April 18, 2006

Pianka postscript - Dembski's descent

In all of the dust-up over Eric Pianka and Forrest Mims little has settled out such that we know anything for certain. What it seems to me we can fairly sure of is that,

1. - Pianka, while being admirably willing to discuss difficult topics that others blithely brush aside as manifestly inappropriate, is positioned on ecology's philosophical fringe and cannot be taken as representative of the scientific community (if in fact he can be taken seriously at all).

2. - Mims, along with a large flock of creationist chicks following and pecking at the ground behind him managed to make a lot of idiotic and overblown statements in their zeal to impugn the "atheist" scientific community.

But there is one individual who, from my reading, has managed to escape much-deserved scorn (although, to be fair, he did receive a lot of appropriate derision for scooting down the street on his tricycle to tell the FBI about big, bad neighbor Mr. Pianka and his plot to take over the world).

Of course I'm talking about William Dembski and this extraordinary remark which entitles his blog entry touching off the whole affair,
"Would “Dr. Doom” be conceivable apart from evolutionary theory?"
This scurrilous and sophomoric attempt at guilt (and misanthropy) by association would be laughable were it not so pathetic, and is diagnostic of ongoing decay in intellectual integrity on the part of the accuser. Dembski, in aligning his perspective with those cretins who charge "Darwinism" with producing all of the worlds ills from Hitler to pedophilia seems determined to throw away any tatters of respectability he might have left.

His decline parallels that of ID. Not so surprising considering that at one point he was their standard bearer.

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