You're Known by the Company You Keep

The Idiot of the Day award goes to Sal Cordova, one of Dembski's co-bloggers over at Uncommon Descent.  Cordova has been commenting at the post I referred to here.  Let's take a look at what he has to say.  Trying to defend himself, he wrote (quoting Darwin), "I was taking issue with Darwin's statement:

Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good." [his emphasis]

This quotation of Darwin was supposed to be the evidence for Sal's claim that:

Darwin was responsible in large part for the false assumption that “every advantageous mutation that appears in the population is inevitably incorporated”.  -Sal Cordova

Now isn't that cute?  Here's what Darwin wrote:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good. [emphasis mine]

The bloggers over at UD have the reading comprehension skills of anencephalic babies.  That, or they're just compulsive liars.  For more evidence of this, see my post here.  And I don't want to check this myself, but it sounds as if another Dembski co-blogger has refuted Kimura and Ohta's mathematics based on his/her glance at Google Books preview:

Since there was a link that provided a ‘look-see’ inside the book, I did so.  Well, what I found was very fascinating. -PaV

PaV goes on to "refute" Kimura and Ohta.  So much good science and brilliant creative thought goes on over at UD it just gives me the willies thinking about it.
 

Comments

[PTET]

Sal, in common with ID creationists all over, is incapable of leaving a quote in context if it takes away from him message...

Since they are apparently sincere in their beliefs, this isn't, I guess, actually *lying*.

A "lie" requires an intent to deceive. Yeah?

But they don't think they are deceiving, because they think they are being sincere.

We need a new word to describe an untruth, told sincerely, that is still deceiptful.

I've heard this called "Tolstoy Syndrome". We need something snappier.

Any suggestions?