Friday, April 03, 2009

Your regular Denyseitude.


Canada's best-known scientifically illiterate IDiot expounds anti-intellectually:

From the "More stuff we know that ain't so" files: Nobelist Tinbergen

Oh, man ... when Denyse promises to talk about "stuff we know that ain't so," you just know this is going to be good. Denyse quotes:

Nobel prizewinner took short cuts to show that the way gulls feed is instinctive...

One of the most famous experiments in biology isn't the solid piece of work it's usually portrayed as, say Dutch researchers who have replicated the study. Instead, it's more like an anecdote that became slightly more legendary each time its author retold the story.

The work in question was done in 1947 by the Dutch researcher Niko Tinbergen on the begging behaviour of herring-gull chicks. At the time, the dominant idea in animal behaviour was that learning was all-important. Tinbergen argued that animals come into the world with instincts already adapted to their environments...

"It'd be easy to be nasty — if you wanted to be negative and critical, you could do a fair amount of damage to Tinbergen's reputation," agrees ecologist Hans Kruuk, Tinbergen's biographer and former student. "He'd often simplify and gloss over complications: if these publications appeared now, they'd get hammered, but the ideas are lovely."

Whereupon we have Denyse's big finish:

Yeah, like Darwinism. Lovely for certain people ...

If the day ever comes that I get to the bottom of all the stuff we know that ain't so, I could start learning some real science at last. But, from what I can tell at present, that'll be the day ...

Um, yes, Denyse ... the fact that a researcher into herring gull chick begging behaviour 60 years ago might have cut a few corners in his research clearly demonstrates that all of mainstream science is a massive, monumental, horrific fraud. I can't imagine any other conclusion.

And I will politely refrain from mocking the idea of Denyse O'Leary, of all people, whining about "stuff we know that ain't so." That's way too easy a target.

5 comments:

Gube said...

Especially when you consider that ID is all about cutting corners on a huge scale.
"All this stuff is here because.... (cut cut cut cut cut cut)...God made it!"

Mike said...

Just when I think I am amazed at that woman's idiocy, you go and find something even stupider.

I have to wonder how she manages to even dress herself in the morning...

Mike said...

This used to be amusing. Now I just find it painful that people stubbornly deny this one scientific theory simply because of what a quaint myth book says.

Balbulican said...

I'm still waiting for the peer reviewed replication of that water into wine thing.

Niles said...

Doesn't she just prove that science works as it should? That the 'corner cutting' was caught by...other scientists checking to see if it was true?

That, rather than take the original position on *faith*, they attempted replication and questioned the results, willing to change ideas to the facts, not facts to the idea. The method by which Darwin's conclusions have stuck around so long in evolutionary theory.

The lady needs to start shaving with Occam's razor.