Competitor for the most ignorant attack on evolution ever (other than Kent Hovind's)

Speaking of evolution...

I just came across what has to be one of the top three most ignorant attacks on evolution ever at BlogCritics.org. (OK, it doesn't sink to the level of Hovind's "did you come from a monkey" or "did you come from a rock" harangues, but it's close.) It starts out with the usual blather about how "those who push evolution only and don't want anything taught that might expose flaws in that theory" and "those opposing the inclusion of intelligent design in US science texts must feel insecure about their beliefs."

Nothing new there; if that's all that the article contained, I would have just ignored it.

But then I came across a "criticism" of evolution by someone named Kevin Surbaugh, of Topeka, KS, so mind-numbingly ignorant, that I couldn't resist pointing it out:

A major flaw I see: Evolution teaches that life started with simple forms that developed into complex ones. Obviously, that is impossible. If life began that way, then the chicken egg would not need to go through a chicken in order to hatch. Human babies would not need two complex humans to come together and plant, fertilize and carry the egg. Nor would we need science to do these things artificially in a laboratory.

A longer version of this post can be found at Surbaugh's own blog here.

I wonder if that inimitable evolution advocate PZ Myers, who loves slapping down creationist nonsense hard has ever encountered a comment that shows so much ignorance of what evolution actually says in such a short paragraph. The first statement, that it is "impossible" for complex forms to have developed from simpler forms is simply ridiculous, as the evidence that simplicity has given rise to complexity is all around us. Also, "simple" is relative, given that even "simple" organisms are amazingly complex. The second part of his argument is a huge non sequitur. How Kevin Surbaugh takes the evolutionary principle of common descent and from it concludes that evolution implies that a chicken egg "would not need to go through a chicken in order to hatch" or that it would not require two gametes to combine to make an embryo is beyond me. It's so unrelated to any real scientific deficiencies in evolutionary theory as to be laughable.

Perhaps Surbaugh is simply applying "intelligent design" to the problem of chicken and human reproduction. Just because he can't imagine how systems of reproductions such as chicken eggs or the fertilization of human eggs could have come about by evolution, he concludes evolution couldn't have been responsible. And, of course, as with all ID, if evolution couldn't have been responsible, then that means a certain "designer" (who, of course, they swear, is not necessarily God) must have done it. In the comments, he also betrays a profound ignorance of what constitutes a scientific hypothesis or theory:

Evolution is also a hypothesis, which as I pointed out has many holes. A hypothesis is what most of science is. In the case of evolution there is no hard fact, just hypothesis that is taught as fact.

Fact is even in the ID realm, there are those that believe evolution was used by an inteligent designer. To say ID is only a hypothesis and not science, but evolution is, hogwash.

They are both theories and both are hypothesis. Both have scientists that back them up, but the main stream media does not present the full accurate story, so the public does not a balanced view of this.

Apparently the only "holes" in evolution that he can find are his misconceptions of what evoluton says! Also evolution is much more than a hypothesis, while ID doesn't even rise to the level of a scientific hypothesis.

I have to stop now. Exposure to such concentrated logical fallacies and ignorance of science gives me a headache. This is the sort of stuff that Pat Hayes and Josh Rosenau have to deal with. I don't know how they put up with it.