hats off to Stephen Jay Gould
Penguins Kill Intelligent Design TheoryWell, sort of. Also poorly "designed" (but well adapted) is the panda for its thumb and a variety of other creatures. This point was made famous by a series of articles and lectures by the late eminent natural historian Stephen Jay Gould, who confounded creationists with his crazy "science".
I'm just going to quote him some here:
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense."
"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science-or of any honest intellectual inquiry."
"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."
"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."
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