As everyone knows, the Discovery Institute accidentally leaked their grand plans for World Domination, in the form of the Wedge Document, in 1998. Among their goals was to publish 100 scientific articles within 5 years — unfortunately, they’d only reached 72 by 2012 (most of them were in crap journals and by obvious crackpots). What to do?
Invent your own journals.
The latest: a pretend-“science” journal called “Inference Review“, which is apparently the creation of pretentious mathematician David Berlinski. Yeah, that’s one way to achieve credibility: bury yourself in your own garbage.
Ah, taking their strategy from alternative medicine, are they?
To the general public a study is a study — particularly if it shows what you already knew was true. Complaints from skeptics about poor quality, bad design, statistical errors, and improper peer review are simply translated into deniers desperately groping for any excuse. “They wanted scientific evidence and suddenly that’s not good enough! Haha!”
But the failure of ID doesn’t change the fact that atheists have failed miserably to demonstrate, or even postulate, a viable (meaning, that it might happen statistically at least once in the entire history of the universe, lol) biochemical mechanism through which any of the observed genetic mutations can come close to producing a new functional gene resulting in some alleged positive phenotypic trait upon which natural selection can act and drive evolution forward, as per classical Darwinian storyline (which, don’t get me wrong, has its use in today’s understanding of the world, but Darwin was hypothesizing long before modern genetics was remotely understood so there is no way he could have fathomed the depth of the topic he was addressing).
Mark #2
You sure know alot of sciency words.
And Mark @#3 has failed to demonstrate any familiarity with the rules and conventions of proper English composition.
It takes lots of words to make a nice salad.
This is a sufficiently-villainous plan that I have previously endorsed it. I was, and remain, a fellow at the Cold Springs Policy Institute. Which may or may not exist as you picture it.
At #2 Word Salad Mark:
Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
Mark @#2:
LOLWut?
I’m already full… I don’t need a (word) salad to go with my sushi, thanks…
Good counter points guys. Attack my correct usage of the English language. I guess I am just more stupider than you.
Well, I sure won’t let them publish in the International Journal of Journaling Internationally!
E pur si evolves, Mark.
New functional genes resulting in new phenotypes arising from mutations has been directly observed to happen, multiple times. Not understanding the precise details of the mechanism by which it happened doesn’t change the observed established fact that it did.
Mark
You didn’t make any points for us to counter.
What do you expect?
Oh good. Mark is always good for a laugh.
#2, Mark…
Well, I’m convinced.
Before there can be counterpoints, there must first be points.
The nonsensical requires no counterpoints to dismiss.
The failure of ID is the same failure all theists have. The failure to show your deity exists and is there managing things. The designer is MIA, a phantasm without solid physical evidence, like the creator, and nobody has ever come up with a mechanism for the creation of the creator/designer. All needed to get from religious presupposition to a possibility of a scientific theory.
Your God sucks, Jesus is a lie, and your theology is just mental masturbation except light on the “mental”.
Refute that in anywhere from 100 to 300 pages of text or lose the debate, Mark. You have 20 minutes.
Mark @9, it’s hard to make counter points when you haven’t made a point. I think I might know what you were trying to say @2, but I found that sentence (yes, it was only one) to be basically unparseable. If you’re saying that new functional genes can’t evolve by mutation, that’s obviously wrong, we understand plenty of mechanisms by which that can happen, and have observed it happening in laboratory settings. I would encourage you to purchase or borrow from a library a good textbook on molecular evolution and work your way through it. If you want to argue against modern science, you should know what scientific evidence actually exists so that you don’t keep mindlessly parroting the same canards that ID charlatans have been spouting for years. Otherwise you look intellectually lazy, not to mention a bit silly.
I’m sure my lab will be interested to hear that our model protein family doesn’t exist. Or is the problem that my boss is a Christian, so it doesn’t count (still there’s me and at least one other person that are atheists here).
Evolution theory explains all living diversity down to the first self-replicating entity. The origin of that entity is abiogenesis, which remains not yet fully understood.
To be a legitimate alternative to evolution/abiogenesis, ID must do what the existing paradigm does not yet do.
ID pretends to explain existing diversity back to the designer. To be equivalent to evolution/abiogenesis ID requires a hypothesis about how the designer arose (remember, they insist the designer is not supernatural) that is at least as solid as the bet existing abiogenesis hypothesis.
