Saturday Hodgepodge

The Panda’s Thumb crew decided to take her 4 chapters on evolution and dissect them, picking out some of the more absurd claims and showing, in great detail, why she’s wrong about them. Suffice to say that there are enough claims that are not just weak but stunningly dishonest and wide of the mark that this could take weeks to complete…

On the first claim, that there is no evidence for evolution, Myers correctly points to the scientific literature that contains hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of articles about various aspects of evolution. That represents the life’s work of tens of thousands of scientists, difficult and painstaking work that slowly and steadily adds to our understanding of evolution. Of course, Ann has it backwards. The issue is not whether there is evidence that supports evolution, but whether there is evidence that is explained by evolution. Theories, after all, are explanations for data…

The Coulter chapters get much, much worse. As Ian Musgrave notes, she repeats practically every old creationist canard in existence, including the claim that there are no transitional fossils. Again, why would an ID advocate deny the existence of transitional fossils if ID is genuinely consistent with guided common descent? One would expect there to be transitional fossils if that is true, just as we would expect them to be there is unguided common descent is true. The answer seems obvious to me: because they really don’t mean it when they say that ID is okay with common descent, despite the monumental evidence for it.

I’ve asked this before, but what is it about the relatives of people killed by terrorists that these wingnuts hate so much? Recall that Ann Coulter smeared the widows of 9/11 victims and that many righty bloggers smeared the father of Nick Berg, who was beheaded in Iraq. Their sin, of course, was that they criticized America and George Bush.

Let me put this as clearly as I can: To the likes of Hinderaker, the pain of those who lost loved ones to this war only matters to the extent that the bereaved allow their grief to be used to prop up the war effort and Bush himself. If the bereaved relatives don’t allow their grief to be used in this fashion, their sacrifice and loss no longer matter a whit—they’re not to be pitied or empathized with, but scorned and humiliated as brutally as possible. Despicable.