Recently in Humor Category

Anne Minard of National Geographic News writes on July 9^th

The discovery of a missing link in the evolution of bizarre flatfishes—each of which has both eyes on the same side of its head—could give intelligent design advocates a sinking feeling.

CT scans of 50-million-year-old fossils have revealed an intermediate species between primitive flatfishes (with eyes on both sides of their heads) and the modern, lopsided versions, which include sole, flounder, and halibut.

So the change happened gradually, in a way consistent with evolution via natural selection—not suddenly, as researchers once had little choice but to believe, the authors of the new study say. … Though known for their odd eye arrangement, no flatfish start life that way. Each is born symmetrical, with one eye on each side of its skull.

As a flatfish develops from a larva to a juvenile, one eye migrates up and over the top of the head, coming to rest in its adult position on the opposite side of the skull. … Palmer added that the new work is “a fantastic paper” that helps resolve a mystery “that’s bedeviled evolutionary biologists for more than a century.

“It’s really been a major, major puzzle to evolutionary biologists.”

As expected, the Magisterium of Intelligent Design was quick to condemn the finding as simply floundering around, while the Institute of Creation Research has a turbot-charged attack on the finding, pointing out that flatfish are sole-ly members of the flatfish ‘kind,’ and putting National Geographic in it’s plaice.

MSNBC has a list of the 10 worst jobs in science as decided by their crack research team.

I’m surprised that Caged Animal Masturbator didn’t make the list, but Oceanographer did.

A friend from grad school sent me the following clip from his home town.

Warning: some strong language and stereotypes.

Sneer Review reports on an in-depth investigation into “The Wedgwood Document” which outlines how the teapot from the famous atheist Bertrand Russell was acquired to undermine the recent successes from atheists.

Remember that Bertrand Russell had stated

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion .….….….. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

This simple statement set in motion a series of events which will reverberate in history.

Negativism is the philosophy that no knowledge is secure; hence we know nothing. It was developed in the mid-1800’s by the French sociologist Count Juillet. In the 1930’s, following the publication of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, the Viennese philosopher Sir Karl (Pop) Korn identified psychoanalysis as a dangerous pseudoscience that relied on ad-hoc hypotheses to prop up its failed theories. Building on his work with psychoanalysis, Korn recognized that any scientific theory whatsoever could be propped up with ad-hoc hypotheses and concluded that all of science is a dangerous pseudoscience. In one fell swoop, Korn solved the demarcation problem, saying, “If we know nothing, then it doesn’t matter whether we call it science or not.”

Korn’s work was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and renamed postmodernism. Postmodernism taught that all knowledge was provisional, and therefore that no knowledge was privileged over other knowledge. In essence, you could believe anything you wanted to. But Korn went much farther and argued that you have no intellectual right to believe anything. The work of Korn and the postmodernists has since been appropriated by intelligent-design creationists, who claim that evolution is not a theory, because there is no such thing as a theory.

Our flunked ‘rebel’ at the appropriately named movie ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ has made some claims which he believes are relevant to understanding the science and fact of evolution. Since our flunked ‘rebel has obviously missed many of the relevant science and education classes during his many ‘days off’ , we would not want his friends to be similarly affected. Even though exposing the flaws in our juvenile ‘rebel’ is as easy as taking Ben Stein’s money, the results can serve as a fair warning to other ‘rebels’ ready to imitate our flunked ‘rebel’.

Using his questions and assertions, we can explore the disastrous effects of Intelligent Design (ID) on scientific education as we observe him mindlessly and purposefully parroting the ID argument from personal ignorance and incredulity (perhaps less rebelling and more studying would have helped):

Our Flunked Rebel Wrote:

Each of these discoveries has, in one way or another, led a growing number of scientists to reconsider the simple view espoused by Darwin that life is a random, purposeless, chance occurrence. The universe, and life itself – is turning out to be far more complex and mysterious – than Darwin could possibly have imagined.

Two phrases, and yet each phrase is flawed in a variety of ways.

Make it viral.

A hilarious comic featuring PZ.

For the last couple of years, New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) has been hosting the Science Watch radio show on Saturdays at 2:00 PM on AM 1350, in the Albuquerque area. The hosts are PT’s Dave Thomas, plus Kim Johnson, Marshall Berman, and Kim’s son Jesse, regarded by New Mexico’s ID community as the fearsome “Darwinist Swat Team.”

Before now, only people in the Albuquerque metro area could listen to the show, and then, only on Saturdays at 2. But now, thanks to the power of the Internets, anyone in the world can listen in, at any time! NMSR and CESE have joined to create a radio podcast website (built by Science Watch co-host Marshall Berman’s son Brandon!) for anyone, anywhere, to listen to the most recent shows, as well as the Best of Science Watch episodes. Topics range from Intelligent Design Creationism to homeopathy, UFOs, and a lot of good mainstream science as well as “fake” science.