This isn’t a very high bar, since abiogenesis hypotheses are still in their infancy.
And yet, crickets from the ID crowd on this.
Where is the biochemical mechanism for the production of new functional designers?
@Mark:
E. coli experiment. Demonstrates the formation of a brand new functional gene (that can ” use citric acid as a carbon source in an aerobic environment”) from an initial population of genetically identical bacterium. Doesn’t matter if we know or don’t know the exact biochemical mechanisms by which this occurred; it has occurred, will continue to occur, and all we need to do is figure out how.
Back over to you, ID.
Here’s one for you Mark@2 copied and pasted from the abstract of a paper from 2002
“Pressured by antibiotic use, resistance enzymes have been evolving new activities. Does such evolution have a cost? To investigate this question at the molecular level, clinically isolated mutants of the b-lactamase TEM-1 were studied. When purified, mutant enzymes had increased activity against cephalosporin antibiotics but lost both thermodynamic stability and kinetic activity against their ancestral targets, penicillins. The X-ray crystallographic structures of three mutant enzymes were determined. These structures suggest that activity gain and stability loss is related to an enlarged active site cavity in the mutant enzymes. In several clinically isolated mutant enzymes, a secondary substitution is observed far from the active site (Met182 ! Thr). This substitution had little effect on enzyme activity but restored stability lost by substitutions near the active site. This regained stability conferred an advantage in vivo. This pattern of stability loss and restoration may be common in the evolution of new enzyme activity.”
The antifreeze genes in Antarctic icefish is an excellent example of a case where new genes arose from a known sequence of mutations.
1. A segment of DNA was duplicated by mutation.
2. Further mutations destroyed the old information in the duplicated segment, turning it into a pseudogene (the original gene was a digestive enzyme, but it could easily have been anything – this part is a random, immaterial feature)
3. Another duplication mutation produced a new transcription start signal in front of the pseudogene, causing a protein to be produced from it.
4. The new protein is mostly gibberish, since the old pseudogene already had its function destroyed by other older mutations, but the laws of chemo try dictate that any protein, even a random gibberish one, can lower the freezing point of water when dissolved, as a result of concentration and hydrostatic effects.
5. Thus the new gibberish protein has a weak antifreeze effect, which in the icefish ancestors had a beneficial impact on survival.
6. Further mutations improved and honed the initially weak antifreeze effect.
And boom. A wholly new set of genes with a wholly new set of functions, produced by random mutations and natural selection.
A similar sequence is thought to be he way the lens proteins in vertebrate eyes came from. They started out as copies of metabolic genes (would any rational intelligent designer choose to use METABOLIC genes as a starting point to make a lens for an eye?), and initially the function of bending light in a lense was produced by changing concentrations of the otherwise gibberish proteins.
Thanks to the laws of chemistry, even completely random protein sequences will have SOME kind of weak biochemical activity, which can be selected for by natural selection if that particular activity happens to find itself in an environment where it is beneficial.
It doesn’t matter, folks. Mark’s twenty minutes are up. He’s lost. I challenged him to a debate and he failed to pass muster. He failed to defeat my powerful rhetoric and immaculate logic. He failed to address my incoherent arguments within an arbitrarily set time frame so now I can just spend my time laughing about his incompetence, and blustering, and accusing him of cowardice. I have won. I HAVE WON.
(I believe if I repeat this enough times I will complete a metamorphosis into William Lane Craig or some other similar entity)
@ Mark,
“… demonstrate, or even postulate, a viable … biochemical mechanism…”
There is such a mechanism and you’re part of it.
@Mark (wallowing in self-pity and persecution) whines:
“Good counter points guys. Attack my correct usage of the English language. I guess I am just more stupider than you.”
Finally, something we can both agree on!
Yes, and he got it mostly right anyway. Don’t you see how this works i his favor? Do you not know what it means to confirm a theory?
Rather transparent bit of gobbledygook, don’t you think, Mark? This has been demonstrated multiple times. Lenski’s work has been cited already, so I’ll add Thornton. Lots of work has figured out the precise mutations behind new proteins, and yes, we have the mechanisms to back ’em up.
You’ve got no knowledge of biochemistry or genetics at all, do you?
