Casey Luskin — our favorite creationist — is making a guest appearance at a website called The Blaze. We know nothing about them except that they’re willing to publish Casey’s material — and they’ve done so in the past. There’s no need to know anything else.
This is Casey’s article: Defenders Of The Evolutionary ‘Consensus’ Could Benefit From More Fact Checking. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hey — The Blaze gives some biographical information about Casey: They inform their drooling readers:
Casey Luskin is an attorney with graduate degrees in both science and law, giving him a unique combination of expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. … For his day job, Luskin works as Research Coordinator at Discovery Institute, where he has worked since 2005 helping scientists and educators to freely investigate and discuss the evidence for intelligent design.
Casey’s bio goes on at great length. That alone is worth clicking over to The Blaze. The way they put it, he’s a Renaissance man! But somehow they failed to mention Casey’s greatest achievement — see Casey Luskin Is Named a Curmudgeon Fellow.
That’s enough introductory material. You’re eager for us to leap into The Blaze to inform you of what it says. Okay, here are some excerpts from Casey’s guest column, with bold font added by us:
One of the dangers of enforcing “consensus science” is a lack of competition. Just as in business, when competitors aren’t allowed, the quality of the product suffers. Anyone who has dealt with a local cable company understands this truth.
This is soooooo bad. Hey, Casey: You can’t compete if you don’t know how to play the game. If you want to try, we urge you to read this: Advice for Creationists. Let’s read on:
In science, this same principle can translate into a failure to adequately fact-check arguments. When defenders of the consensus try to squelch and ignore those who disagree with them, their arguments often become sloppy.
We’ll skip Casey’s examples of what he claims have been “sloppy” attempts to refute various Discoveroid arguments. We don’t know why anyone would waste his time that way. If the Discoveroids ever have a good point to make, it will be carefully considered. Until then, our preferred response is ridicule. At the end, Casey says:
Additional examples could be given, but the point is clear: Without checks and balances from dissenting voices, defenders of the consensus can become overzealous and promote false information. Competition from skeptics helps everyone better evaluate the truth of these important scientific questions.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, Casey. You Discoveroids have been a great help. We really appreciate it.
Copyright © 2014. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
The Blaze is a right-wing Christian news page started by Glenn Beck. While he owns it, he doesn’t necessarily run it, and in fact at times it has published stuff in direct contradiction to things he has said on his tv, radio, or web video appearances. Consistency is not a requirement, it seems.
How about this novel idea?
That the creationists (including IDers) some with a competing account of what happened, when and where in the history of life on Earth so that (how or why) it turned out with the appearances of having a history of change with common descent and modification over many millions of years?
It isn’t the evolutionists and the atheists and materialists who are stopping the creationists from being a competition. Indeed, the policy of ID is not to address such questions. Come on, ID, remove the gag order!
Does Luskin not realise that, for proper scientists, finding a flaw in an established theory is a triumph for which, if they get it right, they will be highly regarded?
…where he studied evolution extensively at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. … “
Huh? Studied evolution extensively? He was a geology major. He did not do research, he took courses and got his terminal MS degree so he could tout “scientific credentials.” The rest of it is all BS.
I’ll have to search my old files. I recall some years back that Luskin actually published his geology class notes on his web site to demonstrate how studious and diligent he was. He has of course deleted them some time ago.
Casey the babbling gerbil has made a career as a paid propagandist and crafty liar for so long that he’s turned himself into a laughing stock. The guy is an intellectual cipher, and The Blaze is just the right venue for his mindless blathering.
That consensus Bluffking is trying to confound and confuse people about is the result of consideration and consilience, not empty-headed conformity, in contrast to what the Discorrhoids contend. He’s conducting quite a con.
John Wilkins of the most excellent Evolving Thoughts blog has a paper available at philpapers.org/rec/WILTSR describing why people like Casey have difficulties with science. Notice how Mr. Luskin is hung up over transitional forms – he is an essentialist – thinking it has to be either a fish or an amphibian and never something in-between. There is also more about how quickly one adopts new ideas (150 years since Darwin and 250 since Hume – Casey, definitely a late adopter), whether one can generalize (use induction), and if authority is more important than empiricism. Definitely worth a read and puts Casey on the extreme left of the curves in Figure 1.
