Update 13 August: Denyse O'Leary disses PTET (!!!1eleventyone!!!)
No-one embodies the intellectual, moral and spiritual vacuity of the "Intelligent Design" movement more than Denyse O'Leary.
The Canadian journalist's inability to process information contradicting her petty prejudices is legendary. A recent post at Uncommon Descent lays into what she terms Intelligent design and its enemies:
"Looking at the big picture over the past seven years (when I first started to take the intelligent design controversy seriously), one item stands out: The behaviour of the promoters of Darwinian evolution."For O'Leary, the problem is not that ID has produced no research, no science, and no substance... It isn't the rejection of "ID Theory" by the scientific establishment and even conservative religious scientists, nor its catastrophic court defeat at Dover... It isn't even that ID has failed utterly in its own terms and goals as set out in the Wedge strategy and elsewhere... It is that people have been mean in pointing these things out.
Incredibly, after seven years of writing on the topic, O'Leary still seems clueless about what "science, "research" or "evidence" actually mean.
After a scattershot paranoic attack on her "enemies", O'Leary promotes her latest column in Mens News Daily ("ranked in the top 75 most popular right of centrer websites for 2007"). This supposed defense of abstinence education for teenage girls links to an item in the Washington Post, which referenced various studies showing such schemes were ineffective.
But O'Leary makes no attempt to address these studies or the issues they discuss. Instead, her readers are treated to a rambling discourse on O'Leary's relationship with her own father and then a list of her previous articles on unrelated topics.
How this challenges the studies reported on the ineffectiveness of abstinence education is not explained. But then to O'Leary and her target audience, explanations are unnecessary - their opinions trump any evidence. "Conservative" is right, "Darwinism" is wrong, and reality is irrelevant. In another posting at Uncommon Descent O'Leary again links to another of her blogs, this time discussing The real reason why Darwinism is overwhelmingly confirmed - a tale for our times. Again O'Leary shows just how clueless seven years of taking the "controversy seriously" has left her: she still thinks that arguments about how evolution occurs are somehow magically evidence that it has not occurred... And that they are somehow miraculously evidence in favor of "Intelligent Design".
As a final irony, in yet another entry in yet another of her blogs, O'Leary reminds herself that the "Intelligent Design" ain't religion, no siree, lie is just a lot of hooey. Who would have known.
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3 comments:
Good stuff, my friend. I have a theory... February has been a banner month for Tardmining, because the cdesign proponentsists want to give us a nice present for Darwin's birthday. I swear, they're churning it out faster than any one person can keep up with.
btw, bpsdb.org should be up today. Are you going to sign up?
"For O'Leary, the problem is not that ID has produced no research, no science, and no substance... It isn't the rejection of "ID Theory" by the scientific establishment and even conservative religious scientists,..."
Which is always fascinating to me since ID simply cannot produce any credible scientific research at all since it is based on one hypothesis that cannot be proven on scientific grounds. The level of confusion for so many young science students this has created to me, is actually quite evil.
At best it's a piss poor recapitulation of Aristotle's unmoved mover argument which Aquinas and Avicenna pretty much summed up as well as will be accomplished. So it even devolves those arguments for something made of straw. In this way it's even bad for philosophy.
Oy Vey.
BTW - found your blog via Nick Norelli's and I dig it :-)
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