Those Defensive Darwinists

THE first court trial over the theory of intelligent design is now over, with a ruling expected by the end of the year. What sparked the legal controversy? Before providing two weeks of training in modern evolutionary theory, the Dover, Pa., School District briefly informed students that if they wanted to learn about an alternative theory of biological origins, intelligent design, they could read a book about it in the school library.

In short order, the School District was dragged into court by a group insisting the school policy constituted an establishment of religion, this despite the fact that the unmentionable book bases its argument on strictly scientific evidence, without appealing to religious authority or attempting to identify the source of design.

The lawsuit is only the latest in a series of attempts to silence the growing controversy over contemporary Darwinian theory.

For instance, after The New York Times ran a series on Darwinism and design recently, prominent Darwinist Web sites excoriated the newspaper for even covering intelligent design, insulting its proponents with terms like Medievalist, Flat-Earther and "American Taliban."

University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers argues that Darwinists should take an even harder line against their opponents: "Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough," he wrote. "The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians."

This month, NPR reported on behavior seemingly right out of the P.Z. Myers playbook.

The most prominent victim in the story was Richard Sternberg, a scientist with two Ph.D.s in evolutionary biology and former editor of a journal published out of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. He sent out for peer review, then published, a paper arguing that intelligent design was the best explanation for the geologically sudden appearance of new animal forms 530 million years ago.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel reported that Sternberg's colleagues immediately went on the attack, stripping Sternberg of his master key and access to research materials, spreading rumors that he wasn't really a scientist and, after determining that they didn't want to make a martyr out of him by firing him, deliberately creating a hostile work environment in the hope of driving him from the Smithsonian.

The NPR story appalled even die-hard skeptics of intelligent design, people like heavyweight blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds, who referred to the Smithsonian's tactics as "scientific McCarthyism."

Also this month, the Kansas Board of Education adopted a policy to teach students the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory. Darwinists responded by insisting that there are no weaknesses, that it's a plot to establish a national theocracy — despite the fact that the weaknesses that will be taught come right out of the peer-reviewed, mainstream scientific literature.

One cause for their insecurity may be the theory's largely metaphysical foundations. As evolutionary biologist A.S. Wilkins conceded, "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

And in the September issue of The Scientist, National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell argued that his extensive investigations into the matter corroborated Wilkins' view. Biologist Roland Hirsch, a program manager in the U.S. Office of Biological and Environmental Research, goes even further, noting that Darwinism has made a series of incorrect predictions, later refashioning the paradigm to fit the results.

How different from scientific models that lead to things like microprocessors and satellites. Modern evolutionary theory is less a cornerstone and more the busybody aunt — into everyone's business and, all the while, very much insecure about her place in the home.

Moreover, a growing list of some 450 Ph.D. scientists are openly skeptical of Darwin's theory, and a recent poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute found that only 40 percent of medical doctors accept Darwinism's idea that humans evolved strictly through unguided, material processes.

Increasingly, the Darwinists' response is to try to shut down debate, but their attempts are as ineffectual as they are misguided. When leaders in Colonial America attempted to ban certain books, people rushed out to buy them. It's the "Banned in Boston" syndrome.

Today, suppression of dissent remains the tactic least likely to succeed in the United States. The more the Darwinists try to prohibit discussion of intelligent design, the more they pique the curiosity of students, parents and the general public.

[All we ask is that the AECreationists and "IDers" STOP LYING, stop lying about their beliefs being actual science, and stop trying to get their lies taught to school students.]

Good example. If someone disagrees with you, they are a liar. Nice!

You have big problems with reading comprehension, don't you?

No, feel free to disagree with me all you like. I even said so explicitly. What I *do* insist upon, however, is that the AECreationists stop lying their faces off every time they open their mouths.

Here are just a few examples -- out of thousands -- of AECreationist gross dishonesty and truth-twisting propaganda, which you have my permission to repost at any time, since you claim to be a crusader against lies and bullying (from a past post of mine):

Take for example the way that creationst Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind declares that radiocarbon dating produced wildly different dates for the skin and bones of the same mammoth specimen, in order to attempt to raise questions about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating.
THIS. IS. A. LIE.
Hovind's *own* citation which he gives in "support" of this his false claim -- which is the scientific paper which is the original report on the specimens in question -- states quite clearly that they were DIFFERENT specimens taken from DIFFERENT locations.
When challenged on this point, Hovind gave specimen ID numbers which he claimed were for the samples in question (which, again, Hovind claimed were from the same individual mammoth), and looking up those IDs in the primary literature shows that not only were they indeed NOT from the same mammoth, one of them WASN'T EVEN FROM A MAMMOTH AT ALL (it was from a rhino). Nonetheless, creationist Hovind has never retracted his false claims about the evidence itself.
Freeper Havoc (a creationist) repeated Hovind's lie here on FreeRepublic.
When I pointed out that even Hovind's own citation contradicts Hovind's version, and showed him documentation of that, Havoc mumbled a reply ("you haven't displayed a falsehood, you just make these assertions") and failed to retract the false claim he had repeated from Hovind.
HAVOC THEN REPOSTED THE SAME FALSE CLAIM SHORTLY THEREAFTER ON ANOTHER THREAD.
Summary of the ability of the two creationists (Hovind and Havoc) to present information they *know* is false, and to *fail* to retract when reminded of their falsehoods, is presented here, along with links to all appropriate documentation.
(Quick aside -- Fester, do you condone this behavior of your fellow creationists? Yes or no? Is lying for the "cause" of creationism acceptable to you?)
This sort of behavior, unfortunately, is *typical* of creationists. Here, want dozens of more examples of their distortions? A few more for the road? Another? Still more, perhaps? How about even more? Ooh, here are some good examples. And there's lots more where that came from, like this and this and this and lots more here and *tons* here and countless more here and yet more here, a goodie... Wait, there's more over here, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., *ETC.*, etc., etc., etc., . How about 300 more creationist misrepresentations? Not enough, you say? Well then visit Creationist Lies and Blunders. And at least half of these are outright lies, repeatedly used long after their dishonesty has been exposed (the rest are merely creationist stupidity, *still* knowingly used after the errors have been explained, which is yet *another* form of creationist dishonesty).