Intelligent Design also has the wee little problem that living beings are full of poor designs that look very much like kludged together make dos. They sure don’t look like something designed by an omnipotent being, who you would think would use the most elegant, effective, and simple designs possible, with the minimum of possibilities for things to go wrong.
Photorespiration. ID: you got some splainin to do.
Well Mark, I will happily cop to failing to demonstrate… whatever it is you want atheists to demonstrate, w/r/t abiogenesis. But then again, this atheist is an English major. (I actually 3 degrees and a certification, all in the general area of Words.) So, I will happily analyze any piece of literature for you, or I can teach you about grammar and linguistics. But demonstrating anything in the hard sciences is a bit beyond me.
Sorry if this makes me a failure as an atheist.
Goalpost shift in 5…4…
Protein folding itself being a prime example! Take the prion proteins as an example. The lethal configuration is more stable than the normal configuration! And this for a protein whose function is unknown and whose absence has been empirically shown to be compatible with life and apparent normal phenotype!
Or sickle-cell hemoglobin. What an utterly stupid and inefficient method for producing malaria resistance (and an incompletely effective one at that). Particularly when the gene for producing artemisinin *already existed in another organism* free for a designer to repurpose and splice in.
And then there all those proteins that need chaperones upon chaperones to fold properly, and the ones where a significant fraction DON’T fold properly and the misfolded ones just get digested up almost as quickly as they are made, wasting energy and resources.
Protein folding is indeed complicated. But when viewed through the lens of design “theory” it is a gongshow of incomprehensible lunacy.
But viewed in the light of evolution, it makes sense, just like everything else in biology.
timgueguen #29
The Designer* did that on purpose to test your faith.
* Soli Dior gloria!
Mark @2:
Let me stop you there. “Atheists” don’t have a responsibility or an obligation to do anything regarding development of new traits. Unless of course those atheists are also biologists – but not all biologists are atheists.
Assuming the conversation about evolution is only between IDiots and atheists was your first mistake. 30-odd comments later and I’m quite sure you’ve heard about a few others.
No. Berlinski is a pretentious philosopher. He may get more mileage out of posing as a mathematician (and he does know a bit of math), but his doctorate is in philosophy, not mathematics.
Rey Fox got there first, but anyhow….. I predict that in the unlikely event that Mark#2 comes back into the conversation, it will be to split hairs over the definition of “viable”, “mechanism”, “new gene” and “functional”.
truthhurts
You are an IDiot.
Except, truthhurts @38/39, that PZ Myers isn’t using his blog as a platform to debunk a century and a half of established science with a combination of dodgy maths, high-school-flunking-science and grade-school theology. If you’re seriously comparing starting a blog to starting your own “peer reviewed” vanity journal because actual science journals know that your ID hobby horse is so much unevidenced horse-hockey, you have nothing of value to contribute to this thread.
PZ’s holding ID to its own promise, by the way. It wasn’t scientists that demanded ID publish 100 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals in 5 years – ID vowed to do that themselves. And when it looked like they wouldn’t be able to keep that promise (chiefly because science got wise to its “complexity = GOD!” nonsense), they started their own journals (this isn’t the first one) where scientific standards were virtually non-existent and the only peer reviews would be performed by IDiots.
Thank you MRA idjit.
PZ has published as would be expected for teaching at TEACHING UNIVERSITY. Research is nice, but one paper every other year is sufficient, compared to say one paper per month for established research professors at a research university. If you can’t/won’t tell the difference, that says what your level of honesty and integrity is. And it is lacking with your observation. Typical….
BTW truthy, “Let the players play” is actually kind of appropriate here, because that’s precisely what PZ does every friggin’ day – in his function as a professor of biology at a university. It’s scientists and science educators like him that are the actual “players” here, teaching the scientists of the future their skills, while your precious IDiots are just parading around in misappropriated lab coats, scribbling nonsense and cosplaying as scientists. It reminds me of what I used to do as a little kid, clomping around in my dad’s giant boots and affecting a deep voice – however, the difference between me at six years old and an IDiot is that I was smart enough to realise that I wasn’t actually my dad.
No 38 – Whatever. You are of course aware that simply checking PZ Myers’ Resume you will find that he has published peer reviewed Scientific papers and presented papers at Scientific Conferences. As of 2003 PZ Myers has 13 articles to his credit and 13 conference papers. And of course he has had some since. As against the entire ID movement which although it numbers in the hundreds of Academics is had put to come up with 72 of which practically none can be called published in peer reviewed.
