Mike Dunford takes my side in the War of Angry Words.

A while back, I wrote a response to Coulter’s piss-poor excuse for a book, Godless. It’s actually fairly long and substantial; since there was absolutely no accurate statement of either fact or theory on the subject of evolution in the entire book, and since there was nothing specific to address, I took the time to make a link-rich collection of sources where anyone could look up the evidence for evolution, with suggestions of places where one could look up the basics of the theory. Writing a line-by-line rebuttal would have been a massive task, and one that Coulter fans would have ignored anyway.

At the end of that post, I made a challenge. I said that I would make a comprehensive, detailed reply to any one paragraph in the chapters on evolution if anyone who’d read the book would come right out and state that it was an accurate and honest and supportable claim about the subject. I’m still waiting for anyone to stand up for Ann’s words. No one has, and it’s been about 9 months now.

I guess even her fans can’t defend anything in that book. Either that, or they just got it for the pictures.

The IDists love to quote me, because I am rather militant in my opposition to their lies. They are particularly fond of one particular quote^* that they’ve even used in their fund-raising literature. They think it’s damning; some of my fellow anti-creationists swoon and protest when they hear the words, but they tend to be faint-hearted anyway. But here’s what’s really amusing.

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This one has been around for almost a year now, but if you’re getting tired of Conservapedia, take a stroll through the CreationWiki. It doesn’t generally have that tone of having been written by a gang of third-graders, but there’s plenty of stupid on display.

(via Unscrewing The Inscrutable)

Many will argue with the conclusion of my title, but there are so many examples of outright intellectual vacuity from people who anoint themselves with the title “conservative” that it is fast becoming a synonym for “ignoramus”. We’ve lately been laughing ourselves silly at the absurdity called Conservapædia, but here’s another flabby, nutritionally empty scrap of junk food to chew over: a site called The Intellectual Conservative. In particular, I call your attention to yet another right wing rejection of a valid, well-established science by someone completely oblivious to either the principles or the evidence, in an article asking whether biology has a “Rational Evolutionary Hypothesis?” The author doesn’t seem to know anything at all about biology, but he has heard two names — Darwin and Dawkins — and no, sir, he doesn’t like ’em. He dislikes ’em so much that he’s willing to lie about them.

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State senatory Raymond Finney of Tennessee (a retired physician—hey, we’ve been making Orac squirm uncomfortably a lot lately) has just filed a resolution that asks a few questions. Actually, he’s demanding that the Tennessee Department of Education answer these questions within a year or … well, I don’t know what. He might stamp his foot and have a snit.

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This fellow Mike up around Toronto asked me for assistance a while back—he was planning to attend the Bible Skeptics Conference, an event put on by the Institute for Creation Research. I couldn’t say much, but I did suggest he get in touch with Larry Moran at the U Toronto.

Well, he attended and survived. It’s a good summary of the usual combination of drivel and lunacy that comes out of these events. He also attended a second talk by Bruce Malone. Malone, by the way, was the fellow who was speaking in the Twin Cities last week, to whose talk on Mt St Helens as evidence for a young earth I was invited by a creationist. This is the instance where I begged off by saying I wasn’t a geologist…and, amusingly, the creationist admitted that was OK, since the speaker wasn’t, either.

There’s going to be a third write-up soon. I’m pretty sure his sanity survived the harrowing, although I do have one concern. Mike told me in email that Larry Moran was a “nice guy”—I’m suspecting that there might have been some residual impairment of his mental facilities. Everyone knows that Larry is godless curmudgeon.

Let this be a lesson to you: being a moderate will not spare you from the reactionary criticisms of the lunatic right. Chris Mooney is an unbeliever, but he’s also one of those softies who thinks atheists ought to be less vigorous in their assault on the public sphere (I recall arguing with him a few times about that). I confess to feeling a little schadenfreude that now the Discovery Institute pillories him for daring to be a secular humanist. The DI doesn’t like theistic evolutionists either, though, so it’s not like it’s a big surprise that they’d have the vapors over a secular humanist.

Also, it’s Casey Luskin, attack mouse, leading the charge. It’s hard to get too worked up over a squeak from that incompetent joke.

He’s baaaack. That creationist surgeon, Michael Egnor, keeps flaunting his ignorance — and his verbosity — in the comments.

Your assertion that you answered my challenge ‘perfectly’ is, well, not perfect. I asked for a measurement of new information, not anecdotes about new functions. You and Nick have managed to generate molecular ‘just-so’ stories, anecdotes without actual quantitative measurement, for your central hypothesis that Darwinism can account for biological complexity. I guess ‘just-so’ stories are in your genes.

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