And deserved it is, in this remarkably ignorant article by a creationist named Peter Heck. It starts out very, very badly.

It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually condescending evolutionary naturalists can be. Keep in mind, these are folks who believe that an indescribably tiny wad of nothingness exploded into a fully functional, structured, and ordered universe of orbiting planets and complex creatures without any supernatural agency involved. They are the ones who cling to a theory known as spontaneous generation – the notion that dead matter can just suddenly pop to life. They are the ones who champion a man (Charles Darwin) who suggested that Africans were more closely related to gorillas than Caucasians. They are the ones who believe that a wolf-like animal with hooves took to the water, lost its legs, and morphed into a whale (Cetaceans). If anyone should go easy on the intellectual condescension, it’s these people. But they don’t.

Wow. Let’s begin at the top.

Scientists believe that the universe began in the Big Bang because a large body of astronomical observation and mathematical work provides evidence that it happened. It’s odd, it’s counterintuitive to us short-lived humans who don’t see a large enough span of time to see changes on an astronomical scale, and there certainly are a lot of unanswered questions about what was going on in the first instant of our origin…but the physics all points in that direction. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who believe the universe was poofed into existence pretty much as it is right now by a snap of a god’s fingers 6,000 years ago, and the reason they think that is because priests of a tribe of nomadic goat-herders said so. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

Biologists recognize that the basis of life is chemistry — that we are the product of some wonderfully interesting biochemical reactions. We do not believe in spontaneous generation, but we do know that the boundary between biology and chemistry is very, very fuzzy indeed, and that there was a transition in the history of life where chemical replicators gradually acquired sufficient complexity that they became the basis for life. Again, this is the product of evidence and experiment: we see molecular indicators of the common origin of all life, and that we see even in our own cells the hallmarks of a history with a much simpler origin. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who believe a god independently created each species fixed and eternal, and that there are few enough of these unchangeable forms that they could all be loaded on a big boat. Why do they think so? Because a few Jewish poets and mystics scribbled down a page and a half of metaphor in an old book. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

Charles Darwin had complex views on race (I recommend Desmond and Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)} for a good overview). He did have the common biases of his time, and certainly did believe that white Europeans were the best and most advanced of all peoples. However, the creationists of the time also shared those views, and in many cases were much worse. Louis Agassiz, for instance, thought that black and white people were independently created; he found Darwin’s view, that Europeans shared blood ancestry with Africans, to be repugnant in the extreme. The views of the religious were divided between slavery-promoting, black-denigrating believers in plural origins who thought blacks were marked as inferior by their god, and abolitionists who read the Bible as describing a brotherhood of all peoples. Darwin’s idea of evolution actually provided scientific support for the unity camp — and he himself found slavery abhorrent. To claim that Darwin was deplorable because he was a racist is both a gross misreading of history (nothing new to creationists) and a logical fallacy (also nothing new), since his views on race have nothing to do with the validity of his scientific ideas. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

The evolution of whales is also a matter of fact and evidence. We have the fossils; we can see a pattern of change across geological time, from those hooved terrestrial quadrupeds to flippered ambush predators adapted to living in the shallows to four-flippered, paddle-tailed swimmers to obligate water-dwellers with flukes and no hind limbs, with many stages in between. It is a beautiful and strongly-supported example of macroevolutionary change. So yes, we believe it — you’d have to be blind to ignore the testimony of the rocks. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who are shown the succession of forms and retreat to arguments that they’re just the animals who missed Noah’s big boat. The reason they think so is because a century of ludicrous apologists for fundamentalist faith have been frantically denying the emerging evidence. Who should be intellectually condescending here?

The rest of Heck’s article professes to cite specific instances of evolutionary problems. Swine flu isn’t an example of evolution — it’s just microevolution. He makes up stories to support his claim.

If Darwin was right, we should be able to observe and replicate gene mutations that yield new information nearly everywhere we look. We simply cannot.

But we do. All the time. The mechanisms are documented and demonstrated, and we even have thorough experimental confirmation of the acquisition of new genetic properties in evolving populations.

Heck continues his creationist twaddle with more outrageous claims.

Meanwhile, what we can find are innumerable cases of destructive gene mutations, where we end up with less genetic information than what was originally present. Take the recent discovery of perfectly preserved octopus remains. The discovery revealed that these ancient octopi actually had more genetic information than do modern octopi. Call it “Darwin in reverse.” Both horizontal and destructive mutations support the creationist model…and both devastate Darwin’s.

