Junior Birdmen of the Discovery Institute

And when you hear the grand announcement
That their wings are made of tin.
Then you will know the Junior Birdmen
Have sent their box tops in.

Human beings cannot fly.

It's simply impossible, and we've known it for centuries; there is, however, a conspiracy of committed, dogmatic aerodynamicists who have a vested interest in preserving the myth of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and despite the obvious impossibility of flight which is readily apparent to anyone with common sense, they persist in promoting their "theory."

There are honest engineers who can lay out in detail for you the impossibility of flight. The dogmatic Wrightists simply ignore weight-to-lift ratios, surface area, power output, and Reynolds numbers. Reynolds numbers prove that humans can't fly, but you will never, ever see that in any aerospace engineering textbook. There is a world-wide cover-up: they don't want to risk their cushy grants and their payola from the aerospace industry.

They hide the truth. That strange "flying machine" to the right? It never got off the ground! It fell apart on the first attempt to fly! Yet you still find it portrayed in the textbooks, intact and looking like it's about to leap into the air. This is a long-running and disgraceful fraud. And if you look at the history of the Wright brothers, you'll see that they relied on the prior work of people like Lilienthal and Maxim and Boeing and Curtis, all frauds and charlatans. How can you trust a theory built on failure and fakes?

You want to show me what?

That proves my case.

Look at this birdman. We can all agree that that guy never flew — it would be a joke to think otherwise. Yet you expect me to believe that you can add many tons of weight, millions of complicated parts, and make it all out of metal, and now it can fly? You've amplified all the problems in the original design a million-fold, and now you try to tell me it works? You silly Wrightists.

No, I haven't gone insane. I made the absurd argument above just to give you a sense of what I feel when I read the latest from the Discovery Institute. They have this ridiculous site, Judging PBS, that purports to be a rebuttal to the PBS documentary on the Dover trial. It's actually just another rehash of the dishonesty found in Wells' Icons of Evolution — a series of misrepresentations of the state of biological thought. I keep hammering on the lies in that dismal book, but the DI keeps using it. In this case, it's particularly egregious; the PBS documentary didn't say anything about the specific issues they're trying to rebut. It's as if they've got nothing else but the same old recycled garbage.

Continue reading "Junior Birdmen of the Discovery Institute" (on Pharyngula)