Comment

Ben Stein Withdraws As UVM Commencement Speaker

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Hhar2/05/2009 12:14:24 pm PST
If his biology is weak, I don’t expect much from his criticisms of Dawkins either, whose biology is anything but weak.

When Dawkins starts with memetics, he is no longer in the realm of biology, and Stove is very effective in that realm, and in the analysis of Dawkins’ language, I think he is spot on.

Looking at the comments on Amazon, “Darwinian Fairy Tales” appears to be an ID’ers wet dream. Anything that attacks Darwin with that sort of language is bound to be.


Yes, we can’t ridicule Darwin and Malthus. Good heavens.

Stove in no way endorses anything like ID or creationism. Here is a case where a man of unimpeachable agnostic credentials, who in no way favors pseudoscience or religion, is distrusted because he is attacking a sacred cow, and attacking it out of the philosopher’s duty to dismantle a bad idea.

Can’t you point me to a more credible source, because this doesn’t look it’s worth wasting my time on.

If you are too prejudiced and insecure to handle a little cutting language, try Ruse’s book “The Evolution Creation Struggle”. I must warn you though: Ruse is one of those agnostic/creationist/pathological liars I hear about who think that evolution seems to be a lot like a religion to some of its proponents.

Why do you introduce the idea of Darwin’s being a hypocrite? Do you think he was?


You introduced Darwin’s (putative) faults. I don’t care about them, nor even if they exist. They seem pretty much irrelevant to me. I can’t say that they ARE completely irrelevant, because I am not a deep scholar of history, but they do seem irrelevant, if they exist. YOU brought them up, now you are asking me about them as though I had some hidden motive. If you stopped with the paranoid notion that I am somehow a super stealthy creationist shill, you would see how silly this part of the exchange is.

There is no equivalence between the debate over memes and the ID fiasco.


Hey, half baked shonky pseudoscience is half baked shonky pseudoscience. Don’t care who its from, or who agrees with it. You seem to be compounding a genetic fallacy with an argument from authority and an argument from popularity. Me, I’m just looking at the arguments.

Behe, like the rest of the ID movement, has been conclusively shown to be wrong, repeatedly, yet he persists with this nonsense.

Has it ever occurred to you that he can be dogmatically attached to his pet theory, for (say) religious reasons? Of course it has. Well, people will not always be very rational when they start seeing a vast religious significance in something. It can be a species of dishonesty, to be sure, but it doesn’t mean that he will out and out lie about his scientific and religious ideas. In fact, everything he does points to this aspect of his life. He keeps saying: He thinks the designer is his deity, and that he’s a catholic. Why not just look at him that way? A religious crank, trying to reconcile diverging ideas and having difficulty with it. That doesn’t make him a creationist.

Let’s try for the sake of argument to be generous to him. Even if as you claim he really believes for his own part that ID is science of sorts, he must be long aware that the people with whom he is deeply connected in this and whose books he has co-authored have a blatantly religious agenda. He must have read the wedge document by now.(LOL) His failure to distance himself from them, and his continuing to go along with this nonsense screams his dishonesty and mendacity from the highest tower.

He agrees with them. Why should he distance himself from them? So that the people who scream “Liar” all day and demean him should stop? A man of any worth wouldn’t stoop to that. For shame. And Dawkins? He calls himself an educator of science, and he is nothing more than an antireligious bigot who finds science a handy stick to beat religionists with. If you think not, that speaks for itself.