The other day, I shredded Pat Boone for mindlessly parroting the Lady Hope story. You’ll have to take a look at the Pat Boone evolution article now, though: mysteriously, that entire paragraph has vanished without acknowledgment. Aren’t computers wonderful?
Alas, the rest of the article is still there, and it’s still crap. If we take it apart paragraph by paragraph, can we make the whole thing disappear?
If this is true—that the Edwards campaign has caved to pressure from the right wing—he has lost my vote.
The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps — John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.
The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.
I’ll want to see some confirmation from the targets of this rumor first, but if it’s true that Edwards would rather heed the screams of right-wing sleazebags like Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue than the people he’s supposed to represent, then he has lost. We don’t need another timid Democratic candidate who flits away at every gust of noise from the Republican slander machine.
Zuzu says more, much more. Jebus, but I’m tired of craven Democrats.
Correcting Jonathan Wells’ misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He’s been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he’s just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he’s trying to argue for his abuse of the term “Darwinism”, which has steadily become a term of art for the rantings of creationists in addition to its more specific meanings.
Here’s his most unpromising start to his letter:
In a recent column (“Churches shouldn’t buy into Darwinists’ ploys,” 1/29), I distinguished between “evolution” as change over time, and “Darwinism” as the theory that all living things are descendants of a common ancestor, modified by unguided processes such as random mutation and natural selection. I criticized Evolution Sunday for disguising the latter (which is scientifically and religiously controversial) as the former (which nobody denies).
Evolution Sunday originator Michael Zimmerman responded (“Writer missed point of Evolution Sunday,” 2/5) that “Darwinism is a term that is almost exclusively used by creationists to attack evolution.” Yet prominent biologists Ernst Mayr (“The Growth of Biological Thought”) and Stephen Jay Gould (“The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”) often used “Darwinism” as I used it above, and the term occurs regularly in scientific journals. By trying to discredit the more accurate (though controversy-provoking) term “Darwinism” and insisting on the more ambiguous (and innocuous) term “evolution,” Zimmerman proves my point.
It’s the old microevolution vs. macroevolution shell game with different names. He wants to relabel microevolution as evolution, and “Darwinism” as macroevolution, while also making the false claim that evolution/microevolution is undeniable (correct), while “Darwinism”/macroevolution/common descent is scientifically controversial (it isn’t, except in the specific details).
He should have stopped there, and I would have just rolled my eyes at the boring old creationist boilerplate, but no…in his second paragraph he goes on to try and support those claims. If you know Wells like I know Wells, then you also know that whenever that guy attempts serious scholarship, you’re either going to witness a hilarious pratfall or a con man’s sleight of hand, or both. And when he cites an authority like Gould or Mayr, who also happen to be dead, you can trust him to completely misrepresent their views.
I really need the raptor suit. People would stop calling me a mild-mannered professor if I showed up at speaking engagements wearing one of those.
There is no need to speculate about exactly what they would call me…
Carl Zimmer tells us that there are going to be showings of Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos all across the country next week—do you know where your nearest exhibition will be going on? Here it is for us Minnesota people, along with a little rebuttal of a Discovery Institute hissy fit:
So Scott Adams shouldn’t be too irritated at this amusing depiction of his mental state.
Here’s a peek at a work in progress: it’s got two kinds of cephalopods, Stethacanthus, and crinoids front and center. Delicious.
Take a look at this promising poll at Daily Kos. This informal and unscientific survey of the netroots seems to be showing that a third of the readers are utterly godless, and that if you toss in the agnostics, freethinkers have got a clear majority. I anxiously await the hysterics from the wingnuts, who will be horrified at all the heretics and apostates and damned infidels lurking on the Left, with their forked tails twitching and their horns filed to sharp, pointy tips.
Maybe we need to start agitating for a godless caucus at Yearly Kos—or even a panel on standing up for secularism, and how this is a good result.
Smarmy Sal Cordova, the Eddie Haskell of the Intelligent Design movement, is at it again, with a post in which he pretends to be competent at information theory. It is with great delight that I watch Tyler DiPietro and Mark Chu-Carroll hand his ass back to him. I know full well the creationist clowns are utterly ignorant of biology; it’s interestingly consistent to see that they also know nothing about astronomy and mathematics, and as the Dover trial showed, they’re complete boobs about the law. What exactly are they supposed to be good at again?
