The vortex of madness that is Denyse O’Leary

I have read a whole book by Denyse O’Leary. I don’t recommend it. It was not a pleasant experience, ranking among the worst books I’ve ever encountered, which is saying a lot since she’s one of the stable of incompetents working out of the Discovery Institute. She doesn’t actually write, you see — she assembles collections of quotes with short sentences linking them and telling you what the author actually said, explanations that are often totally at odds with the authorial intent, but that’s OK, she got to name-drop a famous scientist or philosopher to ‘support’ her belief in dualism and psychic powers and life after death.

Here’s her bio.

Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul; and with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor of the forthcoming The Human Soul: What Neuroscience Shows Us about the Brain, the Mind, and the Difference Between the Two (Worthy, 2025). She received her degree in honors English language and literature.

I read the one she co-authored with Beauregard, which was bad enough. I won’t even dare to touch the one co-written with that twit, Egnor. I’m also not interested in sticking an immersion blender in my ear and turning my brain into a bloody froth.

If you don’t believe me that she could be that bad, you can get a non-lethal taste of her style and content at a blog out of the Discovery Institute called Mind Matters. Her latest post there is titled The Mind has no History, in which she attempts to tell us that the human mind leapt into existence fully formed by recounting a few examples from history. I had hopes that a history of the mind that claims the mind has no history would be short and, optimally, blank, but she does her O’Leary thing instead and slaps together a series of non-sequiturs, unaware that every word refutes her thesis.

She begins with the tremendous news that philosophers disagree with each other on the nature of consciousness, implying that dualism is shaking up the world of academic philosophy.

Briefly, the leading theory has been trashed as “pseudoscience.” Tellingly, so far as one can make out from reading the letter signed by over 100 angry prominent neuroscientists, a big issue is that that leading theory is not as friendly to “abortion rights” as they might wish. (If the theory is correct, humans may enjoy prenatal consciousness…)

Oh, right. Another of her big obsessions is abortion, and she thinks bringing up weird ideas about how the mind works is useful to justify the argument that embryos might possess a fully function mind. Sorry. Reading O’Leary often quickly throws you into the maelstrom of incoherence that is the religious anti-abortion world.

What follows, though, is a grab-bag of long quotes from the scientific literature in which we see evidence of the long history of the development of human technology, with the characteristic O’Leary misinterpretation. For example:

Usually, Neanderthal Man takes it on the ear for being less evolved than us but, more and more, no one can figure out why. Here’s a find from Neanderthal cooking from somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago:

Then she quotes an article from phys.org about the discovery of a Neandertal hearth in Portugal. I don’t know anyone who argues that Neandertals were less evolved than other species, an idea that doesn’t even make sense in evolutionary theory, and I don’t think anyone is surprised that Neandertal used fire, given that we know that Homo erectus was cooking food over a million years ago.

Next, she googled up an article about excavating wooden beams from 476,000 years ago.

Nearly half a million years ago, humans were building wooden structures, of which only a very few have been preserved:

Interesting. And…? Denyse O’Leary is the one arguing that human intelligence is sudden and binary, finding old artifacts showing that ancient hominins could carve wood is not the surprise she thinks it is. It’s a weak argument, so she asks Casey Luskin to back her up. That’s desperation!

This rare find shows that some of the very human-like forms in the fossil record — perhaps Neanderthals which lived at this time period — were actually much smarter than we thought. In any case, this kind of evidence does not support the idea that early humans were unintelligent brutes and that we are descended from intellectually primitive precursors.

Uh, that gives the game away. The scientists aren’t the ones claiming that early humans were unintelligent brutes. What’s going on is that O’Leary is steeping in the assumptions of creationist culture, and whenever it’s pointed out that her biases are invalid, she takes that as evidence that she was totally right all along.

So she finds another anecdote.

Roughly 600 limestone balls (spheroids) , the size of plums, have been found alongside tools at a site in northern Israel, dating from 1.4 million years ago. What were their makers trying to do?

I don’t know. So Homo erectus was shaping stones? Is this a revelation? Maybe they were playing, or practicing, or maybe they were just bored. How does this support O’Leary’s thesis? She doesn’t say.

She has one more example, though, and she comes so close to getting it.

Researchers: Neanderthals invented process to produce birch tar. The tar can be used for glue, bug repellent, and killing germs. This finding tracks growing recognition of Neanderthals as intelligent. Why didn’t Neanderthal culture — and other human cultures — advance more quickly? Tech progress is not a stepladder. Much depends on specific discoveries.

