Ray Comfort is sure that his new book is selling poorly because of a conspiracy among atheists to give it bad reviews on Amazon.

But he said he’s sure his book sales have been affected because of the negative reviews, “because people purchase upon other people’s opinions.”

Has he considered that the book might just be awful? No, apparently not.

Still, he said, the book can’t be too bad.

…

Comfort said the strong opposition easily is explained.

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

I know Ray is rather stupid, but who knew he could be that stupid. This has been explained to him multiple times: evolution does explain this stuff trivially. Populations evolve, not individuals, and male and female elephants evolved from populations of pre-elephants that contained males and females. Species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female — they arise by the diffusion of variation through a whole population, male and female.

Rather than a conspiracy of atheists falsely downrating his book, there is a simpler explanation for his lousy sales: it’s a piece of crap written by an incompetent and idiot, and his complaint just confirms that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“WE WILL BURY YOU!” seems to be his message in his latest complaint. He is very upset that The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is boycotting Louisiana, and he informs us all in a long argumentum ad populum that the ignorant outnumber us, addressed to the president and members of SICB.

Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don’t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They don’t share your passion for ideological purity in science classes. They have a quaint notion that science depends on the freedom to ask questions, and their insistence on academic freedom is catching on. They don’t want religion taught in the science classroom, but they know that students are not learning about all of the science surrounding evolution. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support academic freedom in the teaching of evolution in schools, and that number is rising fast — it’s up 9% in the past 3 years. People clearly resent your demand for censorship. After all, it’s their children in their schools, and they aren’t happy with a bunch of supercilious Darwinists telling them that they can’t even question Darwinism in their own classrooms. So if you’re going to boycott all the creationists who despise you, you’ll eventually have to hold all of your conventions in Madison or Ann Arbor. Keep up the arrogance and eventually you won’t have to boycott people at all. People will boycott you.

Whoa. I’m impressed.

Note the open admission that the Discovery Institute’s audience are the god-fearin’ creationists, and that the people they regard as “on their side” are plain-and-simple, unmodified creationists, not just the usual Intelligent Design creationists. That’s useful to see.

There’s also the usual distortions. People ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in the public schools — that’s what science is all about, and I would encourage kids to raise their hands and speak out in class. However, none of this argument is about squelching inquiry: it’s about whether weak and discredited ideas, like ID, ought to be given special privilege and elevated to the standard curriculum. They shouldn’t.

We’re also seeing the usual deprecation of expertise. SICB is an organization of thousands of scientists who have invested years of their life in the study of biology. They are experts. Against that, we have millions of people in Louisiana who, while competent in their own areas of work, have very little knowledge of biology. According to Michael Egnor, the people we should listen to on this relatively rarefied subject are the majority who know nothing about it. Would he be quite so sanguine if we dismissed his specialization, neurosurgery, and suggested that he needed to follow the suggestions of a roofer from Baton Rouge? Is it “censorship” that he doesn’t allow his patients’ families into the operating room to give him a hand?

Madison and Ann Arbor are both lovely places to have conventions, and I certainly wouldn’t complain if SICB held their meetings there — it’s much closer to home, for one thing. But Egnor left out a few cities. How about Berkeley and Eugene, Seattle and Tucson, New York and Philadelphia, Austin and Cleveland, Champaign-Urbana and Chapel Hill…and I could go on. These cities and university towns are all part of America, too, and they are places where we find majorities who do not accept the ideology of creationism…because their populations are better educated and less shackled to religious dogma. These are good things.

I’m also confident that the people of Louisiana are a mix of the uninformed and the scientifically competent, and that many are good people who deserve better than the falsehoods institutions like the Discovery Institute will ladle out. It would be great to have more scientific conventions in New Orleans (if nothing else, because the cuisine is fabulous). However, when the government of the state promotes policies that are damaging to science, scientists have no choice but to reject them in any way they can.