The question IDjit, is Where’s the Science. Since that is utterly and totally lacking in an IDjit paper, due to the lack of evidence for the imaginary designer…..Prove the designer outside of the claims for “design” (explained by evolution, so dismissed as fuckwittery).
truthhurts wrote:
Hahaha. Oh, wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder! You really think the journals care about “views”? They don’t sell advertising. They trade on their reputation, which would go into the shitter if they started publishing obvious pseudoscience. The fact you don’t understand this is actually embarrassing.
Truthy @44, it’s good manners to actually link to the article you’re quoting from. It’s also good manners to identify who, if anyone, you’re responding to.
Anyway, you quote this bit:
and then you say this:
and in doing so miss the point completely. The first quote expressly criticises journals who focus on getting views to the detriment of scientifically valuable contributions. Do you even read what you paste before responding to it? A good journal doesn’t operate like a magazine or a newspaper, FFS.
But hey, if journals want to be laughed at by the communities they exist to inform and lose their credibility, sure, publish some ID papers. Fortunately, they don’t have to because the IDiots are starting their own journals. Very considerate of them to provide a focus for all the mockery and ridicule that ID deserves.
truthhurts, #38
Why are you creationism idiots so awful at simple reasoning? The entire topic of Intelligent Design has a lack of real publications. The topic of evolution has an astronomical amount of publications.
Haha, you’re a fucking idiot. Please keep posting.
truthhurts
I now suspect that you are a banned-person, trying to sneak back in.
-alert in the offing-
Hey, if they were journals where the topic of general coverage was: “modern advertising memes” then yeah, ID might get a mention along with the latest efforts at homeopathy.
if you’re talking science journals, then no, it would DECREASE their reach to publish nonsense that is also non-science.
Basic logic, ur doin it wrong.
you know what’s really ironic?
creationists consistently do not actually understand irony.
otoh, maybe that’s not really ironic. more like symptomatic.
say, that reminds me, how did the Disco Institutes attempt at creating a journal to publish their “in house” “research” succeed?
surely they must have wide circulation and millions of subscribers by now.
what’s that you say? they haven’t even published a paper in THEIR OWN JOURNAL in nearly a decade?
I’m shocked I say! shocked!
What a pathetic display of crass intellectual dishonesty we have here.
The ID community SET FOR THEMSELVES THE GOAL OF PUBLISHING 100 PAPERS IN FIVE YEARS. They have failed in their OWN SELF-DECLARED INTENT.
PZ never made any such declarations, and as faculty at a TEACHING UNIVERSITY rather than a research institution, he has published more or less as much as would be generally expected for someone in such a position.
And you have the nerve to talk about “apples to apples” you pathetic hypocrite.
Of course if this was true, it makes ID’s abject failure all the more stunning. If the journals would have been eagerly clamoring for ANY ID driven papers so long as they could meet the barest minimum of plausibly deniable quality, if the financial incentives were all in favor of the journals publishing ID papers of even the barest minimal qualifications, what then does that tell us about the lack of ID publications so far, if the field was so well tilted in their favor by systematic biases and they STILL FAIL?
Oh, truthhurts, you’ve SCOURED the internet? Apparently scouring doesn’t go as far as a google scholar search.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=p.z.+myers&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C23&as_sdtp=
Although you did specify you haven’t found anything “of relevance”, so perhaps you can tell us which of those (many, many) citations are “relevant” to science or not. Although given what understanding of science research you’ve demonstrated so far, I won’t hold my breath.
btw, this is mentioned because this effort by Berlinski is not new, this is the FOURTH attempt by the discotute to create a faux scientific journal. the first never really got off the ground, the second was well touted, and started off with 3(!) papers in it… then as mentioned never published another edition in the last 10 years. there was another attempt in 2010 that was lamasted by NCSE, and also disappeared.
now this.
Still waiting for your solid and conclusive physical evidence TruthHurts. Physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. And your alleged “design” evidence is explained by evolution. Maybe an eternally burning bush or equivalent you can point to, and we can investigate with modern instrumentation????
Or, you can decide to shut the fuck up. Your choice.