Maybe Victorians thought Neandertal was unintelligent, but then, they thought everyone who wasn’t white and British was inferior. We’re well past that, I hope, except in the creationist community.

Think about her last two sentences. Technological progress depends on specific prior discoveries, it is true, which means it is like a ladder, with each step building on previous steps. She undercuts her own claim, that the mind has no history, by focusing on technological advancements that actually do have an obvious history. That’s Denyse O’Leary for you, though: she piles up observations she does not understand and then simply decides they all support whatever conclusion she wanted.

Is Eric Hovind trying to provoke me?

He’s succeeding. He has this new series of videos titled “Beyond Darwin,” in which he tries to claim that fossils disprove evolution. It’s warmed-over Harun Yahya bullshit. You know, show a picture of a fossil, then show a picture of a modern animal, and declare, A-ha! There’s no difference between them!

It’s all perfectly ignorable nonsense, except he roused me from my slumber with this: SPIDERS DISPROVE EVOLUTION!

What a pitiful effort. Let’s scrutinize his example of failed evolution, shall we?

On the right, that’s a familiar beast: that’s a modern Araneus diadematus, or European garden spider, a big ol’ common orb weaver. It is most definitely a true spider.

On the left is a grainy photo of a fossil. It took me a moment to figure out what that is — you might look at it and notice that it seems to have only 6 legs. Actually, it has 8, but the 2nd pair is thin and attenuated. It also has a segmented abdomen, unlike most modern spiders, and there’s something going on with it’s mouthparts. It’s an arachnid all right, but it’s not a spider. That’s a fossil whip scorpion, Weygoldtina. Here’s a reconstruction that will clarify the details.

So here’s dumbass Hovind showing us a photo of two animals with radically different morphology, coming from two different distinct orders, the Araneae and the Amblypygi, and trying to tell us they look completely the same. Then he says Maybe evolution didn’t work on that one, or it just evolved as high as it can go, two excuses that aren’t valid evolutionary concepts. He riffs absurdly, pointing out that spiders still die, as if that’s something that wouldn’t happen under evolution.

Hey, Eric, does the fact that you’re still ignorant mean that education doesn’t exist? Do you think The Atlas of Creation is a biology textbook, rather than a religious scam written by a convicted con man? This approach didn’t work out so well for him, or your dad, you know.

I guess the rotting apple hasn’t fallen far from the dying corrupted tree, I guess.

Wait! I just watched the full video from Eric Hovind (the clip above is just an excerpt), and would you believe…he comes right out and cites The Atlas of Creation at the 21 minute mark and credits it for his ideas!

He is literally pulling out examples and photos from that discredited and blatantly silly book and quoting them as evidence that we have to move beyond Darwin. (Here’s a hint, Eric: we have. Darwin didn’t have genetics or molecular biology as tools.)

I called it

Back in May, I suggested that we have seen who Ken Ham’s chosen successor would be. I was correct. It’s Martyn Iles. Ho hum.

Iles was formerly the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, and was kicked out because he was terrible at his job and godless Australians kept winning legislative victories while membership in the organization declined. Let’s hope he keeps his losing streak going!

There are many people at Answers in Genesis who have stood by Ham — I really wonder about the internal politics here, when the Big Boss brings in a total stranger over the heads of the existing staff and announces that he will be the next man in charge. I almost feel sorry for Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, who has now been officially passed over.

Ken Ham is a disingenuous fraud on climate change

I’m sorry, I feel stupider for having read this: it’s Ken Ham talking about climate change. He reports the headlines:

Shortly after the Fourth of July weekend here in the US, headlines proclaimed: “For the third day in a row, Earth’s average temperature breaks record highs.” Last week on July 5, 2023, the average global temperature (according to one university’s “Climate Reanalyzer,” “a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world’s condition”) was a record 62.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 17.18 C), beating the “record” set on Monday. But is this really a record?

Yes.

But Ol’ Ken questions it.

…was last week really a record? Well, it might have been—but we don’t really know! Humans have only been recording climate data since the 1880s, and we’ve only had robust data since satellite data collection began in the 1970s. So we have no idea how warm the warmest day on earth was in all of the earth’s history! (But we do know, based on the fossil record, that the earth’s climate was much warmer before the flood!)

You idiot. We have over a century of robust climate records, and this was the highest temperature on record, therefore, yes, it was a record high temperature. Words mean things, you know. They weren’t saying this was the hottest the planet had ever been — that probably occurred about 4½ billion years ago, when the planet was a molten ball of rock — but the hottest since we humans have been carefully tracking the climate. OK, you fucking stupid charlatan?