The podcast website is: http://web.mac.com/nmsrorg/iWeb/sci[…]ch/Home.html.

Check out The Feb. 2^nd, 2008 one-hour interview with Prof. Ken Miller of Brown, on his involvement in the Dover PA “ID Trial.” Or, listen to the November 17^th, 2007 post-NOVA Dover show with Prof. Barbara Forrest, in the “Best of” section.

If you have technical problems, please e-mail Science Watch staff from our radio updates page.

Special Note for Trolls: remember, these are podcasts, and are no longer live. If you call the number given during the Trivia Segment, be advised that no one will answer the phone.

If reading is more suitable to you, why not check out Marshall Berman’s Feb. 13^th Darwin Day Talk to NMSR, “The ‘Intelligently Designed’ Attack on Science and Society.”

Over the the “After the Bar Closes” forum, “Amadan” has a timely update of a favorite bit of nonsense. I’ve added URLs here and there to the original.

In anticipation of a special anniversary tomorrow…

I Am the Very Model of a C-Design-Proponentsist

[Note: Malicious allegations have been made that this work somehow plagiarises something by W.S. Gilbert. Nothing could be further from the truth and I emphatically state that I have nothing to apologise for. And I’m really sorry. Comments on this subject are now closed.]

I am the very model of a c-design-proponentsist
The diametric opposite of all that is materialist
My engineering cert allows me call myself a scientist -
We won’t discuss those classes in Biology I might have missed

Continue reading at the Austringer

Well, if Behe can call Miller an intelligent design proponent because of his Christian faith, showing that ID really is all about religion, then it seems that it is not more than fair that we call Behe an evolutionist for his acceptance of common descent, and his somewhat self-contradictory claim that after God set it all in motion, evolution could very well have played itself out via purely natural processes of regularity and chance. But if that is the case then ID, which is based on eliminating such natural processes to infer design seems to have lost its claim to it.

Miller Wrote:

Even more confusing is Behe’s attempt to meld this version of design with science. He tries to argue that his God need not intervene to produce change because “the purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws.” Really? Bebe has just provided two hundred pages of passionate arguments that natural laws are not sufficient to explain evolutionary change, only to turn around and claim that they are. His core argument is that the natural laws that produce mutations cannot generate the diversity needed to explain evolutionary change. Then he insists that the unfolding of our universe is governed entirely by those same natural laws. And Behe does nothing to dispel this self-contradiction.

Kenneth R. Miller “Faulty Design” Review of “The Edge of Evolution” CommonWeal, October 12, 2007

Last January Prof. Steve Steve, Bora, and I met Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC) at the NC Science Blogging Conference. We took the opportunity to explain to him NCSE’s Project Steve and our Project Steve Steve.

Rep. Miller is the Chairman of the House Science and Technology subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation and promised us that he’d ask science skeptics that testify before him “How many are named Steve?”.

Today, he did it:

Do you all know any climate skeptics … named Steve?

During a hearing about the impact of global warming on the arctic he unexpectedly asked the panel if they knew any Steves that agreed with them. The global warming skeptics couldn’t name any off the top of their head, while the global warming researchers named two.

Miller also gave the Panda’s Thumb a plug for good measure.

The discussion about Steves begins a bit before one hour, fourteen minutes (1:14) in the RealPlayer clip of the hearings. It continues for a few minutes.

I’d love to see the clip on youtube if anyone can extract it. If not, a transcript would be nice. (A lot of people don’t like dealing with RealPlayer.)

I guess that Miller had a good time bringing up Project Steve because he directed his staff to email us about it.

Hopefully, more politicians will follow his example when dealing with “expert” testimony.

Irony alert:

William Dembski Wrote:

People sometimes ask me why I encourage posts on global warming here at UD, whose focus is ID. The reason is that global warming exhibits many of the same abuses of science that we see in the ID debate. Science has become a wonderful tool for social control. This role of science in modern secular culture is destructive and needs to be broken.

Can anyone say Wedge

Ignorance begets ignorance.

Prof. Steve Steve’s buddy breaks out:

In more news of the weird concerning the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum, it seems that the actor who played “Adam” in one of the museum’s videos has had other scantily-clad appearances. Eric Linden is the owner and sometime star of a pornographic website, “Bedroom Acrobat”. Linden’s reply when asked about this was:

Linden tells the AP that he is no longer affiliated with the site.

