Mike Dunford and I have disagreed several times over the past couple of years about issues in the ID-Darwinism debate. Mr. Dunford was very upset recently that I had made a minor error in quoting him in a recent blog post. Of course, he offered no answer to my scientific critique of his earlier post, and one has the suspicion that his pique may be related to his difficulty in formulating a credible scientific answer.

He fired off an e-mail to the Discovery Institute. Here’s his closing paragraph:

…I would not dream of taking a position on whether or not you should continue to provide a platform for someone who is apparently incapable of meeting the basic standards of academic discourse, but I would like to see a public retraction and apology appear on your site. [emphasis mine]

I’m the “someone” he’s referring to. I have of course corrected the error, and have set out to review Mr. Dunford’s “basic standards of academic discourse.”

Here are examples of Mr. Dunford’s own “standards of academic discourse,” culled from his blog posts from the last couple of years. Keep in mind that Mr. Dunford is a trained scientist:

From Mr. Dunford’s post on 12/9/08:

Dr. Michael Egnor: Neurosurgeon, Stony Brook Faculty, and all around Dishonest Twit…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. ….I’m simply going to highlight the most egregious case of flat-out, nose-growing, pants-on-fire lying…I don’t know if Dr. Egnor’s dishonesty is substantial enough that I would have gotten him expelled from school, but I do know that any student I caught pulling a stunt like that would flunk.

From Mr. Dunford’s post on 11/29/08:

There he goes again. Creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s… Egnor’s characteristic lack of intellectual integrity…Egnor has, yet again, decided to ignore the examples that were presented to him… Declining to face reality in favor of tilting with your own personally invented reality may not necessarily be the mark of a psychiatric pathology, but it’s definitely not the mark of intellectual honesty, either…But we can ignore the lack of integrity, too. After all, the fact that Egnor is apparently incapable of facing reality…

From Mr. Dunford’s 3/22/07 post:

An ever-deepening Egnorance…His last attempt, before today, came less than a week ago, with this spectacular piece of inane argumentation… Egnor has, apparently, been sucked dry of any remaining vestiges of intellectual honesty that he might have had before he joined the DI flack crew. If there’s a difference between Egnor’s latest “argument” and a five-year-old jumping up and down, fingers in ears, chanting, “na na na na I can’t here you na na na na,” it’s only in Egnor’s ability to form complete sentences.

From Mr. Dunford’s 4/23 07 post:

Would the Real “Michael Egnor” Please Stand Up.”Egnor” manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the “Michael Egnor” articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes.

From Mr. Dunford’s 3/12/08 post:

Two Things that Don’t Go Together: Michael Egnor and Intellectual Integrity…Someone once pointed out that when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant, it’s not committing an act of vandalism. It’s just being a dog….the same casual disregard for public decency as a male dog telling his neighbors that he’s still around, but, unlike dogs, the creationists are presumably capable of self-control…

From Mr. Dunford’s 3/29/07 post

The Revenge of the Egnorant: Everyone’s least favorite Creationist Brain Surgeon, Michael Egnor, is at it again, jumping up and down chanting “I can’t heeeeaaaaarrrrrr yoooouuuuu!!!”

Mr. Dunford will no doubt scrutinize his quotes for skipped ellipses, but one gets the sense that his “academic discourses” emerge primarily when his scientific arguments aren’t going all that well. His screeds are characteristic of his Darwinist colleagues, mostly professional scientists, mostly atheists promulgating their creation myth, mostly living off of government grants (i.e. you).

Meanwhile, I’ll look elsewhere for standards of academic discourse.