It’s short, but mildly amusing in a dumb, almost pitiful sort of way. Behe tries to come off as a serious scientist but he may as well just put a cracker box over his head and drool conspicuously.
Behe on Colbert Report
- Doc Bushwell is a biochemist and a medical writer who serves as a slavering minion of the dark lords of Big and Little Pharma; Jim is an engineering professor with a fondness for running shoes and drumsticks; and Kevin Beck is a self-exiled member of the clan who refuses to stay gone.
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What Hominids are Saying
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#1 by DieFundie on August 3, 2007 - 9:19 pm
Remember, it’s not the bible that teaches us that the Earth is only 6,000 years old… PHYSICS teaches us this! (Cue crazy person music)
#2 by Kevin Beck on August 3, 2007 - 9:26 pm
What a freakin’ knob. The fact that Darwin got so much right in spite of not knoing about DNA or cells in general is, if anything, a point in his intellectual favor, not a limitation. We don’t criticize ancient mathematicians for getting some pretty good approximatons of irrational numbers and other things without the aid of calculators.
It’s also cute how Behe in one breath emphasizes how much more we know than we did in the 1800s, yet in the next notes that the “problem” (for him, at least) of whether life was consciously designed goes back to Aristotle’s time. That’s right, baby, it’s all a bigass phlogiston.
Colbert actually made some biting pointsand criticisms, but these probably lay beyond the scope of the average viewer.
#3 by Laelaps on August 3, 2007 - 9:54 pm
I really am starting to think that Behe is a robot that is programmed to go over the same talking points over and over and over again. The mousetrap argument has been bogus for over a decade, but I guess he didn’t get the memo. At least Colbert called him out on the implied notion that ID (and by extension, Behe) is to evolution what Einstein’s ideas about gravitation were to Newton’s, even though Behe gets his history of science wrong.
#4 by greg on August 4, 2007 - 1:42 am
phlogiston gets a bad rap. at least it was testable. it just turns out it makes more sense for a substance to have positive mass rather than negative mass. in a way it’s no more of an error than the conventional current was – just a bad guess. ID is not even that, of course.
#5 by wrpd on August 4, 2007 - 1:48 am
Some people actually take him seriously? Really, this is an honest question. When does he start laughing and say “Just kidding”? He’s pulling a Cartman, isn’t he?
#6 by ElectronKid on August 4, 2007 - 7:51 am
Wait, he said that they did not know about the cell in Darwin’s time; but then says they did? And he is not darwin’s Einstein. Einstein’s discoveries were accepted by mainstream science
#7 by ElectronKid on August 4, 2007 - 8:04 am
I found a nice antidote to irreducible complexity. The magazine itself had a feature on the evolution of the eye, but it’s not online.
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0611/feature4/text3.html
#8 by c on August 4, 2007 - 8:21 am
The irreducible complexity here is the pathology that forces this sad little man to seek notoriety by making a clown of himself.
Forget the eye and the blood clotting cascade, I’d like him to explain why the intelligent designer designed a nose that has to be constantly blown or picked and an anus that requires wiping.
#9 by The Ridger on August 4, 2007 - 11:29 am
To do Behe justice, he clearly means that physics teaches us the world is more than 6,000 years old, not evolution. Behe isn’t a YECer, after all.
Of course he’s still trotting out that tired mousetrap.
“We used to see mystery everywhere and explain it with God. But now, with everything science explains, God gets smaller.”
That’s it all in a nutshell, isn’t it?
#10 by God (and a half) on August 7, 2007 - 2:21 pm
Some people actually take him seriously? Really, this is an honest question. When does he start laughing and say “Just kidding”? He’s pulling a Cartman, isn’t he?
He hasn’t given a handjob to Ben Affleck yet, so it’ll still be a ways off.