John Woodmorappe

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Jan Peczkis is an Illinois high school teacher and Young Earth Creationist. Under the pseudonym John Woodmorappe he has published several articles and books with the Creationist groups Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research.

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[edit] Biography

Peczkis was born in the USA to Polish immigrant parents, and has a Bachelor's degree in Biology and a Master's degree in Geology from Northeastern Illinois University. He suffers from a neurological disorder called Tourette's syndrome, which causes him to have spells of torso rocking and finger wiggling.[1] He has credited Campus Crusade for Christ and the creationist work The Genesis Flood (1961) with sparking his interest in young earth creationism. He is currently employed as a high school teacher in Chicago.

Peczkis has published several papers in mainstream geologic journals under his real name. In those papers he affiliates himself with the geology department at Northeastern Illinois University. The current American Geological Institute Directory of Geoscience Departments does not list him as a faculty member and there is no evidence that he currently teaches science or is a research fellow at any university.[2]

Peczkis has written several articles in creationist journals under his Woodmorappe pseudonym but his main works are Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study and the The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods(based on a 1979 article in the Creation Research Society Quarterly).

[edit] Controversy and criticism

[edit] Noah's Ark

Glenn Morton critiqued Woodmorappe's work Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study available on Talk.origins.[3] Morton notes that Woodmorappe's claim that the animals could be fed in a short time is made by analogy to mass production farming, and points out that the care of thousands of animals that require all the same food is vastly different from the care of thousands of different animals that require vastly different foodsources. Morton also argues that Woodmorappe's claim that Noah and his family trained the animals beforehand to assist in ways such as urinating and defecating on-demand into buckets is ridiculous, stating that "This, of course, makes Noah the greatest animal trainer in history," and pointing out the absurd lengths of time that it would take for eight people to train 16,000 animals.

Woodmorappe has offered a rebuttal to the criticism.[4] This response includes namecalling, such as claiming Morton is called "naive," accused of having "fantasies," and displaying "ignorance." Thusly, backing up Morton's assertion in the original criticism that "Woodmorappe resorts to lots of name calling when he does not like an adversary's argument.[5]

Another criticism of Woodmorappes work is a crucial error in his statistics, using the median value where he should have used the mean.[6].

[edit] Geologic Dating

Woodmorappe published Radiometric Dating Reappraised in 1979 attacking geological dating by claiming bad data points, geologists "fudging" radiometric dating results, and criticizing the geologist data of a 4.5 billion earth date rather than the 6,000 years that Woodmorappe claims.

Steven H. Schimmrich criticized the work, claiming misrepresentation of terms, "highly inflammatory rhetoric," and "superficial treatment of data." [7]. Woodmorappe has replied, in part with name-calling, to the criticism[8] and Schimmrich has responded.[9]

Geologist Dr. Kevin R. Henke from the University of Kentucky has written over forty articles which criticize Woodmorappe's statements on geology, various radiometric methods and the overall capabilities of radiometric dating, and accusing him of misquoting sources to support his arguments. [10]

[edit] Self Quotation

Woodmorappe has been criticized for quoting himself. In the article New Educational Activities for Home Schooling Science:A Hands-on Science Activity that Demonstrates the Atheism and Nihilism of Evolution [11], Woodmorappe quotes "Illinois high school science teacher Jan Peczkis" from an article Evolving student thought: Simulating evolution over many generations published by Peczkis in Science Teacher 60 (1993). Woodmorappe is effectively quoting works he published under his real name.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

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