I got a lot of pleasure from listening to Dr. PZ Myers completely rip this fellow from the dishonesty institute apart on a Christian radio show (Mp3 is at the link, it’s around ~30 megs or so). Particularly amusing was when Dr. Simmons managed to get caught with his pants down about his knowledge of whale transitionals. While I found it difficult to make out from the audio during the part about the whale transitionals, I believe that Dr. Simmons says something about no transitional fossil with a blow hole and Dr. Myers interjects immediately with some name, that I presume is exactly such a fossil. From listening to the audio, it’s pretty clear that Dr. Simmons manages to come off as completely clueless and gets pretty battered around by Dr. Myers. I had to admire Dr. Myers for sticking to his guns, particularly at the beginning where he was heavily critical of the stations decision to switch the debate topic around on him a bit.
Edit: On a search of Scientific American, because I got curious as to what Dr. Simmons had read (or most likely didn’t pay any attention to) I went searching for the article from Scientific American in question. After fruitlessly searching the back archives on Scientific American, I turned to pubmed for assistance in the matter and surprise surprise, I don’t think there was an article on Whale Evolution in Scientific American from 2007. The last article written on the topic as near as I can tell, is from 2005 and is Rooting the River Horse, in March 2005 by K. Wong. There is a bit of a gap in the time line from an article “six months ago” to 2005 as I’m sure Dr. Simmons may appreciate. Of course, it may be possible as I haven’t set up my proxy that the article may not be immediately present on the archives for Scientific American and that Pubmed may not be able to find it. Can anyone else find this article?
Incidentally, the search terms I used on pubmed were “Scientific American Whale Evolution” and then variations on that general theme.
I can’t comment on the SA article, but I have a few additional comments.
First, Simmons mentioned that he could provide a link to “all the facts you’d want to know” or some such about the Theory of ID. Not the “nuh uh” commentary it does criticizing evolution, but the actual, positive assertions it makes.
I didn’t notice him give any actual URL for such info. (ahem)
Also, I heard comments on The Non Prophets (www.NonProphetsRadio.com) about the debate. It was mentioned that a chat was happening in a Discovery Institute chatroom while the show was being broadcast live on radio (I dl’d the audio).
These were, largely at least, ID folks. Their conclusions seemed to be that Simmons was getting his ass handed to him by PZ. “It’d almost be better that this hadn’t happened at all”.
Well, the Discovery Institute couldn’t wave their arms (or pray) and make the debate go away. Actually, I guess it was a forum thread that was being added to in real time during the show.
What the Institute did, apparently, was to delete the whole thread.
But some unnamed net archiving site (like DejaNews) had already grabbed it, so it can be found out there somewhere.
The archiving was done by a forum user, Ceiling Cat at the antievolution.org boards. You can see the post including the various comments here:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=1274;st=24870#entry95440
There are 5 houses in five different colors
In each house lives a different nationality.
These 5 owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar and keep a certain pet.
No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, or drink the same beverage.
The CLUES:
The Brit lives in the Red house.
The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
The Dane Drinks tea.
The Green House is on the left of the White House.
The Green House’s owner drinks coffee.
The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
The man in the center house drinks milk.
The Norwegian lives in the first house.
The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
The German smokes Prince.
The Norwegian lives next to the Blue House.
The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.
The QUESTION:
Who owns the fish?
Great web site. will definitely visit again!!
K70FSP http://gdjI3b7VaWpU1m0dGpvjRrcu9Fk.com
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