IMPORTANT ADMINISTRATIVE QUERY!

A lot of people (really, a lot—I’ve got a stack of emails on this subject) have been complaining that their browsers routinely crash on loading this site, and a few have been telling me about other peculiarities. The epidemic struck about the time we added the new video ads.

As an experiment, those ads have been at least temporarily pulled from this site. Now we need some important feedback from those of you who have been having problems.

  • If your browser was formerly crashing and now everything is smooth and sweet and easy, let us know in a comment. That means it was the ads, and we’ve found the source of the problem.

  • If your browser was crashing and it’s still crashing, send me email if you somehow read this. Otherwise, the complete silence from anyone who has experienced the problem in the past will tell us there is some other source of the problem.

  • If your browser wasn’t crashing with the ads and is now crashing with them gone, we don’t want to hear from you, and fortunately you won’t be able to comment here, because that result just causes too many headaches.

  • If your browser didn’t crash before and still isn’t crashing (like mine), ignore this message. We aren’t worried about you.

If you do send me a note about continued problems, it’s very useful if you include your OS and version, and the browser you use and its version.

Thanks!

It’s April 2nd!

Yesterday, the Panda’s Thumb revealed that Michael Egnor had only been pretending to be a creationist. They even linked to his confession at Evolution Views and News. I chimed in, defending our prior work on Egnor’s absurd claims with argument that “the line between creationist parody and creationist reality is drawn awfully fine”.

It was an April Fool’s joke, of course. Egnor hasn’t been kidding — he really is that kooky. Or is he? His real April Fool’s Day post was remarkable in its hypocrisy and religious credulity.

[Read more…]

It’s sort of like eavesdropping

I feel a bit peculiar watching these “bloggingheads” episodes — it’s like sitting in on two people’s private conversation, and by the nature of the medium, you can’t even join in. And then the recent Althouse spectacle made me cringe — it was just too Jerry Springer, and I half-expected a tall bald bouncer to show up and make sure the trailer-trash harridan didn’t actually claw anyone’s eyes out.

The recent science episode with John Horgan and George Johnson makes me feel a little better about it, though; it’s more of a chatty and casual intellectual conversation. It’s still a bit limiting that no one else can join in, but I can appreciate that a thousand people chattering on a page would be much worse.

When I heard them, though, I knew their remarks about string theory would set off an informed but indignant response somewhere. What do you know, I was right!

An evil book

Over at Street Anatomy, you can find some utterly stunning anatomical images from a series of books called Pernkopf Anatomy; really, it’s beautiful stuff, with artfully posed models and exquisite detail. If you get on Amazon and look up the books, you’ll see that you might be able to find used copies for $500 and up — far out of my price range, but for the quality, they might well be worth that.

Except, unfortunately, for this little detail…

Like Pernkopf, the artists for his atlas were also active Nazi party members. Erich Lepier even signed his paintings with a Swastika, which up until 15 years ago remained in editions of the atlas, but have been airbrushed out since then.

In 1995, an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, summarized the history of the University of Vienna in 1938. They found that the Anatomy Institute of the University of Vienna, where Pernkopf worked, received the cadavers of prisoners executed during the Holocaust. The University of Vienna conducted their own investigation and found that in fact 1377 bodies of murdered victims, including children, were taken into the Anatomy Institute. It is also known that Pernkopf willingly accepted the bodies of murdered adults and children to the Institute. Therefore, it is almost without a doubt that Pernkopf used these bodies for the dissections from which the anatomical illustrations were drawn.

I’ve often said that I’m not a spiritual person, and that I don’t believe in any kind of spirituality at all. I do believe, however, that objects can be imbued with meaning beyond their simple physical parameters; they can carry a burden of history and intent that, when you know it, can trigger deeper feelings than mere matter would warrant. If I were to own such an item, I know that I could not touch it without feeling revulsion for its authors, and reverence for its victims, and that I would set it aside from my ordinary library as something more than just a book.

Don’t mistake that for a belief in the supernatural, or that there is some greater metaphysic that surrounds our material existence. Ghosts and gods do not sanctify portions of our world. The resonance of a book like Pernkopf Anatomy comes from the fact that it is anchored in purely human evil, and purely human sacrifice—it is a morbid reminder of what we can do.

We should have known better—Egnor fooled us all

A world-class neurosurgeon couldn’t possibly have been as stupid as Michael Egnor — the denial of even the most basic and medically relevant evidence of evolution in bacteria, the outright denial of the importance of the scientific literature, dismissing it as “chaff”, the obtuse insistence on self-contradictory definitions of information — it should have told us long ago that our leg was being pulled. We put a lot of effort into debunking arguments that only a purblind ignorant creationist could have fallen for, and we should have noticed that Egnor was just a little too far over the top.

As the Panda’s Thumb reveals, those wacky fellows at the DI have carefully set us up with a well-built-up foundation for an April Fools prank, establishing Egnor as a believer in ideas so outrageously inane that not even Casey Luskin could possibly have fallen for it. I blush to admit that I did think it was possible a well-trained surgeon might hold notions as foolish as those expressed by the clownish Egnor persona. It just goes to show that the line between creationist parody and creationist reality is drawn awfully fine.

Now that the trick has been played, though, I do hope the Discovery Institute goes back through Egnor’s postings that were put up to establish his fake creationist bona fides, and edits them or adds disclaimers. There’s a lot of material he’s put up in the last month that’s going to have to be labeled with big bold THIS IS A JOKE! stickers, lest others also be fooled into thinking the DI supports that kind of blatantly backwards old-school creationism.

How not to teach biology

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote about that creationist teacher who was fired in Sisters, Oregon — Kris Helphinstine had been showing his freshman biology class some PowerPoint presentations designed to cast doubt on biology, rather than to inform the students about the facts and evidence. Now a Bend newspaper has given a few more details of the grounds for firing, and most entertaining of all, has put up copies of the PowerPoint presentations! Aficionados of both bad creationism and bad PowerPoint will savor these.

[Read more…]