A check of “whois”, though, says otherwise:

San Francisco’s adoption campaign for older children is featuring “Intelligent Design”, and they have this great “Heather Has Two Mommies” sort of poster.

(Original post at the Austringer)

In another observation of pop culture’s war on ID, I bring you a remark by Wired:

Apparently feeling pressured by Tux, supporters of Darwin, an open-source version of the Mac OS, decided they needed their own mascot. The result is Hexley, a curious platypus who in some images is portrayed with horns and a pitchfork – enough evidence for several intelligent design theorists to offer him as proof of the satanic origins of evolutionary biology.

This is additionally funny to us because we run FreeBSD, whose mascot, Beastie, inspired Hexley.

Over the weekend, another “Egnor” post appeared on the Discovery Institute blog. This one addresses a post I wrote two weeks ago discussing the “Framing Science” article. In his “response,” “Egnor” manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the “Michael Egnor” articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes.

(For the record, I’m neither a “prominent Darwinist” nor a “prominent scientist.” Also, there are only two possible ways that someone could claim that “find a way to get people who aren’t interested in the science behind an issue to care about the issue itself” is the same thing as “recruit people who don’t care about science to the cause of Darwinism.” The author either has a level of respect for honesty that falls below the Roveian, or he has the reading comprehension skills of a repeatedly concussed chipmunk. In either case, I have real problems believing that it’s coming from a reportedly well-respected neurosurgeon.)

It’s been fun while it lasted, but the game’s over now. Would whoever is really writing this stuff please take this opportunity to own up to it? Please? Come on, I know it’s got to be someone who is a regular here.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

Some recent science journalism from The Onion: Unemployed Scientists Prove Dog Likes Beer

Well, it was nice while it lasted, which was far longer than we projected; the SUCKERED post was indeed a prank on you, dear PT readers, pretending to reveal a Discovery Institute prank at our expenses.

We’re not sure whether this is a success or a failure on our part. On one hand, our prank was better executed than the ones at Uncommon Descent and Telic Thoughts and received lots of praise. On the other hand, many of our readers need to work on their critical observation skills. Maybe we can blame it on our good reputation; our readers trust the quality of our work.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been possible without the DI acolytes providing us with seemingly inexhaustible involuntary parodies themselves. Indeed, just as our prank went online, Michael Egnor himself out-pranked us with a real post containing this philosophy gem:

Materialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn’t exist (it’s neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn’t exist, then materialism can’t be true.

Dude, that’s like, so deep.—Seriously, how can you beat these guys?

Anyway, it all started with us honestly wondering, after Egnor appeared on the scene a few weeks ago, whether he was actually real.—The sweet onomatopoeia of his name and style was just too good to be true.—Alas, it quickly became clear he was a real person and surgeon. As April 1^st approached, we considered writing a post claiming that he was, in fact, a prank, but that seemed too direct and obvious. So the LeCarréan double-twist was conceived of trying to fool you pretending that the DI fooled us.

Andrea wrote the SUCKERED post, Reed made up the faux “Evolution Views & News” page with some pompous-sounding rewrites by Douglas, and the rest of the PT crew provided the usual slew of commentary, suggestions, nagging, doubt, and advice. The sciencebloggers amplified the effect by feigning dismay on their sites.

We thought most of you guys would see right through it, but it worked so well that it even fooled PT contributor PvM, who needs to read his e-mail more often. I guess years of contending with the absurdities emanating from the DI can make anyone confused between what is real and what is farce . …

[BOW]

OK, well, we have to admit it, this time our adversaries at the Discovery Institute completely fooled us. For several weeks many of us have been involved in a back-and-forth with Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook who, ironically, displayed an amazingly thick skull about anything concerning evolutionary biology. Not only did he deny the obvious facts of evolution and its importance for medicine and biology, but he kept contradicting himself, repeating empty statements, ignoring the evidence and demanding answers to questions which had been already answered many times over. It was maddening to think that a person with a high-level degree and an academic position in a major educational and research institution could be such a know-nothing fool.

Well, he isn’t, apparently. It was all a ruse by ID advocates to see how far they could pull our chain, and lead us to take his progressively more outlandish statements for real. The Discovery Institute Media Complaint Division site has now come clean, admitting to the prank and giving us a well-deserved raspberry. We should have known better: imagine having a guy who denies the obvious homology of our neural system to that of other vertebrates in charge of slicing off chunks of it in an operating room! Or someone who doesn’t believe bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics dealing with the risk of post-operatory infections.

While we are ashamed to have fallen for such a crass caricature of a “dumb Creationist”, and apologize to our readers for the time wasted in countering his ludicrous arguments, we applaud the cleverness of the ID folks involved in this April Fool’s joke and their effortless impersonation of such a character.

