Take a listen to this delightful debate between biologist P. Z. Myers and Geoffrey Simmons, a fellow of the Discovery Institute.
Myers absolutely destroyed Simmons and demonstrated effectively that Simmons knows virtually nothing about the subjects he was pontificating about. When Simmons claimed that there were no transitional whale fossils, Myers trotted out three or four names of transitional fossils that Simmons couldn't even recognize. (Even I, a biological neophyte, knew about Pakicetus.) Simmons was reduced to spluttering that he had gotten his information from a recent issue of Scientific American. It's good to see yet another Dishonesty Institute fellow exposed as an ignoramus.
Simmons' entire argument in favor of intelligent design was (paraphrasing) 'look at how complicated organisms are; that could not happen by chance'. Of course, like a typical creationist, he gave no metric to measure complexity, and he offered no proof that mutation and natural selection can't generate complexity. We know that they can. Maybe Simmons is actually something even worse than an ignoramus.
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4 comments:
That's just like ID people, isn't it? "Send me the citations for all your claims!" Perhaps one should research this stuff before one writes two books on it and debates publicly about it.
*sigh*
While I thought PZ got off to a terrible start, overall he was far more credible than Simmons. Not to descend into ad hom. attacks, but Simmons sounded a lot like any other conspiracy theorist: "They won't allow us to present the evidence against them." Reverse inquisition? Give me a break.
I scared my slumbering cat shouting an exasperated "what???" when Simmons went off on evolution as "just a theory". This guy's a doctor? Published author? Senior Fellow at DI? And he resorts to that? Wow. Let him perch himself on a bridge and start blithering on about the theory of gravity...
What an ignoramus!
I have long thought that the difficulties we humans have with childbirth shows rather bad design. As Dr Robert Winston described it, the right angled turn the baby must negotiate is rather like getting your foot into a Wellington boot. (don't know what USAnians call it.)
Excellent Post!
By the way, I have a website that debunks creationism, you should check it out:
http://aigbusted.com
-Ryan
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