If you’re not careful, “creationists” (80% of Americans) might notice this irony: you boycott their states, but you forgot to boycott their money. If one percent of the people you’ve censored and boycotted wrote letters to their congressmen demanding a defunding of evolutionary research — a boycott of you — the grant money currently allocated to advancing Darwinist ideology (it’s ideologues, not scientists, who censor) would be re-allocated to genuine non-ideological science.

There’s a word for this: demagoguery. What Egnor proposes here is nothing less than a naked threat to use the ignorance of the mob to attack science. And you haven’t heard anything yet. Look at this attitude:

Your arrogance and disrespect for academic freedom demeans the scientific profession, and your boycott of people who don’t capitulate to your censorship is risible. You’re actually debasing Darwinism, which, after eugenics and a century and a half of third-rate science, is no mean accomplishment. Most people don’t see your refusal to visit their state as a “threat.” Honestly, they’d rather you made your boycott all-inclusive, so you’d miss all of their legislative sessions and federal court hearings as well. So back off the “boycott” stuff. Just say you misspoke, or pretend you never said it at all. You Darwinists are good at covering your tracks (remember “junk DNA”?). Keep in mind that you’re living off the people you’re censoring and boycotting. Your livelihood is dependent on their largesse, and, in “comparative biology” vernacular, it’s unwise for parasites to boycott their hosts.

My advice: just keep suckling at the public teat and pretend the boycott never happened.

Now we see exposed the Discovery Institute’s opinion of scientists: they are parasites, suckling at the public teat, and that a scientific organization’s boycott of a state is just fine…and that we should be divorced from civic responsibilities altogether.

We also see his ignorance of biology on display. Evolutionary biology is a third rate science. Why is “comparative biology” in quotes? When did parasitism become the provenance of comparative biology? It’s a concept in common use, you know. And of course we remember junk DNA — we know that most of the human genome is junk. There is no covering of any tracks there, so I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s probably yet another delusion of the creationist mind, like a schizophrenic babbling about his satellite-based mind control rays.

What we really have to remember henceforth is exactly what the Discovery Institute’s agenda actually is, and there it is in Egnor’s freely expressed opinion: the incitement of an intentionally misinformed public to silence scientific inquiry, all in the guise of ending an imaginary censorship.

But let’s leave laughing. There’s a convention in much of the kook email I receive that they howl at length at me, and then sign off with a conventional and inappropriately friendly signature that is entirely at odds with everything they wrote. Egnor fits right in.

Cordially,

Mike Egnor, M.D.

Phillip Skell has a long and sleazy history of lying to support creationism. His usual tactic (actually, his only tactic) is to claim that evolution is irrelevant to science, denying the importance of the theory to understanding discoveries about the natural world, and refusing to believe that it has any application at all to anything. In a clear and straightforward op-ed, Stuart Faulk points out how easy it is to pick up any popular science magazine and find counterexamples to Skell’s claims. And then he picks up a knife, sticks it in, and twists:

Given how easily Skell’s arguments can be dismissed, it is reasonable to ask why he would make them in the first place. He is just as capable of reading Scientific American as I am, and probably more qualified.

The short answer is that this is not a debate about factual truth and science, but about public opinion and religion. What Skell neglects to mention (but any Web search will show) is that he has long supported creationist causes. His guest viewpoint is but one of many letters supporting “intelligent design” and opposing the teaching of evolution in public schools, which he equates to “indoctrination of students to a worldview of materialism and atheism.”

That’s an important approach we have to take more often. The vocal charlatans of creationism are actually relatively few in number, and their histories need to be directly addressed and made public. Skell is most definitely not an impartial scientist looking at the evidence objectively: he has his made up, ignores the evidence (where he is even aware of it—professionally, he is a chemist), and then uses his faux authority to claim that the biological sciences lack substantial evidence that we actually have, all in the service of his religious dogma.

One interesting fact emerges at the end of the piece. Stuart Faulk is Skell’s son-in-law. I’d like to know how the family copes with Skell’s uninformed obnoxiousness…

After all, he says nice things about me and not-so-nice things about Ben Stein.