Errm, what? I wrote about those Cretaceous octopods — there was absolutely nothing in the work to quantify genetic information. What they revealed was a pattern of change — that macroevolution thing that Heck denies — in support of evolutionary explanations for octopus origins. And evolutionary models do not demand any direction for information; lineages can be streamlined and simplified, or they can become more elaborate and complicated. Everything is in response to local opportunities.

Who should be intellectually condescending here? I think the side that presents the evidence, actually seeks out new knowledge to test their conclusions, and actually demonstrates some knowledge and scholarship deserves to be a little uppity and arrogant. It’s the people like Peter Heck, who are utterly ignorant of the science, mangle what little they know, and actively mislead people about the evidence who might deserve a little condescension. My only reservation about that is that I tend to favor treating ignorant, lying twerps with open contempt instead.

A nice, specific request: name a gene that shows no signs of an evolutionary origin.

The argument has long been highly asymmetric. Scientist find a gene, and what do they do? Figure out what it does, and dig into the databases to find its relatives within that organism or in other species. Creationists claim genes can’t be created without the intervention of a designer, and what do they do? Nothing.

I like the title of this post: Texas School Board votes on the age of the Universe. In case you were curious, the board decreed 11:3 that maybe it isn’t the age all those egghead physicists, geologists, and astronomers say it is.

VenomFangX is one of those semi-legendary creationists, one so inane that it’s hard to believe. He had a website where he kept all of his ridiculous youtube videos, but it’s about to disappear. If you go there now, this is what you’ll see:

Oh, wow, that’s going to leave a psychological scar.

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As long as we’re talking smack about creationists, don’t forget to click on this link and help me win an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind. Click it lots.

The smug and rather imbecilic face in this video belongs to Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, who was interviewed on a conservative talk show, Fox & Friends. Watch it at your peril. Like the recent Matthews/Tancredo incident, it’s two people who know nothing about science babbling at each other.

At the beginning, the host says,

Your main problem with science books is that they take a one-sided look at evolution.

No one seems to notice that this is a show that claims to be examining a “white-hot controversy” with one guest discussing only the Discovery Institute’s position. Hmmm.

Luskin parrots a couple of Discovery Institute talking points, and he lies, lies, lies. He claims all the biology textbooks are completely wrong, and that all they want is for good science to be taught. His evidence? The first thing he talks about is Haeckel’s embryos, and repeats the oft-told canard that Haeckel’s embryos are presented uncritically — that they are fraudulent, the biologists know it, and they still use them.

Oh, dog. Not again. I have been all over the Haeckel story so many times. It’s not true: relatively few textbooks use the Haeckel/Romanes diagram, and when they do, they present it in a historical context. And the Discovery Institute doesn’t object to the obsolete figure itself, since they also castigate textbooks that use photos of embryos. Vertebrate embryos at the phylotypic or pharyngula stage do show substantial similarities to one another that are evidence of common descent. That’s simply a fact. The creationists are just frantic to suppress that piece of information, I guess.

The second piece of ‘evidence’ Luskin throws out is another one that pisses me off: he cites the New Scientist article that claims Darwin was wrong! I told you all that we were going to be seeing a lot of quote mining of that blatantly misleading cover — as I also told you, they ignore the content that says the opposite, and they ignore the strongly worded rebuttals that scientists have published. New Scientist has a lot to answer for; these creationists are desperately mendacious and will be flaunting that rag at us for years to come, claiming that New Scientist has shown that Darwin’s tree of life is all wrong, yet we still keep teaching it.

Luskin’s new twist is that “when you look at one gene, it gives you one version of the tree of life, and when you look at a different gene, it gives you an entirely different tree of life”. Of course, if you actually read the NS article, it’s about horizontal gene flow in bacteria making the root of the tree of life more syncytial, saying nothing about the variation you get when you look at single genes. Luskin’s argument is completely bogus. It’s like saying that when we look at the history of the English language and pluck out one word, it may have a different etymology and rate of change than another, therefore English could not have evolved.

Luskin has had this stuff explained to him repeatedly, and it never sinks in…or more likely, as a dishonest propagandist, he chooses to disregard all the demonstrations of the problems with his claims. How he can accuse scientists of peddling fraudulent evidence when he sits there and lies nonstop is beyond me.

Chris Matthews, who has lately been hammering the Republicans for their problem with science in general and evolution in particular, had a guest on to ‘debate’ the issue: Tom Tancredo, the ignorant Republican congressman who ran for president in the last election, and was one of the candidates who proudly announced that he did not believe in evolution. It was awful. Two people who know nothing about the science babbling at each other. While Matthews’ heart might have been in the right place, he was more interested in stammering out apologies for believing a god might have guided evolution, and sat their stunned and incomprehending as Tancredo blithered out falsehood after falsehood. Tancredo was simply inane.