That reminds me that we’ve got a whole bag of apples in the fridge. And thanks to the wonders of both natural and artificial selection, I’ve got several varieties to choose from.
I’m gonna eat me an apple.
sez truthhurts@38:
BZZZT! I’m sorry, truthy, but if you were really tryna “compare apples to apples”, you’d have compared the scientific output of 1 (one) individual ID-pusher to the scientific output of PZ. Who is, just in case you failed to notice, one single person, not a collective movement of whatever type. What you did instead, truthy, comparing the scientific output of the entire ID-pushin’ community to that of 1 (one) real scientist, is not comparing apples to apples. Rather, what you did is comparing an apple to an orchard. It’s amusing that you apparently did not consider that your illegitimately-slanted comparison would be seen thru by anyone, and it’s an extra layer of amusement that the ‘apple’ (PZ) you criticize is, in fact, more scientifically productive than the ‘orchard’ (the ID-pushin’ community) you strive to defend, so even if we did accept your comparison as valid, ID-pushers still end up with a great big FAIL tattooed on their collective forehead…
Apart from the deceitfulness of your slanted comparison, I also observe, as others before me have, that the OP to which you’re responding is calling the ID movement out for its failure to achieve its own publically-announced, self-defined level of success.
Bad truthy! No donut for you!
truthhurts:
Apples to Apples: Publication amount of one scientist vs. Publication amount of one entire community.
Creationist math strikes again.
Still waiting for you solid and conclusive evidence for your imaginary designer truthhurts. Until you provide said evidence, you can’t forward your argument, and you can’t refute evolution without citing the peer reviewed scientific literature. Which excludes all creationist and designer journals, since they aren’t scientific, by presupposing your imaginary designer…..
truthhurts:
My god. Those two sentences. Right next to each other. The projection. The Dunning Krugocity.
truthhurts @38,
So you believe that comparing one person (Professor Myers) to an entire community (ID) is “apples to apples”? Really? Tell us more.
anteprepro @61,
Sorry, we didn’t mean to copy your point. Note to selves: read all comments before replying next time.
Always nice for some creationists to come along and provide free entertainment! :D
@truthhurts, Like, PZ is wrong…because…he’s not published enough or something…he shouldn’t be an armchair quarterback…so …he better defer to….?
……..oh ya, the published scientists he already cited.
(I’m laughing over this faceplant.)
Also, #39, it’s easier to make a blog than a fraud journal? Was that your point? Or was you point that PZ stands within the majority group composed of people who are not frauds?
Please come back with more, this is priceless.
We are Plethora: No worries, I didn’t copyright it yet.
(I was actually surprised, unless I read too fast and missed someone else saying it as well, that I was the first one to explicitly make that comment. Pacal made a similar point though!)
ah, but I misread 39. It says “Six in one half a dozen in the other.”, I thought it said “Six in one half, a dozen in the other.”
I have a lot of blogs, about half a dozen actually. How do I make some Science Journals?
First ya’ll ran off poor widdle Mark. Now you’re jumping all over the new IDiot. Has the Horde no shame?!
See, back in the day, Jesus had a hankering for some scientific reading, and he went to the ID orchard to get one. But there weren’t any. It was the wrong season, perhaps, or everything was still stuck in peer review.
So in a fit of pique, the Son of Man (er, God) cursed the ID orchard to be barren, and never to bear the fruit of scientific publication ever again.
And as the Lord did say it, thus it was so.
It’s possible thruthhurts is more slyme than IDiot. The “PZ Myers has hardly published a thing, therefore not a horseman” meme is one of theirs.
Science has evidence. You have ‘faith’, and no evidence. The universe, as it functions, looks exactly the same as it would if there was no deity. Because of this, I’m not going to waste my time pretending there is a deity that I see no sign of. And even IF there is a deity, if it was at all worthy of reverence, it would not punish me for this. IF it exists, and it punishes me for atheism, well… I wouldn’t have followed it in life anyway.
I left the christian faith while still believing in God… but believing he was actually a force of evil. The God in the bible IS evil.
truthhurts @73:
Wow. You really don’t know how this works. See, PZ’s worldview matches up with reality bc unlike you, or any theist, he’s taken the time to ensure that his beliefs are backed by evidence. You really should try lining up your views with the way reality works. Ain’t a shred of evidence to support the existence of your god, nor any other deities. Until such time as sufficient evidence is presented–and people have been claiming they have evidence for thousands of years; really, we’re tired of holding our breaths waiting–there is no reason to believe in any god or gods.
