#453: Mark Armitage

The famous, probably nice, but completely cranky New Age crackpot José Argüelles narrowly escaped inclusion in this Encyclopedia in March 2011. No one would of course suspect global warming denialist Dick Armey of being a nice person, but despite his denialism he remains one of the less moronic (though probably not less vile) of the extreme wingnuts, and if he were given an entry we would probably be forced to swamp our Encyclopedia with similar trolls.

We cannot pass over Mark H. Armitage, however. Armitage was an Adjunct Professor of Biology at Azusa Pacific University, a religious college, and received a “Masters Degree” from the regionally unaccredited Institute for Creation Research. Graduate School. Currently Armitage is affiliated with the Creation Research Society, and operates and maintains a working electron microscopy lab there (what a waste of resources), as well as serving on the Board of Directors.

He graduated in May 2007 from Liberty University's School of Education, and is currently a doctoral candidate at Liberty. In short, he has no – and apparently no intention of getting – any actual education. Still, Armitage has actually published in Parasitology Research (Germany) and Microscopy and Analysis (England) as well as in several U.S. Publications. Indeed, he has somehow managed to become president of the Southern California Society for Microscopy and Microanalysis and a member of the American Society of Parasitologists. In other words: real credentials for the Institute of Creation Research (although some of his publications, which have little to do with creationism, have been heavily criticized by real experts).

Of course, what his few real publications are supposed to do, is to confer authority to his other work, such as “Helium Retention in Deep Core Zircons,” a review of radiohalos in granite that CRS claims contains “startling evidence” for a young Earth. That one has not been published in a respected journal. His work on radiohalos (some of it with Andrew Snelling) has instead been published in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism (ed. R. L. Ivey, Jr.), which is, again, not the same thing as a peer reviewed publication, but more like being accepted for posting at Ken Adachi’s Educateyourself website. Another “research” article is “COMPLEX LIFE CYCLES IN HETEROPHYID TREMATODES: STRUCTURAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DESIGN IN THE ASCOCOTYLE COMPLEX OF SPECIES”, which contains lots of jargon, an introduction, a discussion … and – predictably – no results and no data (discussed here; Armitage responded rather feebly to the critique). The piece is, in other words, “science” by rhetorics, not research, and pretty typical of creationist publications; instead of developing hypotheses and testing them, Armitage and his ilk revert to JAQing off to facilitate their Gish-galloping and insulate themselves from real criticism.

Armitage has also written the book “Jesus is like my Scanning Electron Microscope” and given it his very own five-star review on Amazon.

Diagnosis: It’s hard to come up with something original for every guy in the long row of creationist blunderheads. Armitage is a loon and a crackpot of (probably) relatively minor importance, and that’s that.