A few years ago, Mel Gabler died, and I put up my response below. Now his wife, Norma Gabler, has also died. Good riddance at last. Those two did an awful amount of harm to American science education by inflicting their ignorant opinions on textbook selection in Texas.

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I read this which led to this, where I learned a few months late that Mel Gabler was dead. This Mel Gabler. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Gabler had a good 89 year run in which he spread poison and ignorance and lies, and made his wretched mark on the textbook industry. He was a dishonest old man who reviewed biology textbooks through the lens of his own stupidity and religious prejudice, and he was darned good at it.

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Here’s a representative slice of average Americana: Parade magazine. I don’t read it, and I suspect most of you don’t either, but we aren’t average—we’re freaky flaky outliers. If you want to see what ordinary Americans are thinking, though, it’s a useful place to look. Right now they have a very short article on the creation museum with a pol that asks, “Do you believe dinosaurs could have existed alongside early humans?”

About a third of the respondents currently answer “yes,” which is actually quite a bit better than I feared. The real scary part is the comments, though, and there are a lot of them. Here’s a quick sampling of the creationist point of view:

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Larry Moran sneers at the creationist habit of stoking their numbers by claiming that M.D.s are “science professionals”, and therefore bolster their generic claim that ‘growing numbers of scientists are defecting from the Darwinist camp’.

I’ll make Larry’s sneer even fiercer by pointing out that many of them are dentists.

(I have nothing against doctors and dentists, of course, and have nothing but respect for their important skills. Most are not scientists, however, and don’t think like scientists, and don’t even pay much attention to the basic scientific literature. Claiming scientific legitimacy by tallying up your fan base among dental hygenists is like claiming Al Gore should have been the president because Canadians liked him better than Bush. Worse, because scientific conclusions are not determined by popular vote.)

If you’re interested in the sordid history of bannings at Bill Dembski’s prissy little blog, here’s a compilation. It’s an ugly little story.

If you’re interested in the history of bannings here, I keep a public list. It isn’t quite so easy to get banned at Pharyngula, although a few are making a strong effort.

This story is getting a lot of attention suddenly: it’s a blog about a biologist reshelving creationist crap in bookstores. It’s good stuff … but I thought we all did this. You mean most people don’t?

Has anyone seen a positive review of Behe’s book from a science source? Discover Magazine joins the ranks of those that find it awful:

As unpersuasive as Behe’s ideas are scientifically, they are even less convincing philosophically. Behe professes agnosticism on whether the designer was a dope, a demon, or a deity, although he seems peculiarly inclined toward the second possibility. His is a strangely impoverished worldview, one that leaves little space for awe, much less for future scientific advance; he never even raises the obvious question of who the designer is and how it works. Contrast this with Darwin’s starry-eyed summation in Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

That’s pretty much my opinion, too. It’s a bizarre exercise in bogus math and bad biology to arrive at a sterile conclusion, with no reasonable future scientific efforts proposed.

Comments are still trickling in and I still get email about this article, where I explain why debate is a poor strategy for dealing with creationists. I definitely don’t argue that we should avoid engaging the public, but that there are a number of reasons why the debate format doesn’t work for resolving conflicts between legitimate science and discredited malarkey. However, I missed one.

Some of you may know that a couple of commenters here resolved to have an off-site written debate on the dependency of the universe’s existence on, specifically, the Abrahamic god. The debate is at the Topical Octagon, but after The Physicist AKA Equus Pallidus put up his first rambling shamble of a post, the debate was terminated for a very common reason: plagiarism.

There is almost no creative, original work on the creationist side. I sometimes wonder if the only reason that ID gets so much attention is that one thing the ID creationists did accomplish was to infuse a collection of new arguments into their side’s corner — over and over again, the same old arguments, even down to the same words, show up in creationist debates. It’s like the scholarly tradition in creationism is a glorified version of cut & paste, lifting paragraphs from other works and stringing them together, and Behe and company at least provided some new source texts from which to steal words.

Although IDists don’t have much new to add. The last talk I heard by Behe was virtually identical, right down to the same old jokes, to the first talk I’d heard from him, ten years before.

How can anyone be surprised at this turn of events? Governor Goodhair of Texas has appointed a flaming, blatant, unashamed creationist and friend of the Discovery Institute, Don McLeroy, to head the Texas State Board of Education. Phil Plait is not amused. But isn’t this part of the grand Republican and Texan tradition of promoting gross incompetence? Isn’t that how we got GW Bush? This is the state of Terri Leo and Mel Gabler. It’s all more of the same.

Texas is going to be soooo interesting in the next year or two. I wonder if this is where the next big court battle is going to occur? McLeroy is just the kind of conservative theocrat who’d provoke it.