Saturday, May 06, 2006

Creationist Quote Mining...Again

Afarensis has already corrected Intelligent Design advocate Luskin's errors on the meagerness of the human fossil record directly here and with great posts on just how much information you can get from fragmentary bones here, and here and with links to actual, bona-fide, peer-reviewed articles on the subject here and here. Luskin used quotes out of book review to give the impression that hominid fossil discoveries are limited to what could be held on a good sized table. Now it seems, as we all coud have guessed, that Luskin engaged in the typical creationist tactic of pulling quotes out of context to support your position. I bring this up only because we just discussed the early hominid record in my Anthropology 1 class and the students should be able log in here and see just why Luskin is wrong about the fossil hominid record given the great posts at Afarensis and our discussions in class. But I also wanted to ask a couple of questions. Luskin says the following about the fossil record and paleontologists:

This is especially poignant when one considers that their hypotheses are based upon little evidence...

So, advocates of intelligent design, a) what specific hypotheses has ID developed to test?; and b) what size tables are currently needed to hold data generated by ID? (cafeteria, picnic, Barbie doll house, what?)...

2 comments:

CFeagans said...

I can see why the blog at CSC doesn't allow comments from readers.

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