How stupid of us not to have thought of that!

The PT Crew

April 2^nd Update:

The above post is part of our April Fools’ prank on you, our readers. The Discovery Institute did not admit that Egnor was pranking us. That faux page was part of our ruse. Read all the comments in this thread to see who fell for it and who didn’t. Also check out this post, where we come clean.

Prof. Steve Steve has a new job: producing raw material for paper production.

Researchers at a giant panda reserve in southern China are looking for paper mills to process their surplus of fiber-rich panda excrement into high quality paper.

Liao Jun, a researcher at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Base in Sichuan province, said the idea came to them after a visit to Thailand last year where they found paper made from elephant dung. They thought panda poop would produce an even finer quality paper, he said.

I can see it now: Prof. Steve Steve’s Old Fashioned Panda-Processed Paper.

I’m not sure what they are, but there is apparently a site offering free hovinds: FreeHovind.Com. Can anybody tell me what a hovind is before I order a free one?

As a followup to my recent fisking of Egnor, I wanted everyone to know that T-shirts are still available. (Do an in-article find for “ambulocetus” and check out the links.) I just bought mine today and it should arrive by the end of the week.

Get your T-shirts here.

Maybe I’m the only one who thinks this is totally awesome way to show your support for evolution, seem ostensibly athletic, and needle Behe* all at the same time, but that’s okay. (I don’t get out much.)

BCH

*To understand the reference, Behe liked to drop the lack of whale transitional fossils (search for “whale” in that link) as a problem for evolution wink wink nudge nudge must have been ID. That was before a dude named Thewissen, who later became head football coach at NEOUCOM got a grant to dig in the Indus Valley. (Behe doesn’t mention whale evolution any more, for some reason. But you should.)

Make sure you don’t miss this YouTube video on a visit to the now-closed Dinosaur Adventure Land, home base of convicted felon Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind. It’s not exactly film festival material, but there are a lot of interesting tidbits.

HT: Pharyngula

An interesting phenomenon I have observed lately is that now that many Kent Hovind videos are on YouTube, a whole new group of people is realizing just what a wacky dude he was, and just how wacky it is that he is probably the most-known and quoted authority among the creationist public. Check out the Hovind-alia on YouTube (if you have an afternoon to kill…the stuff is strangely addictive).

I have another observation in pop culture’s war on ignorance. (Okay, that is an oxymoron.)

On tonight’s Family Guy, “Airpot ‘07”, Peter attends “The Redneck Comedy Tour” and decides that he wants to become a redneck. So he buys a pick-up truck, puts the couch on the front lawn, and hits on his daughter. Then he sits down with Brian to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Scene: Brian and Peter are on the couch watching TV. Peter is wearing cowboy boots, jeans, large brass belt buckle, flannel shirt, and a green John Deere cap.

TV Announcer: We now return to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos … edited for rednecks.

Sagan on TV (occasionally dubbed over by a redneck voice): I’m Carl Sagan. Just how old is our planet. Scientists believe its four b—hundreds and hundreds of years old—Scientists have determined that the universe was created by a—Goooooooood—Big Bang. If you look at the bones of a—Jesus–asaurus rex, it is clear by the use of carbon dating that—Mountain Dew is the best soda ever made.

Brian: Peter, do we have to watch this?

Peter: This is what rednecks watch, Brian.

Peter takes a can of chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and begins to dip.

Of course, carbon dating cannot be used on the fossils of a “Jesusasaurus rex”; other forms of radiometric dating with longer half-lifes have to be used.

Update: Below the fold, I’ve posted the scene from YouTube. Thanks Chris Hyland.

Over at the “ID is nothing but science, we really mean it” Uncommon Dissent blog, there’s an interesting little biblical discussion going on right now. In this case, DaveScot’s remarkable response to a comment on the After the Bar Closes discussion board does an amazing job at evoking that Ghostbusters kind of feel.

Read More (at The Questionable Authority):

On UcD, Bill Dembski provides a somewhat confusing commentary on the following picture from My Confined Space

WAD Wrote:

If the challenge below were met, would it be evidence for ID or for teleportation?

I guess teleportation is a purely natural process and God is of course equivalent with ID. Thank you Bill for a good laugh.

The email exchange between Dembski and Richard Dawkins continues. Dawkins just posted an email that Dembski sent to him in 2004 (2003 actually, referring to “early next year”, which would be 2004).

It sparked a memory that I had seen it before. So I asked around. It turns out that in late 2003 Dembski sent the following email to most of the people he is spamming right now. In response to this letter in the UK Guardian by Dawkins, Dembski emailed the following. It really…well, any comment would be superfluous.