Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit

By Mike Dunford

I've been dealing with creationists for a long time now, and I thought that I'd gotten over being surprised by dishonest behavior in their ranks. In fact, I thought I'd gotten over it [even when I'm on the receiving end of the false witness, and when the person dishing it out is someone who really should know better](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/03/two_things_that_dont_go_togeth.php). As it turns out, I might not have quite as far over it as I thought.

As regular readers know, Dr. Michael Egnor is one of the more impressively credentialed denizens of the Discovery Institute's media complaints blog. He has decades of experience as a neurosurgeon. He's on the faculty at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, where he serves as a professor of neurosurgery. And, based on the level of intellectual integrity that he just demonstrated, he's not someone I would trust to train a dog, much less a doctor.

That's a harsh statement, I know, but I just got through reading [his response](http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/12/mike_dunford_alleles_that_surv.html) to [my recent critique](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/11/egnor_shoots_he_scores.php) of some of his Discovery Institute ramblings. Or, rather, his response to what he _says_ was my recent critique. It was actually an interesting experience. He managed to take what I wrote so far out of context, and distort it so thoroughly, that I actually had problems recognizing some of the quotes as being my own work.

I may (or may not) deal with the nonexistent scientific merit of Dr. Egnor's reply later on. I'm not even going to try and catalogue all of the cases where Egnor was less than honest in his characterization of my writing. Instead, I'm simply going to highlight the most egregious case of flat-out, nose-growing, pants-on-fire lying.

[Read more at The Questionable Authority, where comments may be left:](http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2008/12/dr_michael_egnor_neurosurgeon.php)