But he goes on to top that disingenuous word game. He claims that he believes in climate change.

Not only do I believe in climate change, but I’m a climate change alarmist, and I do believe humans have caused climate change!

Except…just not the way scientists do, with their measurements and data and records. No, he believes in a coming Biblical catastrophe.

Well, I’m not referring to a supposed slight global temperature increase allegedly caused by humans burning fossil fuels. I’m referring to the ultimate catastrophic climate change everyone should be aware of when one day in the future, Jesus will return, and the earth (and the whole universe) will be judged with fire, and God will make a new heavens and earth.

He then goes on to say that humans are the cause of this coming catastrophic climate change, because of our sin in Adam…except he then goes on to say that we’re not going to be the cause.

So, man is not going to destroy the earth! We can boldly proclaim that humans aren’t going to destroy themselves or the earth because God is in complete control, and he will determine when the ultimate catastrophic climate change will occur. So, the climate change countdown clock is absurd! We need to understand and believe in climate alarmism in a biblical context.

This is a bait-and-switch game AiG plays all the time. They have multiple articles with titles like Science Confirms Climate Change and The Globe Is Warming, But It’s Not Your Fault! and I’m a Climate Change Alarmist! that, when you actually read them, are denying all the scientific evidence in order to claim that the basis of their belief rests entirely on Bible prophecy, and that, of course, the way to prepare for climate change is to pray and go to church and give Answers in Genesis your money. The only reason you should worry about environmental catastrophe is if you don’t fear God.

Lord, I despise these liars.

You missed your chance!

I’m sorry, the last day to register for the International Conference on Creationism was 3 July, so it’s too late for you. It will be held at Cedarville University, a glorified Bible college in Ohio.

It’s sponsored by a fine assortment of organizations dedicated to promoting ignorance:

I don’t think you’ll miss much. One of the things that struck me about the list of speakers at this meeting is just how familiar they all are. These are mostly the same old frauds who’ve been parroting nonsensical lies for years, in some cases, for decades.

  • Dr. William Barrick (Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew, The Masters Seminary) — Theology
  • Dr. John Baumgardner (Vice President Logos Research Associates & Research Professor Emeritus, Liberty University) — Geophysical Modeling
  • Dr. Danny Faulkner (Researcher at Answers in Genesis and editor of the Creation Research Society Quarterly) – Danny Faulkner
  • Dr. Joe Francis (Dean of the School of Science, Mathematics, Technology and Health, The Masters University) — Biology
  • Dr. Aaron Hutchison (Professor of Chemistry and Forensic Science, Cedarville University) — Chemistry
  • Dr. Russell Humphreys (Independent Researcher & Board member of the Creation Research Society) — Physics
  • Dr. Matthew McLain (Associate Professor of Biological Science and Geoscience, The Masters University) – Education
  • Dr. Douglas Petrovitch (Teaches Ancient Egypt at Wilfrid Laurier University) — Archaeology
  • Dr. John Sanford (Director at Logos Research Associates) — Genetics
  • Dr. Andrew Snelling (Director of Research at Answers in Genesis) — Geology
  • Dr. Kurt Wise (Director of the Center for Creation Research & Professor of Natural History, Truett McConnell University) — Paleontology

I have to compare it to real conferences. There, you also find the old establishment giving review talks in plenary sessions, but the real meeting, the interesting and exciting new stuff, is given by hordes of grad students and post-docs presenting their current research. It’s a rich and complicated event with lots of people at all stages of their career talking things they’ve done that, mostly, no one else has done before.

Creationist conferences, not so much. It’s mostly old fuddy-duddies rehashing tired old arguments that have been repeatedly debunked and dismissed, and you have to pity any younger people who have been deluded and dragged into this mess. It’s just sad.

Also, is including representation from a few fringe ‘researchers’ at a Canadian university sufficient to call it an “international” conference? At the international meetings in the US that I’ve attended, I’m used to seeing a majority of the sessions led by European and Austrialian and Asian scientists.

They also tend not to be sponsored by religious institutions.

I keep missing their funerals!

I am a neglectful nemesis. I told you before that the Slymepit had died, and it took me six months to find out. Now I learn that Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent, has expired. I’m only about 2 months late to the party, so I’m getting better.

As his blog sank, Dembski was crowing in triumph.