Sorry, but the truth hurts.
More dishonest lies from you, I see.
PZ has made it abundantly clear that it is his science and humanism that drives his atheism, not the other way around. It is the very heart of his very public split from the “dictionary atheists”.
Of course, the false equivalency lie.
One party derives its worldview from the evidence it observes. The other cherry-picks the evidence to make it fit a presupposed worldview.
And a verbatim repeat of the IDer’s most basic lie of all, that their ideas do not have bearing on the existence of God, as definitely demonstrated by their own Wedge Documents.
The conclusions of evolutionary science demonstrate that the existence of God IS NOT NECESSARY to explain the diversity of life. And that means that the onus is on those who wish to stick God back into the equation to present POSITIVE EVIDENCE for his existence. A god that cannot be proven scientifically is also a god that is irrelevant as an explanatory mechanism.
Because the ideas of the IDers DESERVE to be ridiculed. It would be a grave disservice to the intellectual discourse of humanity to NOT ridicule that which deserves ridicule.
truthhurts has chosen his pseudonym well, since clearly the truth hurts him so much he is unable to post any of it in his commentary….
Let’s say he isn’t in your estimation. SO WHAT?
The ethical alignment of a fictional entity is wholly irrelevant except as a subject of diversionary entertainment.
The thing about God is you must first demonstrate that he exists before you get to talk about who gets to decide what he should be like.
But do you look to your drug-addicted asshole father as a paragon of morality, goodness and virtue?
I never said I wanted to decide what God is like; I implied that IF he exists, he’s unworthy of reverence because he’s evil. And that’s the plain truth.
Do you, or do you not, think that removing free will from the leader of a country in order to visit torment upon the peoples of that nation culminating in the deaths of thousands of *children* to be ‘good’?
Do you, or do you not, think that sending 2 bears to kill 42 kids because they made fun of someone you like, to be ‘good’?
Do you, or do you not, think that considering a man to be ‘righteous’ after he offers up his daughters for gang rape is ‘good’?
Do you, or do you not, think that killing a man’s family because of a bet to be ‘good’?
truthhurts #77:
The thing is, if this evil being existed, I wouldn’t praise the bastard or try to sell it as loving, kiind or merciful.
But yeah: if anyone ever shows me good evidence that it exists, I’ll certainly go as far as entertaining the idea that it exists. Given really good evidence, I’ll even believe it. ID doesn’t even try to show evidence though: its proponents just try to pick holes in the opposing theory, in the mistaken belief that disproving one would prove the other.
I see that you are avoiding my questions.
truthhurts #82:
Does this sentence actually mean anything?
truthhurts @77:
You can disagree all you like, but based on what the bible says, and what actions your god takes therein, it is reasonable to conclude that your god is evil. No one is trying to decide what a fictional character should be like. People are reaching conclusions about a fictional character based on that character’s actions. Just as we condemn Hitler and the Nazi’s for their genocidal actions, so too should every reasonable human recognize that Yahweh is a monster that committed greater genocide than the Nazi regime. Yet people like you won’t hold him accountable for that. There’s something wrong when your moral compass doesn’t recognize genocide as abominable.
When it comes to humans, I think it is fair to recognize that we are complicated, nuanced creatures. It is possible for you to love your father while recognizing that he is an asshole with drug problem. Doesn’t mean you love him any less. Just means you recognize that there are multiple facets to your father.
My father rejected me when I came out of the closet. For over a decade, we rarely talked, and when we did, it was “how’s the job”, “how’s your health”, “how’s school”.
It was “shop talk”.
Yet during all that, despite the hurt and pain that I felt, I still recognized that my father was showing that he cared for me. He was still interested in what was going on in my life, despite the distance. So I knew that while he rejected my sexuality, he still loved me. That’s human relationships. They’re complicated…messy, with conflicting emotions. Recognizing that, and not glossing over any of the bad in favor of the good, is more helpful in understanding an individual, IMO.
Daz @84:
I *think* it might be something along the lines of “you atheists are so arrogant and close minded”.
truthhurts @#77:
Strangely, your analogy undermines your argument. Or at least, it seems to.