For a very recent example, here's something from this week on http://www.pandasthumb.org/ (my highlighting in red):

William Dembski [a darling of the "ID"/creationist movement -- Ich.] finally managed to find the transcript of Shallit’s testimony. Since I’ve been correct on predicting his behavior all the way along so far, I’ve taken another stab at it at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
Update: Holy cow, I missed this the first time. Yesterday I asked the rhetorical question, would Dembski continue to embarrass himself in this situation regarding Shallit’s testimony? Well, we have our answer. Not only is he continuing to embarrass himself, he’s digging the hole even deeper. He’s now compounding his dishonesty with an attempt to erase the past. He has now deleted all three of his previous posts where he made the false claim that Shallit had been pulled from testifying by the ACLU because his deposition was an “embarrassment” and a “liability” to their case, even after one of those posts got almost 100 comments in reply to it. There’s no word so far on whether he will change his name to Winston Smith.
This really is dishonest behavior, there’s no two ways about it. Clearly, Dembski’s world is one in which he thinks he can rewrite history and no one will notice. I’m dying to hear how his toadies will defend this behavior. It’s not defensible on its own, so they can only attempt to distract attention away from it with a tu quoque argument or pointing fingers at others. So let’s hear what they have to say. Salvador? O’Brien? DonaldM? Let’s hear you defend this dishonest and Orwellian behavior. And tell us again how it’s evolution that undermines ethics and morality while you’re at it.
Update #2: Oh, here’s Dembski’s latest on the subject, in a comment responding to being asked what happened to the previous posts on the subject:

The previous postings were a bit of street theater. I now have what I needed. As for responding to Shallit and his criticisms, I have been and continue to do so through a series of technical articles under the rubric “The Mathematical Foundations of Intelligent Design” — you can find these articles at www.designinference.com. The most important of these is titled “Searching Large Spaces.” Shallit has indicated to me that he does not intend to engage that body of work: http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archive….

A bit of street theater? Okay, let me see if I understand this. Dembski engaged in a bit of “street theater” - meaning “told a lie” - to get a copy of the transcript that he could have gotten two months ago because it’s been publicly available all along? And now instead of admitting to the lie, he’s just erasing the evidence of it? Okay, let’s call a spade a spade here. Dembski is a lying scumbag with no regard for the truth whatsoever. Period. Just when you think he’s hit rock bottom, Dembski begins to tunnel.

Furthermore, I catch IDers/creationists lying on a regular basis on almost every "crevo" thread here on FreeRepublic. Usually they're just cribbing from this extensive list of hundreds of persistent AECreationist dishonesties and distortions, but often they come up with new ones, including libeling via false accusations, misrepresenting what people have written, posting their false presumptions about science as if they were established fact, etc.

I have many hundreds of examples from my own personal experience with them.

[Moreover, a growing list of some 450 Ph.D. scientists...]
Wow, 450 whole scientists are skeptical. Turn out the lights on the theory and go home! < /sarcasm >

I refer you to project Steve.

That alone makes the anti-evolution creationists' list of "skeptical scientists" look pretty foolish, but *this* one *really* blows their agenda out of the water:

The "Clergy Letter Project": An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science
"Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
"We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
[As of 22 November 2005, there are 9,975 signatures collected to date]

Click the links that follow to see the alphabetical lists of clergy members who have endorsed this letter
A to E - F to J - K to O - P to S - T to Z
Listing by States

But hey, I guess MM and his science-hating friends know better than ~10,000 Christian clergy, eh?

...or are they all part of the "vast Darwinian conspiracy" too, who are likewise "professional propagandists that are assigned to twist" things in the anti-evolution creationists' paranoid world?

PZ Myers is just one guy, and he shouldn't be considered representative of all biologists, much less everyone who believes in evolution. He has unfortunately become an accidental online spokesman for evolutionists, not because he is an effective communicator (he isn't) or has accomplished anything worthwile in science (he hasn't) but because he is a raving far-left moonbat who got linked by all the other lefty blogs. Frankly speaking, he's an idiot who is as ignorant as his creationist opponents, and should be as much an embarassment to evolutionists as Fred Phelps is to Christians. There are plenty of right-of-center evolutionary biologists such as Matt Ridley and Leda Cosmides, as well as conservative figures such as Charles Krauthammer, John Derbyshire and George F. Will who are more representative of the spectrum beliefs. As for Myers, when I read his Pharyngula blog (as well as Cosmic Variance), I am reminded of something which Heinlein once wrote to John W. Campbell:

For a long time I have from time to time felt exasperated with you that you should be so able to so completely to insulate your thinking in nonscientific fields from you excellent command of the scientific method in science fields. So far as I have observed you, you would no more think of going off half-cocked, with insufficient and unverified data, with respect to a matter of science that you would stroll down Broadway in your underwear. But when it comes to matters outside your specialities you are consistently and brilliantly stupid. You come out with some of the gaddamndest flat-footed opinions with respect to matters which you haven't studied and have had no experience, basing your opinions on casual gossip, newspaper storeis, unrelated individual data out of matrix, armchair extrapolation, and plain misinformation--unsuspected because you haven't attempted to verify it.

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