RE: Debunking Pseudoscience

Eat your heart out Michael, I have a copy of The New Geology. It isn't hard
to find the flaw for a geologist. He advocates what he says is the onionskin
theory (something I don't think any geologist ever advocated). In this
view, the sediments all over the world which lie next to crystalline
basement were supposedly all deposited at the same time. Such a view is
codswallop and destroys any value in paleontology.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
> Behalf Of Michael Roberts
> Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 4:23 PM
> To: gordon brown; asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: Debunking Pseudoscience
>
> All of McCready Price's books are amazing, with their apparent erudition
> and
> fatal flaws. Gardner dealt with them in his various books. TGF took on the
> mantle and it all has a life of its own, despite being cranky
> pseudoscience.
>
> I have several of Price's work and a photocopy of The New Geology- all 700
> pages of it and it appears at first sight like any geology text of the
> 1920s. One has to root to find the fatal flaws, which are akin to YEC on
> geology.
>
> BTW John Blanchard D.D. from Pacific International University in MO is
> giving a talk of YEC this Saturday in a village between Lancaster and
> Preston. Usual stuff - circular reasoning from fossils etc. But can
> someone
> show me what the status of the PIU is?
>
> Michael
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "gordon brown" <gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu>
> To: <asa@calvin.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 8:17 PM
> Subject: Debunking Pseudoscience
>
>
> > Today I received the latest issue of the Notices of the American
> > Mathematical Society. It featured an interview with Martin Gardner, who
> is
> > well known for his 25 years as author of the "Mathematical Games" column
> > in Scientific American magazine, but it turns out that he has also
> written
> > books debunking pseudoscience such as Scientology and Uri Geller.
> >
> > What he said that especially caught my interest was his answer to the
> > interviewer's question "How did you get interested in debunking
> > pseudoscience?"
> >
> > He said that at some time during his childhood he read George McCready
> > Price's "The New Geology" and was convinced by it until he took a
> geology
> > course at the University of Chicago and understood where Price went
> wrong.
> > He now describes Price's book as "one of the great crank works of all
> > time".
> >
> > Gordon Brown
> > Department of Mathematics
> > University of Colorado
> > Boulder, CO 80309-0395
> >
> >
Received on Wed Jun 15 18:51:46 2005