Casey's still beavering away

In other news, dog bites man.

DS said: In other news, dog bites man.

I will take this as a correction of a prior belief of mine that creationists tend to stay away from biogeography. I see now that even this, which among the starkest indicators of speciation, can be misrepresented by creationists.

Casey Luskin is "well-known"? I think that's questionable.
Bonus points for the photo of the loon though.

@Mark Sturtevant:

Biblical creationists will either avoid it or "explain" it with "Flood Geology," but the DI will take anything they can get away with to promote unreasonable doubt. In this case Luskin admits 5 lines of evidence, then pretends that if he can show that one is "weak," even by very selective omission, that you are free to believe any other origins story you want - global flood, young earth, old earth, flat earth, aliens, whatever. Anything but "Darwinism."

@MaskedQuoll

Luskin is well-known to critics, but we're a tiny subset of the population. Few people, whether or not they accept evolution, can't name one DI person, though Medved's radio show is slowly changing that. But the DI, through well-"designed" spreading of memes, has been astonishingly successful at training the public to see the "debate" only in terms of "weaknesses" of "Darwinism," and of course how acceptance of it is, in their paranoid fantasy, the root of all evil. While diverting all attention away from the real weaknesses - in the mutually-contradictory origins stories that they calculate that most of their scammed audiences will infer by default.

...few people can name...

What I find interesting is that Casey Luskin - well-known to pal around with Ark-believing YECs who implicitly hold that koalas left Australia, somehow crossed the Indian ocean, travelled to the Middle East to get on a boat and then returned to repopulate the continent - sees fit to chuckle at the possibility of monkeys rafting between Africa and America tens of millions of years ago.

Which is it, Casey? Rafting ok for koalas but not monkeys? Or are you too busy shuffling the goalposts around to notice that you've scored an own goal?

Not to mention that monkeys are generally more mobile, and definitely more flexible in their diet than are koalas...

(Monkeys don't have to gum their food, either!)

Henry

Harry Probert said: What I find interesting is that Casey Luskin - well-known to pal around with Ark-believing YECs who implicitly hold that koalas left Australia, somehow crossed the Indian ocean, travelled to the Middle East to get on a boat and then returned to repopulate the continent - sees fit to chuckle at the possibility of monkeys rafting between Africa and America tens of millions of years ago. Which is it, Casey? Rafting ok for koalas but not monkeys? Or are you too busy shuffling the goalposts around to notice that you've scored an own goal?

harold said: But what you have to remember is that all that matters is contradicting science. You have to understand, ID/creationism is part of the post-modern religious arm of an authoritarian reactionary ideology. The priority of ID/creationism is, as they themselves state, is to "destroy Darwinism". Anything any "Darwinist" said must be wrong and must be contradicted. That is pretty much the only consistency. No positive claims, certainly no effort to arrive at a consensus. It's been conjectured that if they could get rid of "Darwinism" and the many other things that they consider themselves unified against, they'd turn on each other. Possibly. At any rate, Casey Luskin's current job is to contradict anything in a mainstream biomedical science paper, while not directly contradicting any possible version of fundamentalist creationism. It's not about defending ID/creationism, it's about contradicting science.