Saturday, September 30, 2006

Only a Matter of Time

First off apologies, it has been a very long time since my last post, but I do have an excuse, 4 telescope proposals and a new website to work on. Expect a link any to it anyday.

Anyway back to the main point of this blog, bad science, and crackpot theories.

I read something this morning that has thoroughly saddened me. Check it out at the BBC here. The basic gist of it is some idiots have decided that because the US is having such fun with all this Intelligent Design bullshit perhaps we should have a bit over here too. They're using essentially exactly the same tactics as in the states, claiming that "many" scientists do not agree with Evolution and that this means there is some "controversy" over whether or not it is right. What crap.

If your really interested in "Truth in Science" look at their website here. It amazes me that people that lack the ability to think rationally can come up with such pretty websites, or devise clever misinterpretations to fool the unwary. Lets have a look at some of them shall we?

First the many scientists disagree with evolution bit that they all spout, where does this come from? Well from here. Well, well, well its run by the famous Discovery Institute, those honest brokers of knowledge and truth, or more accurately the most right wing Christian nuts you are ever likely to run into. Seeing this I think your probably doubtful about their "scientists" as I was, but lets look at the list of scientists that disagree with evolution, there are 600 of them. Here is where you can find the pdf of the list of scientists. If you look at it you may notice something I did, the vast majority of those "scientists" are people whose only qualification to be called such is a PhD, and in the vast majority of cases in a subject totally unrelated to biology. Most of them are probably bloody bankers now. Hmm this is really the best you can do guys? Out of many millions of PhDs in the world, you find 600, most of whom have no connection to the subject in question. Well done, slow hand clap all round. I think if you looked at this statistically they have probably succeeded in proving evolution the most widely accepted theory in history.

The rest of the Truth in Science is essentially the same old rubbish, find one tiny inconsequential problem that still isn't fully understood and claim that it disproves evolution. Just check out their section on the evidence for evolution, which is mostly just an attempt to mention problems, they never actually talk about the successes of evolution. Distort and Distract, distort and distract. I'd love to see them show us a peer reviewed paper which presents evidence for ID, yeah right.

3 comments: