The ongoing dissection of Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design continues, with two new disembowelments on display.

Andrea Bottaro rips up Chapter 9, “The Secret of Life”. In this one, Wells makes the tired old argument that only intelligent agents can create information, therefore informational macromolecules must have been created by intelligent agent(s). It’s also got a sharp, succinct critique of the Sternberg affair, in which Stephen Meyer smuggled an ID paper into Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. (Don’t ask what those two subjects were doing together in this chapter. Wells is not big on logical organization.)

Mark Perakh takes on Chapter 16, “American Lysenkoism”. You can guess the subject from the title: the Darwinists are persecuting the proponents of heterodoxy, confining them to the gulags of right-wing think tanks, like the Discovery Institute, and not allowing them to be represented in the universities. Yeah, right. We also don’t let flat-earthers get professorships in geology.

Expect more in the near future. We divvied up the chapters a few weeks ago, and everyone is working through them at their own pace (for the record, mine was ready to go a week and a half ago, and I held off to give a few people a chance to catch up—doesn’t everyone whip out a few thousand words in a few hours?), and they’re getting released as they’re done. When they’re all organized, it’s going to represent a very substantial rebuttal of some extraordinarily shoddy scholarship.

One of the things all of us are noting that may not get communicated well in the rebuttals is how much is wrong in each of Wells’ chapters. We’d have to write a whole book for each chapter just to explain all of his foolish errors and dishonest cheats, and what we’ve all been electing to do (by necessity!) is to focus on just a few examples and shred those. This is a book that would be slashed to bits by competent reviewers—I have a growing sense of amazement that it got published at all. But then, all I need to do is note that it was put out by Regnery, where incompetence and lies are a prerequisite for publication.

By request, I’m bringing over this old post on the outcome of the Dover trial. What it reveals to an astonishing degree is how delusional and disconnected from reality the Discovery Institute gang are.

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Michael Behe has previously commented on his testimony in the Kitzmiller trial. He felt good about it; in fact, he thought it was exhilarating and fun.

I haven’t the foggiest idea how the Judge will rule, but I think we got to show a lot of people that ID is a very serious idea.

Hmmmm…I wonder, what did the judge think of his testimony? Do you think there might be a way to, you know, find out?

Let’s look in his decision for references to Behe! As it turns out, we owe a debt of gratitude to the good doctor of ID for the invaluable assistance of his testimony.

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Over at All-Too-Common Dissent, the conversation has turned to Terry Trainor. You’ve probably never heard of him; he’s one of those garden variety self-infatuated creationists who frequented talk.origins some years ago, using the pseudonym “American Patriot” (which does rather tell you a lot about him right there.) He has now retreated to his own little MSN discussion group, to which I will not link—he really doesn’t deserve the attention.

However, all the talk lately about Darwin as the source of all racism, and the comments that noted a peculiar tendency of creationists to think very, very literally, combined with the mention of Trainor to remind of a wonderful example of all of those points made in a
talk.origins thread 6 years ago. It was amazing.

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If you aren’t yet sick unto nausea with D. James Kennedy, S. Daniel Morgan has a roundup of the recent commentary. And if you haven’t had enough, the program is about to be rebroadcast in my area, in the next few minutes.

I’m going to give it a pass.

Well, I just watched the much-ballyhooed Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, with D. James Kennedy. Here are a few quick comments.

• The opening scene was perfect. Kennedy walked onto a stage decorated with flasks and beakers and graduated cylinders full of brightly colored water. One had a small flame going under it; the graduated cylinder was bubbling. It was practically an admission that all of the science in the show was going to be fake.

• In a show purportedly about science, how desperate do you have to be to give Ann Coulter that much face time? Triple points for irony, though, when Coulter calls Eugenie Scott a “hack.”

• The first half was all Nazis and Columbine. No mention of Hitler’s Christianity, of course, everything was driven by “Darwinism.”

• The second half was all about the “crumbling theory of evolution.” All the old chestnuts were tossed out. We got “just a theory”, 747s being spontaneously assemble while monkeys write Shakespeare, Behe babbling about “molecular machines,” Strobel saying there were no transitional fossils, Nebraska Man, teach both theories, and that famous paleontologist, Ann Coulter, telling us that all forms of life suddenly appeared in the Cambrian explosion…and did you know you’ll get sued if you mention the Cambrian in a classroom?

• Francis Collins is still in the program, in the second half. His contribution was to help Kennedy argue that evolution is inadequate, that “man is a special creature,” and go on and on about how complex the genome is. Collins is back on my shit list. He may not have supported the Hitler connection, but he is a creationist dupe arguing against scientific theories.

• There were a couple of times when the collection plate was passed. Kennedy offers a copy of Tom DeRosa’s book, Evolution’s Fatal Fruit, for any donation. Go ahead, give ’em a dollar and tell them to mail it to you. The address is:
  D. James Kennedy
  Box 555
  Ft Lauderdale, FL 33302
  Or call them toll free at 1-888-334-9680.

It was a truly vile exhibition, the fans of this kind of crap will eat it up, and man, is it ever easy for these guys to lie.