The Mad Scientist (Profile of PZ Myers, biologist, blogger, ID opponent)

[Dudley_DUright]

ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 24, ABOUT 500 PEOPLE squeezed into the lecture hall at the Tate Laboratory of Physics on the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. There were none of the usual Friday night attractions— no music, no beer, no sports. A celebrity of sorts had come to town. Dr. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, is best known for his 1996 bestseller Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. The book made Behe one of the leading voices of the intelligent design movement, and a hero to religious conservatives who have long yearned for credentialed scientists to take up their cause. At the time of his appearance at the U, Behe was just a few weeks removed from his star turn as a defense witness in the so-called Scopes Two trial in Pennsylvania—the highly publicized legal melodrama occasioned by a local school board's decision to include intelligent design in its high school science curriculum.

<snip>

By the time he finally published his assessment of the Behe lecture, Myers's palpable fatigue had given way to a feistier, more polemical air. Behe's arguments, Myers wrote, "exceeded my expectations of suckiness. It was an evening of phony rhetoric, smug self-aggrandizement, and utter vacuity—and the audience of complacent Christians ate it up. That part of the audience that consisted of atheists and competent scientists and, I presume, honest Christians found it appalling." After that, Myers dissected Behe's technical contentions in considerable detail before concluding as follows:

"Behe talked for an hour, and in all that time he didn't give one specific hypothesis, he didn't describe any evidence, and he didn't propose one single line of research that an ID-friendly scientist could follow. This was a completely empty talk, a hollow shell with a few buzzwords and fallacious analogies to make his cheerleaders happy. He's a fraud. I can't say that it was an entirely wasted evening, though. I learned that Intelligent Design creationism is still dead in the water, and that one of the few legitimately credentialed scientists working within the movement is still an empty babbler without a whisper of scientific support; the most amusing part of the talk was his opening line, when he gave a disclaimer that the provost of his university wanted him to say, that his views do not represent Lehigh University."

more...

http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1303/article13908....

[GAspnes]

1. great article

PZ Meyers' name sounded familiar but I didn't realize he taught here.

Good on him for hitting back at the PowerLine doofii.