What an appalling waste of time. At one point, the two were proudly comparing their backgrounds in science — they both went to Catholic schools as kids. In other words, all the knowledge they have is based on the brief high school level exposure to evolution they might have gotten 30 or 40 years ago, and both have gone on in careers where they’ve never had to think about science again. Why are they debating evolution with one another, and why does MSNBC think this tripe is worth airing to a national audience? Both were out of their depth.

Matthews should have brought on someone qualified to address the topic. We have a host of smart scientists who seem to be fairly comfortable standing before a lay audience and explaining the basics of evolution: bring in Eugenie Scott, Neil Shubin, Jerry Coyne, Kevin Padian, or even Ken Miller (especially if you want to go over and over that nonsensical line that god did it via evolution): any one of them would have destroyed Tancredo. Or even me: I don’t have the prestige of any of those luminaries, but even a guy from a small liberal arts college can demolish Tancredo’s awful arguments.

So what did Tancredo claim?

“There’s Darwinian evolution, and there’s Intelligent Design…the one is equal to the other in terms of the number of people who support it in terms…especially of their backgrounds and the research out there.” Absolutely false. If you go to any biologist, there is maybe a one in a thousand chance you’ll find that he or she gives even a moment’s consideration to intelligent design. ID is a fringe theory held by a tiny minority of scientists. The number of IDists in biology is probably about equal to the number of kooks who have made it through graduate school. To claim parity is simply a damnable lie.

“Crossing a species there is no evidence of that you have to make an assumption. I’m just saying that assuming that is just as tough as assuming that there is intelligent design.” No. We do of course have direct evidence of interspecies hybrids, if that’s what he’s talking about; we also have evidence of species evolving into new species, if that’s what he’s trying to say. His conclusion is sloppy thinking: it is easier to assume natural processes occurred than to postulate magic events without evidence. At least for a scientist, that is — deranged right wing politicians may differ.

“In intelligent design, there is no argument about whether the world was made 8 thousand or 8 billion years ago.” This is a symptom of a problem, not a virtue. The evidence is overwhelming that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Any so-called scientific discipline that believes there is ambiguity and that 8 thousand years is just as good a guess as 8 billion is bankrupt.

“You can see on the micro level we see evolution but we cannot make the assumption on it about the macro level cause there’s nothing there to look at, we have no scientific data.” I have a special level of contempt for people who make this bogus macro/micro level argument — they always get it backwards. Macro evolution is on rock solid ground, and has been for 150 years. Darwin’s work was largely on a macroevolutionary level: the evidence from paleontology, biogeography, systematics, comparative anatomy and physiology, and embryology, all disciplines that Darwin drew upon, describes the big picture of life’s history, and shows common descent. In recent years, molecular biology has provided an even greater body of evidence; where Darwin had to speculate that maybe there were multiple origins for the different kingdoms of life, we now know that they can all be traced back to one common root. When a developmental biologist compares the molecules behind the evolution of eyes in a sea anemone and a cow, he is describing macroevolution. We have scientific data out the wazoo on this one.

In Darwin’s day, micro evolution was the wobbly leg of the structure of evolutionary theory. He didn’t have an explanation for heredity. That has also changed, of course: we now have a robust understanding of genetics, and especially of population genetics. Speciation is complex and there are all kinds of details that we don’t fully understand, but it also is not doubted by scientists.

“Here’s a group of people highly educated, well rounded, and well respected in their field who believe in evolution, Darwinian evolution. Here’s a group of people, highly respected, who believe in intelligent design. These are two theories.” The people who believe in intelligent design do not have any kind of parity with the proponents of evolution. Few IDists have any training in the relevant biology; most are philosophers, theologians, lawyers, engineers, and dentists, among other fields. The few who do have legitimate qualifications in any kind of biological sub-discipline, like Michael Behe, are either pariahs in their own departments or have to seek shelter under the umbrella of conservative think tanks, like the Discovery Institute.

And no, they are not two theories. Evolution is a legitimate theory in the scientific sense: it is well supported by the evidence, and provides a productive, integrated, explanatory framework that guides ongoing research and ties together a large body of data. Intelligent Design creationism does not qualify as a scientific theory at all. At best, it is a highly speculative hypothesis, one assembled without any reasonable evidence, and so far it has been a spectacular failure at provoking any useful research.

Tom Tancredo is an ignorant old fool who knows nothing and simply puked up creationist talking points. Chris Matthews also knows nothing and was a lousy representative for the scientific view. The whole show was pointless, except as an aid to creationists who want to sow doubt and confusion.