Egnorance Overload

Egnor may well represent a new basic creationist strategy: appealing to laziness. Kids who don't want to learn, parents who don't want to deal with new knowledge, or see their kids growing out of their provincial worlds, school officials who don't want to deal with controversy, politicians who don't want to spend money on education, powerful people who don't want to deal with uppity educated citizens...all of these will be fertile ground for Egnor's soothing message: "Who cares whether it's true or not? You don't HAVE to learn it! There's no need to make any effort, question any deeply-held belief, spend any money, sweat any exam, or risk any conflict with my unscrupulous bullying chums in the megachurches...relax...everything's under control...submission is easier than learning..."

"Michael Egnor. Who?." Link is broked. It has some html formatting in it.

The second link works; the first one doesn't.

Good news - that post is now #1 on Google Blog-search and Google News-search list.

Templeton Prize Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor won the Templeton Prize for his work encouraging the use of spirituality to better understand world conflicts.

I listened to the NPR report and was pleased with the comments of Dr. Taylor. He spoke of the need to incorporate a study of the spiritual factor into the social sciences to better understand the world around us. He also made it clear that the spiritual factor should not be the sole determinant of making social decisions. A clinical or non-evangelical approach to this topic, IMHO, might only serve to lessen the intensity of the raging culture wars.

It's worth an eight-minute listening.

Egnor is their new expert on evolution? But a big part of his spewing is that doctors don't need evolution and don't get trained in it in medical school. Is he specifically arguing that he's an expert in a subject he proudly declares he's untrained in?

I've added an Egnor post to my blog, not so much to say anything new but just to help link his name to Panda's Thumb and science blogger critics:

http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/03/thats-michael-egnor-not-michael-ignore.html

Drop by and post new links in my comments if you like.

the most pertinent issue of evolutionary biology to the practice of neurosurgery is the fact that within the normal variation of the blood vessels, location of membranes, sizes and shapes of neurological structures and fluid containing (ventricles) areas means that no two human brains will ever be exactly the same. Darwin's proof that this variability is in fact normal and to be expected came from the 7 years of his life that he spent painstakingly dissecting barnacles. It is for this reason that all competent neurosurgeons insist on MR angiography before tackling any case that isn't so urgent that the time spent in doing this kind of study is contraindicated. I am pretty certain that during his actual practice lifetime Dr. Egnor utilized these studies and never counted on the brains of his patients to be so intelligently designed that they would all be optimally perfectly identical.

The search for "Michael Egnor" on Google Web, Google News and Google Blogsearch looks markedly different today compared to yesterday ;-)