Scott Adams reads Newsweek. Uh-oh.

If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, the insignificant, minute information Adams has on evolution must be exceedingly risky—it’s like the atom bomb of ignorance. In this case, it’s not entirely his fault, though. He read the recent Newsweek cover story on evolution, which fed his biases and readily led him smack into the epicenter of his own blind spots, and kerblooiee, he exploded.

This is a case where the flaws in a popular science article neatly synergize with an evolution-denialist’s misconceptions to produce a perfect storm of stupidity.

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The Geopolitical Strategist

I received a strange letter in the mail (the kind with paper and stamps, not the electronic kind) today. It was nicely and formally printed, and looked like something professional…but as soon as I read the first sentence I knew it was junk.

Evolution is defined by the Encyclopædia Britannica (CD Rom Version, 2002) as the process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state [this process is also called growth].

That’s a humdinger of an opening line; it’s completely wrong, of course. The silly book seems to have confused “evolution” with “progress”, since evolution makes no presupposition of a direction in the process. But wait! That’s only the beginning! As I read the rest of the first page, it was incredibly inane…but when I turned the page, it got even worse.

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“A new way of learning about history and science”

At least, that’s how Andy Schlafly characterizes Conservapedia in a New Scientist article. I called it “shallow and useless or downright wrong,” if you’re interested in an alternative position on it.

Josh Rosenau wasn’t any more charitable.

They are re-defining their own truth and seem to think facts are malleable.

Strictly speaking, I guess Schlafly was correct: if you’re redefining facts and making up nonsense as you go along, you certainly are presenting a new way of learning.

Michele Bachmann humiliates the state of Minnesota again

We knew this was going to happen. Our Crazy Jesus Lady now claims to have the inside scoop on the Iranian secret plan to take over the northern half of Iraq, name it the Iraq State of Islam, and use it for a terrorist training ground. She didn’t say how she knows this. My money is on some god whispering it in her ear one night, along with the gay secret plan to put spy cameras in her bathroom.

The Curse of the Prayer Study

It’s not looking good for the authors of a study that evaluated the efficacy of prayer. The authors were Rogerio A. Lobo, Daniel P. Wirth, and Kwang Y. Cha, and now look at what has happened to them (link may not work if you don’t have a subscription to the CHE).

Doctors were flummoxed in 2001, when Columbia University researchers published a study in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine that found that strangers’ prayers could double the chances that a woman would get pregnant using in-vitro fertilization. In the years that followed, however, the lead author removed his name from the paper, saying that he had not contributed to the study, and a second author went to jail on unrelated fraud charges.

Meanwhile, many scientists and doctors have written to the journal criticizing the study, and at least one doctor has published papers debunking its findings.

Now the third author of the controversial paper, Kwang Y. Cha, has been accused of plagiarizing a paper published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005. Alan DeCherney, editor of Fertility and Sterility and director of the reproductive biology and medicine branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said on Monday that it was clear to him that Dr. Cha, who has since left Columbia, plagiarized the work of a South Korean doctoral student for a paper he published on detecting women who are at risk of premature menopause.

Isn’t the explanation obvious? God really hates scientists who poke at him.

Once a crank, always a crank

DaveScot, the anti-science slug from UncommonDescent, is doing an experiment: he’s got a friend who is taking dichloroacetate (DCA) to treat his cancer. DaveScot thinks this is wonderful and useful, but quite the contrary: a one-person uncontrolled trial is pretty much a perfect example of bad science.

One funny (funny weird, because it’s also actually kind of evil) point from the post: he’s shilling for a quack commercial site that is selling DCA—purportedly for animal use. They sell doses for 150 pound animals. That’ll come in handy if my pet kangaroo gets cancer.

Anyway, nice to see that crackpottery is so unfocused. Many of the big wigs in ID are also HIV-deniers, in addition to being evolution-deniers; now we’re seeing one of them jump on the snake oil bandwagon. I wonder if there are also greater than average numbers of cold fusion fans and UFO believers in the ranks of the IDists? There might be an interesting sociological study in that.

The Dumbening of America continues

Somebody shoot me now. The Washington Post tallies up congressional votes, and in an astounding display of technological mastery, allows you to sort and display them by the congressperson’s astrological sign. If you’ve ever wondered whether Scorpios were more likely to vote for highway appropriations than are Virgos, now you can find out.

I really want to know what the conversations the editors or publishers had about this decision were like. I’m thinking they were getting worried about how idiotic and cowardly the press has been looking lately, so someone decided to do something bold and exciting and revolutionary…and this is what they came up with.

There are some things we shouldn’t do

Blake Stacey just asked me to pick on Scott Adams and the Dilbert blog some more—he wants practice taking potshots at fools. Well, Blake, I did a quick browse through the latest entries at the Dilbert blog, and I had a hard time finding anything with even a tiny germ of substance to attack. He spits up a lot of froth, you know, and there has to be at least a hint that he’s taking a stand on something in order to have an argument.

I did see that he is now calling what he does “philosotainment“, which I translate to mean “really stupid philosophy for the feeble-minded.” You might have more luck getting a philosopher like Wilkins to take umbrage at his diminution of a significant field of human endeavor. Or more likely, he’d refuse, as I do, on the grounds that it is impolite to interrupt someone in the middle of masturbation. Sorry.