Casey – “Defenders” article worthy of your fellow status at good ol’ CU. Keep it up and maybe the admin will promote you to emptying the rubbish bins and cleaning the loos.
Casey is right. Science does need checks and balances. I believe it is called “peer review”, and science has long been using it.
Perhaps ID needs more checks and balances. Or do they manage with checks from Templeton and what those do to their bank balances?
If “defenders of the evolutionary consensus” could benefit from more fact checking, defenders of ID could benefit from simply having some facts to check.
Casey is naturally obsessed with disproving that Tiktaalik is a predicted transitional fossil, and gloats that “this “prediction” collapsed in 2010 when tracks of true tetrapods were discovered that predate Tiktaalik by almost 20 million years. The footprints bear distinct digits — an unmistakable sign of four-limbed animals existing long before Tiktaalik appeared.” Although this is not an ID fact – there are no ID facts, only claims – a simple reference to Wikipedia reveals that Casey somewhat misstates his case. On the Tiktaalik page, Wiki has the following: “Putative tetrapod footprints found in Poland and reported in Nature in January 2010 were “securely dated” at 10 million years older than the oldest known elpistostegids.[18] If this is a true tetrapod record, Tiktaalik was a “late-surviving relic” rather than the original transitional form. An alternative interpretation is that the Polish trackways, which do not have digital impressions, were made by walking fish [19]”. Not that Casey states that the footprints had digits, which appears not to be factual, and that they predated and that they were 20 million years older than Tiktaalik rather than the factual 10 million years older. At any rate, Tiktaalik remains representative of the transitional form, and was found where it was predicted to be.
Casey needs to do some claim-checking himself.
@ Richard Bond – Exactly correct and in fact if the flaw is big enough it might result in your getting a Nobel Prize. People like Casey are interested in quote mining and so far there is no Nobel Prize for that yet. Maybe mendacity will be a new category some day. It’ll be a tough choice between Hambo, Casey, Westie, Ray Comfort, et.al.
Luskin publishing on Glenn Beck’s website says it all.
The Blaze is a good fundie site where if they don’t understand something’s inner workings, it must be a conspiracy to deceive them. Or they make up their own hypothesis. Or they demand more information. I’ll back up and say it isn’t just fundies doing this, a lot of people on the internet are. They are all about making noise, not digging into the facts.
Casey may be forgiven for not being familiar with the many checks and balances in real science provided by peer review, since his pseudoscience-peddling colleagues at the Disco-Tute don’t publish their creationist writings in peer-reviewed mainstream scientific journals.
According to Casey, the Flat Earth Society is performing a great service to science by keeping all you globe-heads on the ball, so to speak.
And they don’t let anyone comment on their blogposts either. Can you imagine what fun everyone would have if they did?
So slowing down to read his post myself, I realize Casey cites where errors are, were, or could be … errors that he only knows about because there *are* checks and balances going on in science. Renaissance man? Hardly.
I think I am developing a man crush on Casey. Or at least, a serious gerbil crush.
He’s one in a million! I would struggle to name anyone else who has given me so much entertainment!
What bliss it must be to possess such powers of self-delusion as mighty Casey so clearly has in such abundance!
A marvel amongst men! Casey, we are not worthy!
A few months back Casey was a featured guest columnist at the Heartland Institute’s website. Now he is schlepping his wares on the Blaze. Where can he possibly go next to complete the Reality Denying Trifecta? Mercola? Food Babe? Dr. Oz?
In a different context, Megs, a “gerbil crush” sounds pretty good.
Now Klinghoffer has a post at the Discoveroids’ blog praising Casey’s article. It’s not worth reading. The title alone is sufficient: You’re Welcome: Darwinists Should Thank Us for Quality Control, Fact-Checking.
Science has checks and balances already. We call them falsifiable hypotheses, peer review and reproducible experiments (or observations).
To reinforce what several commenters have stated – Casey clearly does not know how science proceeds! He has shown this over and over.
