Here’s a little secret about getting a graduate degree: it helps to be a little bit crazy. You are dedicating a good chunk of your life to the pursuit of some very abstract knowledge after all, and as a reward, you get faint hopes of landing a low-paying job in your field. A bigger secret: you can even be a lot crazy and still manage to land that degree (you, in the back: stop pointing and snickering at me!)

So it means precisely nothing when someone brags about finding a Ph.D. willing to espouse utter nonsense. It happens all the time — the degree in itself is not an indicator of credibility. It always amuses me to see the creationists getting so excited at finding someone with a doctorate willing to stand up and disavow everything he supposedly learned so that he can praise Jesus and declare the earth to be only 6,000 years old.

For example, right now a creationist with a Harvard science degree is lecturing in Boston on Evolution: Bankrupt Science; Creationism: Science You Can Bank On. Obviously, Dr Nathaniel Jeanson is one of the fruit loops who plodded through a graduate program.

The good news is that the Boston Skeptics are on his tail and will be reporting on the event. I’ll be looking forward to the dissection.