Nothing new under the sun

I thought I had an original idea with my play on the name of Dembski’s blog. As it turns out, there is a blog dedicated to parodying Dembski’s blog called – you guessed it – Uncommon Dissent. It is allegedly maintained by none other than T. H. Huxley, reports of whose death were apparently, like the reports of the imminent demise of evolution, “greatly exaggerated”.

There was also a book published in 2004 entitled Uncommon Dissent, with the subtitle Intellectuals who find Darwinism unconvincing. If you wonder who these “intellectuals” are, they are pretty much all the representatives of the very small handfully of individuals with serious degrees associated with the Intelligent Design movement. They include the well known Behe and Dembski, an “independent scholar”, several apologists, a couple of lawyers, mathematicians, philosophers and an editor. Indeed, it might be said that this list of “intellectuals” who find “Darwinism” unconvincing is one of the most damning pieces of evidence in favor of “Darwinism” that one could provide – after all, if this is the best they could come up with, then evolution’s support base has to be pretty solid. Apparently they couldn’t find a single person who has any expertise in biology (unless you count Behe). There is also a review of the book on WikiPedia that is worth looking at.

So many thanks to the groups that produced these other works of ‘uncommon dissent’ – both providing a parody of ID by an outsider, and the insiders for providing us with a better parody of what counts of scholarship in the ID crowd than any outsider would have dared.