Would you agree that a putative God could have created life — including the parasites and microbial and viral diseases that harm humans — and not be what we would call “good”?
#82:
Some skeptics were (and presumably are) skeptical of their own skepticism.
Is that an apology for your earlier disrespectful words?
Another disgusting lie from truthhurts, seeing as how his original post is about as disrespectful as it gets.
We get to read the bible and decide what God IS like, as described IN the Bible.
And the character of God AS DESCRIBED in the Bible is as vile and evil an entity as any fictional entity gets.
IF this was true, then the ONLY purpose behind truthhurts’ original post in this particular thread about the credibility of ID is either derailment or plain trolling.
BOTH are as disgustingly intellectually dishonest behaviors as dishonest behaviors get.
So either way, truthhurts is a liar.
Shorter truthhurts:
“OW!”
“OW!”
“OW!”
“OW!”
“OW!”
“OW!”
Welcome to reality.
Truthinessentertains would have been a more fitting nickname.
Although, i feel this one didn’t last very long and seemed a bit quick to offer a draw and explain how brilliant he is for deciding the scientific method and ‘making shit up” are actually equivalent modes of understanding, both superseeded by his personal beliefs.
OK, truthhurts got me. I’m a terrible scientist, with feeble output. It’s a fair cop.
Of course, somehow, even the lone worst scientist in the world has a legitimate publication record that’s equivalent to about a quarter of the world’s total publications, mostly in fringe journals, of the Intelligent Design creationism community.
Do you realize that that makes me a better scientist than anyone working on ID? (And yes, I realize that that’s setting the bar incredibly low for myself.)
PZs’ contribution to science is the students he teaches every day. I’m sure they number more than one hundred.
Faith = delusional thinking and a phantasm, not something real. Dismissed beyond that point. You have nothing.
Except with a phantasm, an imaginary deity, nothing is scientific. It is all statements of faith in a delusion. Meaningless drivel comes from pure delusion. Which is all they and you have.
This is pure bullshit. If your deity doesn’t exist, it is rightly ignored when trying to figure out how the world works. Which is why Science ignores your imaginary deity, and can’t use it to explain anything.
What part of put up your solid and conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity, or shut the fuck up, don’t you and your fellow IDiots understand. Presupposition will get you nowhere, and only pointed at a laughed at for being delusional fools.
This from an IDjit not skepitcal of their belief in imaginary things???? Hypocrisy at its finest.
Ugh. Truthhurts is the banned user Beau Stoddard: deletion in progress, blocklist updated.
Consistent with Beau’s other idiocy:
From here:
From Facebook:
Likes: Being Christian, HogMob Ministries, Biblical Creation, Freedom From Atheism Foundation, Kirk Fucking Cameron, and Living Fucking Waters.
This is the kind of creationist that makes pretentious, pseudoscientific charlatans like Mark quietly facepalm and slowly step away.
Truthwhatever:
Excellent. Thanks for pointing that out. Since ID Creationism, as admitted by yourself, is explicitly religious in nature, it should be of no concern to you that it has no place in public school science classes – after all, teaching religious doctrines as scientific fact has been ruled unconstitutional. Both the religious nature of IDC and its non-scientific nature were, as we’re all aware here, determined in Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005 (for “non-scientific”, read “there is no tangible, testable or credible evidence or plausible argumentation to support what little of the IDC hypothesis can actually be nailed down beyond the incredulity of “certain biological features look designed therefore they are”).
The Dover trial was IDC’s first public acid test and probably best chance to shine. It was also a colossal, unequivocal, laughable failure for IDC from any perspective be it legal, educational, ethical or scientific. To this day that trial is held up as a prime example of the incompetence, stupidity and the dogmatic, simple-minded dishonesty of the IDC movement. Everything the IDiots have since done or attempted to do to support their presuppositions of divine design reinforces their image as a pack of deluded incompetents. Dembski and Meyer themselves were lined up to be among IDC’s star witnesses in Dover but decided late in the piece not to take the stand for IDC, leaving Behe to take the brunt of the cross-examination (they were either dissuaded from doing so or decided to excuse themselves from what they might have expected to be a bloodbath). Before and since Dover, the books of Meyer, Dembski and Behe have been routinely torn to pieces by any reviewers with a working knowledge of the fields they all presumed to revolutionise; Behe’s own employers famously took the unprecedented step of publicly distancing themselves from his (no doubt very embarrassing) IDC “theories”.
