: Is it a story about Bertrand Russell’s deathbed conversion? If it is that would be absolutely hilarious because Russell is on record saying that these deathbed conversion stories are all lies fabricated by the religious who can’t accept that people have no need for a god – or something like that.
I’d rather marry a chimp than someone as ignorant as her.
And then eat the pieces.
“…God damn it. That Coren guy from the link @15 promised to totally dismantle atheism and all he can come up with is Bertrand Russel on his deathbed?…”
Alas for Canada, that Coren guy is a columnist who has made sub-clinical bigotry his signature schtick. That is, he generally stays just this side of hate-speech, by using phraseology that causes the effect without parsing out as indictable hate-speech.
Sample from many years ago (2003) in a Coren column calumning Wicca, regarding a prison chaplaincy:
==========
================
And of course, Spocko did indeed use this technique, to good effect.
Rerun the experiment, substituting Ms. O’Leary for the chimpanzee. If the “spinster” doesn’t prefer the man, have we proven that Ms. O’Leary is not descended from humans?
I need to lie down now…
@Rorschach
She co-wrote The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul with Mario Beauregard, a “scientist” from the University of Montreal.
The book was simply awful from front to cover (there’s even a page where they dismiss all we’ve discovered in primatology because Goodall and the likes were there to save the chimpanzees so they tried to convince us they were a worthy subject of study… so everything is bullshit…).
To Aquaria and nigelTheBold;
Chimps do this because they are wild animals, but are so close to us that we tend to anthropomorphise their actions.
The alpha male of many species gets the lions share (pun intended).
Chimps may be intelligent but without technology how else could they catch prey?
We, on the other hand, have all the technology in the world yet still delight (as a species) in forcing others to beg, and to cause untold suffering not only to ourselves but to every other species on the planet.
How is describing how chimps behave anthropormorphising their actions?
Idealizing chimp behavior to the point of attributing them with virtues they don’t have (like that poem does) is a bad case of the naturalistic fallacy. Being “natural” doesn’t make them better, and it doesn’t negate that they don’t always behave kindly to one another.
And if your point was to ask why we can’t behave better with all that we know and have at this stage in our evolution, fine, but don’t offer as an argument such an ignorant and mawkish piece of drivel.