Thursday, December 5, 2013

Refutation of "Evolution: A Fairy Tale for Grownups" - FINAL REPORT CARD

That was quite a drag, reading misquotes after misquotes, sprinkled with the smelly manure of creationist lies and propaganda.

After all this, lets calculate how much crap is in this book.

For starters, throughout the 101 “Questions” of this book, Comfort provides a total of 272 quotes (some of which have no sources provided to verify their validity).


Fallacy Number of Fallacies
Quote Mining 60
Appeal to Authority 22
Outdated Source 67
Non-Academic Source 50
Not a qualified biologist or scientist 47
Not Relevant to Evolutionary theory or Biology 82
Not Damaging to Evolutionary theory 94
Distortion of Science 62
Total 484

 WOW, counting 484 fallacies in just 272 quotes. That's almost 2 for every 1 quote.

So, let's see. Counted thus far, 82 quotes are not even relevant to the theory of evolution. This means that 82 of them did not even address the theory of evolution or biology.

That leaves us with 190 quotes.

60 of them are quote mines, that means close to 1/3 of this book is complete misrepresentation.

That leaves us with 130 anti-science quotes. 94 of them don't damage the theory of evolution as Ray Comfort would hope. That's to say, for example, latch onto the "there are no fossils" mantra, despite the fact that even without a single fossil we can still prove common descent.

That leaves us with about 42 quotes. According to the rest of the data, they usually come from non-academic sources, non-biologists, or simply distortions of what the science actually says (i.e. that means they are simply outright lying or misinformed).

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