It is of no surprise (and of little consequence to science) that the only recourse left to them is to write blog posts with heavy moderation (or no comments at all), to publish in, or launch, creationist journals or to write yet more inane books about “design” and have them published by creationist houses (or by gullible/greedy legitimate ones).
What they, and creationist trolls, do not – or refuse to – understand, is that if IDC had any scientific validity and could be demonstrated as plausible and as a potential new area of inquiry, science would adopt and employ it. It doesn’t and thus hasn’t been. And before the thought even occurs, no: there is no conspiracy by some shadowy scientific establishment to suppress IDC or expel IDiots – there doesn’t need to be.
TL;DR: if creationism worked, scientists would use it. It doesn’t, so they don’t. You might as well hand a carpenter a bad drawing of a hammer and expect him to build you an ark with it.
D’oh. Banned while I was slaving over a hot flaptop to write that wall of text!
Anyway, so whatsit was a banned creationist tool sneaking back in under a new ‘nym. Isn’t there something in their operations manual that proscribes being a dishonest asshat?
And if you were kicked out of a bar for acting like a douche, why would you sneak back in wearing a hat and just repeat the behaviour that got you booted the first time? Are these people all wannabe martyrs or do they just not fucking learn when they’re not welcome?
Apples to Apples: Publication amount
It’s tempting to point out that ID’ers may wish to steer clear of expressions involving apples. Apparently you can get in no end of trouble for going there.
Skeptics are skeptical of everything except their own skepticism.
Sextus Empiricus
Hank_Says @100
Lying for Jesus is a honored tradition among the creationists.
One per month? In what discipline is that possible? Perhaps historical linguistics when you restrict yourself to Least Publishable Units (easy cases of etymology of one word)? And that’s before we get to the imponderabilities of the publication process: peer review doesn’t always take the same amount of time, and while many online-only journals publish just days after they accept a manuscript, dead-tree journals routinely take a year or more.
If you use reason to argue against reason, you contradict yourself. If you argue against reason without using reason, you’re unreasonable.
– said to be in The Incoherence of the Incoherence [of the Philosophers]
Typical of top researchers in chemistry, with a couple of post-docs and several graduate students. It also means an average of one publication per month is submitted, and the acceptance rate to the name is high.
@2, “Mark”:
Ken, is that you?
But salads are so much better with some dressing, such as a period or four.
Looks like my guess in post 106 is correct:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia_talk:What_is_going_on_at_CP%3F#Dealing_With_a_Possible_Ken_Sockpuppet
Ken DeMeyer is sockpuppeting as “Mark Goodson” these days.
And this is why ID is not science.
Science is not driven by presupposition.
Aaaah, the kind of professor who puts his name on everything that comes out of his gigantic lab, apparently often without having even read the manuscript. Yeah, there are such people.
…I feel like I’m looking into a whole new world.
From the link in comment 106:
Just wow:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Debating_Kendoll
Was there not a certain IGNobel laureate, an x-ray crystallographer, whose prodigious output of several papers per month continued unimpeded a full two years after his death?
David M @110,111:
I second your ‘wow’. I read the link and boyohboy, this guy is obsessed!
And the empirical evidence just keeps on a-coming.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/10/23/competition-drove-these-lizards-to-evolve-big-sticky-feet-in-just-15-years/
E pur si evolves.
Uh-Oh. I’ve sucked some newbies into the madness that is Conservapedia! Or “Kenservapedia”. He’s pretty obsessed with PZ, devoting multiple edits in his latest sprees to him. And you can be pretty sure he’s reading this. We may even get some sort of shout-out before he deletes it. I have to confess I visit the Rational Wiki page daily. Because I can’t help myself. And I’m not even a member there.
If you’re brave enough, go to the actual Conservapedia main page and check out “recent changes”. Note that you’ll have to up the number of change per page to get the full glory of it.
Ken isn’t just full of nutty ideas — what makes him special is that he’s such a terrible writer. I’ve always been pleased that obsession is accompanied by longwindedness and repetitiveness, since it so nicely undercuts the arguments of the obsessor.
Intelligently designed goalpost:
http://www.talkrational.org/images/smilies/goalposts2.gif