In closing this farewell, I want to say special thanks to Jack Cole, who was the webmaster all these years and put in so many unremunerated hours; to Denyse O’Leary, whose quick pen and sharp insights supplied a never-ending stream of fruitful content; and to Barry Arrington, whose work in administering the site and writing for it kept the trains running. And finally, thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years who, in supporting ID, have been on the right side of truth and will ultimately be vindicated for being on the right side of history.

Nothing in any of the Intelligent Design creationism blogs were on the right side of truth. Dembski has always been fond of making grandiose proclamations that fly in the face of reality, like this one.

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism – the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level – will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

He wrote that in 2004. It’s a standard trope in creationism to announce the imminent death of Darwinism even as they are being stuffed into a grave. See also the Wedge document from 1998, where they predicted major legal and scientific victories within a few years, and instead they got the Kitzmiller trial in 2005…and we all know how that turned out for them.

(Of course, one could argue that “Darwinism” sensu stricto has been dead for over a hundred years, but that would be an admission that the creationists have been flailing ignorantly against a straw man.)

The creationist heat problem…SOLVED!

Every once in a while, it sinks into the creationist mind that they have a problem, the heat problem. They extraordinarily rapid transitions they claim had to have occurred — a globe-drowning deluge falling out of the sky and surging up out of the earth in a year, vast amounts of lava building huge geological features in a geological instant — would involve the release of immense amounts of heat, among the multitude of impossibilities in their flood myth. Just ask Phil Plait.

Creationists need the Earth (and the Universe, don’t forget) to be 6000 or so years old, due to a lengthy list of “begattings” in the Bible. The problem is, we see lots of processes going on right now that are very slow — but we see their effect because the Earth is incredibly old. But if the Earth is young, these processes have to have been cooking a lot faster in the past. Cooking indeed, because these forces expel a lot of heat. And it can be hard to dump that heat: it has to go somewhere (like an oven heating up a room when you open the door), and we just don’t see that happening.

Just imagine all the tectonic activity that we say was spread out over billions of years compressed into a single year, as creationists believe — there’d be enough heat generated to melt the crust of the Earth. Or consider all the radioactive decay that occurred to generate the elements we find on the planet, which we say is an indicator of great age. They want all that to occur in about 6000 years, postulating in some cases that radiometric dating is falsified by accelerated rates of decay…boom, that would mean natural nuclear bombs would have been popping off constantly.

Some creationists realize this, and invent all kinds of wacky mechanisms for dissipating planet-melting quantities of heat. Dan Phelps finds one who admits the one true solution: voila, it was a supernatural miracle.

However, it is important to appreciate that our inability to identify an acknowledged mechanism for removing the excess heat deposited during and after the Flood, an issue first identified over 35 years ago (Baumgardner 1986), is only a problem in the sense that it represents the limited nature of our human understanding. In a biblical context there is no fundamental problem because God purposely brought about the Flood (Genesis 6:17) as a judgment on the wicked human race of Noah’s day and covenanted with Noah to preserve human and animal life through the cataclysm (Genesis 6:18). He sovereignly accomplished both objectives, implying that environmental temperatures could not have risen beyond biological endurance limits. The only real problem is our current lack of understanding of how this was accomplished; the Flood account in Genesis 6–9 does not tell us directly whether supernatural processes were involved, though it seems very likely that they were. The same basic issue arises in connection with the topics to be covered in Parts 5 (heat due to Accelerated Nuclear Decay) and 6 (heat due to bombardments from space) of this series, and will be considered at greater length in Part 7.

I’ve been saying for years that creationists have an easy out for dealing with the difficulties their model generates. Just say it was a miracle. Just say God did it.

Usually they are reluctant to do that because it’s an admission that they don’t actually have any kind of scientific explanation.

When I used to debate creationists

I was reminded on Mastodon that I used to live in Eugene, and shared the city with a particular creationist that I debated, once. Then I was reminded again how old I’m getting because that debate happened in 2008, fifteen goddamned years ago. Bleh. It was a boring debate and I wasted my youth on it.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote about the debate with Geoff Simmons, way back in, I remind you, 2008. Some of you may remember that because you’re getting as old as I am.

It was a radio debate on KKMS, the regional Christian talk radio station, back when they’d occasionally bring me on to humiliate local Christians (they learned their lesson, eventually). I grabbed the recording before the station deleted the archive, and posted it on YouTube so you can enjoy it now.

Jesus, but he was stupid and dishonest. I was wise to finally give up that ugly habit.