This would be side-splittingly hilarious if it wasn’t so evil. A digg-er spotted this scan of a restaurant children’s menu:
Front
Back
Alongside the cheeseburgers and corndogs is a list of “DiNoSaUr FuN fAcTs”! These include:
“The most up to date scientific information shows that dinosaurs did not live millions of years ago, they lived with man. There are still some around today.”
“There have been recent expeditions into the Congo swamp where some apatosaurs still live!”
“Scientists have determined that the Loch Ness Monster is probably a dinosaur.”
and my favourite:
“Scientists have theorised that the T-rex could probably breathe fire!”
The “facts” have been attributed to the site drdino.com, but they sound more like a stoned-out mishmash of “Believe It Or Not” and “Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real”.
Here’s hoping the kids are too smart to fall for it.
Filed under: Science, creationists/ID, obstreperation, religion
If I never go to Long Island then I never have to worry about some unfortunate accident bringing me or someone I love under the knife of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who is a professor of neurosurgery and paediatrics at State University New York (Stony Brook), and who apparently doesn’t accept that the mind arises from the physiological properties of the brain.
Lest someone accuse me of oversimplifying Egnor’s dumbarsery with my summary above, I can’t see any other way to describe his argument: he’s reifying “altruism” as a concrete concept separate from observable altruistic actions taken by a thinking being, and then arguing that if we can’t point to the place in the brain where altruism is situated then something magical happens and then the creationists win. This essentially comes down to arguing that mind is entirely separate from our physical bodies and not actually dependent upon the physiology of the brain.
Yeah, I’d so want him cutting into my grey matter. Not.
I don’t understand how someone like this functions without collapsing under the weight of the cognitive dissonance they have to studiously ignore as they go about their professional day.
More Egnorance at the Panda’s Thumb.
Filed under: creationists/ID, medicine, skeptics
Some mob of creationists out of Minnesota are putting up billboards around various other states challenging evolutionary theory with the slogan “Are They Making a Monkey out of You?”.
Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education -which has as its motto “Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools” – also took exception with the Who Is Your Creator campaign.
“Contrary to what the group claims, evolution is a central and unifying principle of the biological sciences, accepted by the scientific community on the basis of overwhelming evidence – for which garish billboards are not a valid substitute,” Branch told Cybercast News Service on Wednesday.
“By the way, the billboard captures the scientific illiteracy of Who Is Your Creator nicely,” he added. “That’s an ape in the last panel, not a monkey.”
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Filed under: Science, creationists/ID
April 23, 2007 • 10:36 am
This is all over the science blogs at the moment: how to present science convincingly to the public in an atmosphere of anti-science media sensationalism. It’s got a lot of scientists very agitated indeed.
The debate is mostly US-centric, but there’s no reason for the science-literate elsewhere to rest on our laurels: anti-intellectualism and partisan attacks on science findings that don’t fit particular ideological agenda are on the rise throughout the world, the big drivers being climate change/pollutant effects vs economic growth and evolution vs creationism. Lots of politicking on all sides.
The master of the blog-round-up, Coturnix, has put up a huge collection of links to articles/blogs discussing the issue of framing science. Fascinating and disturbing stuff.
Filed under: Politics, Science, creationists/ID, skeptics
Anti-evolutionists often make the claim that Darwin was racist as if, even were the accusation true (we’ll get to its falseness shortly), that a racist stance would somehow invalidate his scientific discoveries. These claims have repeatedly been shown to be incorrect characterisations, generally involving selective quoting (and editing) of Darwin’s writings out of context, a practice referred to as quote mining.
Over at Pharyngula, regular commenter Ed Darrell made a comment on one of PZ’s threads about creationist quotemining, and PZ reposted it in full at this post, also called Was Darwin a racist?
Darrell provides 6 punchy numbered paragraphs that debunk the core of this myth/slur against Darwin – well worth a read, even for those of us who’ve seen this debunked before. Anyhoo, the more links to this excellent debunking, the more likely it is that people searching for information about this claim will find the debunking, thus this post.
For anyone interested in further examples of creationist quote-mining, check out the Talk Origins Quote Mine Project.
(Yes, I know I’ve spelt quotemining three different ways. That’s because all three are common. Sheesh, the things I do for search engines.)
Filed under: creationists/ID, urban legends, vitriol
February 23, 2007 • 12:05 am
February 16, 2007 • 6:03 pm
Last month, one of my “favourite” creationist kooks, “Dr” Kent Hovind (also known as Dr Dino) has finally had his lies and arrogance over many years catch up with him: he’s been sentenced to 10 years in prison for various tax offenses.
See, Hovind argued that not only did the church he founded not have to pay taxes (fair enough, and legal) but that his “evangelical ministry” organisation to promote creationism was also exempt from paying taxes, and as the president of the church and ministry he did not have to pay any personal income tax either (not legal), nor did he have to put aside the withholding-tax portion of the income of ministry organisation employees, even denying that they were really employees at all (very not legal): in other words, as a religious leader he was exempt from all tax laws, not just the ones applying to property held by the church.
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Filed under: creationists/ID, ethics, law
August 30, 2006 • 7:56 am
Deltoid takes a few more whacks at his favourite pinata, Tim Blair. Tim Lambert channels Monty Python’s Spam sketch in response to Blair asking his fanboys whyowhy couldn’t ABC science wonk Robyn Williams write a book on the flaws in fundamentalist Islam instead of on the flaws of Intelligent Design “theory”?
Indeed, to get all subeditorly as Blair so likes to do (inserted obligatory cliches start here in bold), what unmitigated gall from Williams, writing about anything other than The Greatest Threat to Western Civilisation Evah(TM).
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Filed under: creationists/ID, islamophobia, war