It is so comforting to know the DI is single-handedly keeping the worldwide scientific enterprise afloat due to its diligent fact-checking. Many thanks Casey and DI staff!
Casey and Klinklepooper sitting in the corner in a mutual mental [edited out] session. The Tooters never fail to amuse . . .
vhutchison: “Casey clearly does not know how science proceeds!”
Oh, I suspect he knows full well. The trouble is, the truth doesn’t fit his narrative.
I don’t know what Casey means by checks and balances but it sounds suspiciously like he wants to put a sock in it for evilution. And the last I heard Science wasn’t being “enforced” anywhere. People are pretty much free to believe whatever they want and to undo all the education to the contrary, good or bad , right or wrong, that their children may receive in any school , secular or otherwise so WTF is this ignorant [edited out] talking about?
Mark Germano: “In a different context, Megs, a “gerbil crush” sounds pretty good.
Brings to mind a story I was told about a well-known car dealer in my part of the country that allegedly happened before I moved here. Seems that said dealer had to make a very embarrassing trip to the emergency room for removal of gerbils. Since I can’t verify any of it, I’ll say no more.
“When defenders of the consensus try to squelch and ignore those who disagree with them, their arguments often become sloppy.”
It’s worth repeating over and over again: the Flat Earth Society totally agrees.
Ah, you beat me, SC. Still it’s good to learn that you begin to appreciate the intrinsical value of the Flat Earthers. For one thing they are nice.
I thought you were kidding so I looked it up a I’ll be da–ed there are people who believe the Earth is flat. That ranks right up with the hollow earth theory.
@jack102248
I don’t know if you’re prepared for this: there is a Concave Hollow Earth Theory.
@RSG, I think I understand the car dealer’s problem. When those gerbils get into your, um, dashboard, they can cause a lot of problems.
Casey the crybaby drooled:
“In science, this same principle can translate into a failure to adequately fact-check arguments. When defenders of the consensus try to squelch and ignore those who disagree with them, their arguments often become sloppy.”
michaelfugate correctly pointed out:
“And they don’t let anyone comment on their blogposts either. Can you imagine what fun everyone would have if they did?”
Not only would it be fun but fact checking and corrections would be performed by commenters who disagree with the ID consensus (‘God-did-it’).
Hey Casey, why don’t you IDiots allow and even encourage comments at ENV from people who disagree with you so that your ID ‘facts’ (LOL) can be openly checked and corrected? What are you afraid of? Don’t you have any confidence in your position?
You know better than that, The Whole Truth. Casey is so busy with his cutting edge ID research that he doesn’t have the time to monitor all the evilutionist trolls that undoubtedly will show up.
@mnbo
Which pose a more scary prospect: the evolutionists; or the various stripes of Biblical literalist-inerrantists, or the OECs, etc.; who will insist on discussing taboo subjects like the age of life on Earth? Those who are interested in what happened and when.
BTW, thanks to SC for silently correcting the obvious uglifying mistake in my post.
@TomS AAARRRGGGHHH That’s enough to make me want run down the street in nothing but my shoes and argyle socks and my Depends Ultra Thins (very comfortable and no diaper rash) waving my cane in the air and screaming “The sky is falling , the sky is falling.” I forgot I don’t run so well any more so I guess I’ll just hobble, quickly.
I really can’t believe some of the stuff that people believe. My son asked me one time why I didn’t understand why the sky is getting smaller. I couldn’t try to discuss and set him straight because he’d just watched an episode of Dr. Who whom we both watch sometimes together and he knows all of the episodes starting with Rose, the companion by heart. That’s when I realized almost all of the science he knows and understands comes from TV sci fi. He’s not particularly religious, but he’s not terribly curious either and I think TV has warped his understanding of science and I think this along with the church’s attitude toward science in general has pretty much screwed up the general pops. understanding of many things. People will believe pretty much anything you tell them, esp. if you are there first and beat them over the head with it long enough and loud enough.
Glenn Beck notwithstanding, Luskin got pounded in the comments save for one supporter, the oxymoronic ignorant Bible thumper. That sums it up for Disco Tute supporters these days.
“oxymoronic ignorant Bible thumper”? or “pleonastic”?