Dinosaur Denialism
skepticblog.org
skepticblog.org
"Then the site jumps into other crackpot ideas, like Tom Gold’s abiogenic origin of petroleum (long ago falsified), and presents a list of 19th century naturalists who talked about dinosaurs because they allegedly made up their discoveries in order to promote evolution! Once again, this doofus is so ignorant of history that he has no idea that half that list consisted of devout individuals who were “creationists” and most of them worked on dinosaurs in a religious context. Not only that, but they were not trying to “prove evolution”—their work was done decades before Darwin’s book came out in 1859. Give this guy an “F” in history…."
The primary point of this paragraph appears to insult the person being talked about. The paragraph doesn't actually say anything, it's just a summary peppered with insults. Furthermore, it's very unlikely to convince anyone that doesn't already agree with the author.
It seems like there's a large part of the skeptic community that doesn't understand you can't be so purposelessly condescending and yet convince the unconvinced--especially when you're pretending to be some rational authority whilst being so foaming-at-the-mouth. Which is a shame, because skepticism is a fine cause.
Articles like these are not really about convincing believers, they are meant to be consumed by fellow skeptics.
Downvoters: I'm explaining it, not defending it.
More specifically, I think it’s great to have both: People who painstakingly taken even the most batshit insane ideas serious and engage them on the same level and people who ridicule. That’s not a contradiction for me.
I have talked with moon landing deniers and holocaust deniers but in my life I've never met a single one of the dinosaur deniers. Dinosaur deniers are a very small group, on par with flat earthers. There are clearly many more people that deny the holocaust and the moon landing than there are that "don't believe in dinosaurs". This makes sense. Dinosaurs are difficult not to believe in given how many museums have skeletons available for viewing with bones that obviously don't belong to any currently alive species. Whereas with the moon landing, you have man made equipment in museums, but sure, to someone it could seem like it was all a big faked conspiracy to intimidate the Russians. That sort of at least sounds plausible even though it's not true, and few people actually personally know astronauts or rocket scientists. (I know several of both, but would still believe in the moon landing even if I didn't.)
So where am I going with this? His article is intellectually dishonest because he talks about a "whole group of extreme creationists who deny that dinosaurs existed", suggesting it is a large number of people, which it is absolutely not. He then tries to connect the whole thing to anthro global warming skeptics, which is a completely different kind of thing since you have real scientists and scientifically competent people asking reasonable questions, and people in politically entrenched positions refusing to respond with raw data. It's completely different from dinosaur skeptics who if we could find them would be easily discredited with a few days of museum visits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society
Religious people tend to cluster geographically/socially too, so the formation of actual "groups" would not surprise me.
I meant instead to refer to people who really do believe the earth is flat, and suggest that those and dino skeptics are similarly sized populations.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were 265 true dinosaur skeptics globally since it takes all kinds. Interestingly, many people in many primitive cultures won't be among the skeptics since many tribal people have either seen dinosaurs or know those who have. (Mokele Mbembe)
I once had a very heated debate at a family Christmas party (the first my now fiance attended). It all started when I assumed my aunt was joking about dinosaurs not existing and ended in my being offended by her attempt to discredit my Googling by claiming that it's impossible to believe anything that comes off of a screen as small as my iTouch. She is now referred to as the dinosaur aunt.
No lie.