I was wondering why Harun Yahya kept sending me new copies of his remarkably tedious tome, the Atlas of Creation. It turns out he’s been busy expunging it of embarrassing errors, like the infamous caddis fly fishing lure presented as an example of a modern insect. Several of these revisions have been documented now — the Atlas evolves! I think in this case we can safely say that no intelligent design was involved.

Anytime something wrong happens, there is a Christian who will blame it on atheism and evolution. The latest is the case of the foolish woman who kept an adult chimpanzee as a pet, and got badly mauled for her trouble. This, of course, is Charles Darwin’s fault.

How is it that we live in a culture where people think it’s safe to have a chimpanzee as a pet? Where do people get the idea that we ought to take a wild animal and treat it like a human being? The chimp owner treated the animal like a son who ate at her table, slept in her house, and even drove her car.

…

Last week the world celebrated Darwin’s 200th birthday. Universities placed tributes to Darwinism on their home page (examples include Oxford and Cambridge) and major networks such as BBC ran extensive programs devoted to Darwin’s great contribution to the world.

Yet, ironically, this week we witness a brutal act that seems to logically follow from Darwin’s ideas. You may be wondering how I can possibly link Darwin to this atrocious event. But think about it, if humans are deeply related to chimps then why not expect them to act that way?

“…seems to logically follow…” — I don’t think that Mr McDowell understands that word “logic” very well. I don’t think Darwin ever endorsed the idea that one should keep large, powerful, temperamental animals with the strength to rip your arms off as pets; I’m quite confident that neither did he regard the differences between animals as trivial. I’m also even more closely related to Charles Manson than I am to any chimp, something with which even a brainwashed parrot for jebus like McDowell would agree, yet this imposes on me no desire or obligation to go on a psychopathic killing spree.

It’s funny that McDowell complains that the owner treated the chimp like a son. After all, if we obeyed the rules of his religion, this is how we should treat a son.

Police said a 58-year-old man stabbed his teenage son after he refused to take off his hat at church earlier in the day. The father and his 19-year-old son got into an argument on Sunday afternoon. That’s when police said the father went to a car, got a knife and stabbed his son in the left buttock and fled.

Quick, shut down the churches! Christianity leads to filial buttock mutilation!

They gave a gang of Discovery Institute hacks a free run to publish their delusions (bad). Then, under protest, they gave Jerry Coyne an opportunity to rebut (good). Now, after all that, they add another, final word to the whole mess…and guess who they published?

Phillip Skell.

Perhaps you newbies to Pharyngula have never heard of the fellow, but he’s a wacky evolution denialist who got obsessed with me several years ago, and dunned me with email. (Actually, I think he might be one of the first kooks to inspire my “I get email” series.)

He’s got one note that he plays repeatedly and discordantly: evolution doesn’t matter. It’s a scam. Biologists just made it all up. You don’t need to use evolutionary theory to explain anything. Nothing has changed in his Forbes article, except that he must be on his meds now: he’s dialed back the crazy shrillness, but he’s still whining about the same silly point.

WIll Forbes get the message? They had to go to the Discovery Institute to find their initial mob of loons, and now to reply to Coyne (with a mass of irrelevancies, of course), they had to really scrape deep in the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps next they’ll give some space to Ray Comfort, or the Time Cube guy.

Ray Comfort desperately wants to debate Richard Dawkins, and has even offered to pay him $10,000. Dawkins has a counter-offer: he’ll do it for $100,000, to be donated to the RDF. Comfort has now upped the ante to $20,000. It’s not enough.

I would encourage teams of creationist philanthropists to get together, scrape up the $100K, and pass it along to Comfort, who will then deposit it in the coffers of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Not only would creationists have finally done something productive and contributed to the promulgation of reason for once, but the spectacle of this debate would be a source of endless hilarity for years to come.

Richard does have a few other requests: that Comfort reprise his banana argument, and that the event would have to be recorded by the RDF team, for the enlightenment of the world. It’s not too much to ask.