Who do you think the brilliant minds at the Discovery Institute would recruit to review Sean Carroll’s new book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}? Somebody with some knowledge of biology, perhaps, some faint whiff of respectable biological credentials, who might be able to actually assess (and in the DI’s case, cunningly distort) the science in the book? They’ve got so many legitimate scientists to choose from!

So of course, the duty falls on Casey Luskin’s slender, slippery, snake-like shoulders.

Oh, man, it is an awful review. It goes on for a tedious 15 pages, carps on Darwin and Darwinism 47 times, and right from the starting gate is one long whine that Carroll is preaching Darwinism as a religion (here’s a wonderfully representative example of the kind of evidence Luskin uses: Carroll ‘interestingly always capitalizes the term “Nature”‘ [emphasis in original]. Damned by a convention of the English¹ language!), all in the most plodding prose. These are words that must be read in a nasal monotone for their full impact, I suspect.

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I like Seattle. I grew up near there. But it’s got two things that annoy me: Starbucks coffee (OK, but overpriced and a little too pretentious) and the Discovery Institute (unspeakably vile inanity). Unfortunately, the proximity of those two institutions seems to encourage them to ooze into bed together and spawn expensive coffee with stupid ideas. They’ve done this before, publishing tripe from Wesley Smith on their cups, and now they’ve gotten worse, smearing lies from Jonathan Wells across the cups.

“Darwinism’s impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism’s connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record, and the record is not pretty.”

Dr. Jonathan Wells,
biologist and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design

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“Hi, kids! My name is Barbie, and I’m like Britanny’s aunt, and I’m a model, you know? And I don’t like math? And you know, I never use math? But you know, when you grow up, you can just hire an accountant, so you don’t need math! Skip math class and hang out in the girl’s room touching up your makeup!”

“Greetingth, young mathterth. I am Igor, thon of Igor, father of Igor. I dig graveth for a living. You don’t need to read to do thith work: a thtrong back, a lack of thcrupleth, and a willingneth to do dirty work will carry you a long way. The mathter may thend you to fetch thingth now and then, but by not reading the labelth on the jarth, you will get fun thurpritheth! Tell your English teacherth they are only good for thpare partth.”

“Dudes and dudettes! Have I got good new-ews for you-oos. I’m Pauly Shore, the wea-sel, and that’s my nephew, the lit-tle wea-sel, eating paste over there…and guess what? No, guess what? There’s a mar-ket for being really, really, really dumb! Don’t go to school, PAR-TAY!”

“My name is Dr. Michael Egnor, M.D., and I am a neurosurgeon. Doctors don’t study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no ‘professors of evolution’ in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools.”

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In case you ever doubted that the Discovery Institute’s real goal is the promulgation of ignorance, that’s a genuine quote: Michael Egnor is directly addressing high school kids and telling them they don’t need to learn basic biology, because he doesn’t use it. I well believe he doesn’t — he does seem to be woefully ignorant of the subject, that’s for sure — but then, he’s not asking the kinds of questions that are answered with evolutionary biology. I don’t expect my auto mechanic to have a mastery of evolutionary principles, either, but I’d be a bit pissed off if she were telling the school board to shut down everything but the shop classes at the high school.

That same arrogant ignorance also leads him to misrepresent modern medicine. Of course there are doctors who study evolutionary biology and use it in their research, and there are professors who study evolutionary issues in medical schools. Egnor is being as unethical and dishonest as my imaginary career day advocates who suggest that their personal stupidity about a subject means it has no utility in any context at all.

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Check in to the Panda’s Thumb —Burt Humburg has finished a rebuttal that shreds Egnor. Northstate Science has more, ERV tears him a new one, and Afarensis exposes more lies.

My kitchen sink has a problem. Something has broken inside the Moen faucet, so that the handle is loose and only marginally effective. I’m thinking I should run down to the hardware store and get a new faucet assembly, and get under the sink with a pipe wrench. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

Right away, I run into an obstacle. I get down to the basement to fetch my wrench, and there’s one of the local ministers sitting on the toolbox. “Have you tried the incredible power of prayer yet, son?” he asked. I said no, of course not. I’m trying to fix a broken faucet. And then he gave me one of those pitying looks and tried to convince me that not only could Jesus fix my faucet, he would give me wine on tap. So I told him to get his fat ass off my toolbox and out of my house, and he stomped off.

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Nah, I haven’t bothered to listen to the Luskin/Egnor podcast from the Discovery Institute—I trust Orac’s summary enough that I know it’s a load of the same arrogant, clueless BS he was spinning here a while back.

There’s not a lot of substance to this short video, but it is a last chance to see shots of Kent Hovind’s Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida. It was shut down at the time it was photographed — the poor man refused to get building permits, so county authorities closed his little ‘theme park’ — and now that he’s in jail, I imagine it will all wither away into shabby, weathered plywood and cockroach-infested abandoned shacks. At least, we hope so.

Youtube has spawned a few copycats, and now there’s one called GodTube.com—I think you can figure out what it’s about. I’d be willing to let it be, just as I don’t bother much with XTube (yes, there’s one just for porn!)—if they want to masturbate quietly in private, I’m not going to bother the little wankers. Unfortunately, as you ought to expect, it’s also a haven for creationists, right now largely consisting of some of the dumbest videos ever in a series called “Chatting with Charlie”. Charlie is very confused and not very bright; he’s a kind of Kent Hovind on quaaludes. For example, take a look at his Four Problems with Evolution, which consists of:

• Second Law of Thermodynamics. That tired old fiction—c’mon, Charlie, if the SLoT prohibited evolution, your refrigerator wouldn’t work, and you wouldn’t have progressed beyond a little slime in your mom’s fallopian tubes.

• Fossil Gaps. Ho hum, you should be falling asleep by this point—but of course there are transitional fossils. Charlie is just ignorant.

• No Known Mechanism. At this point, Charlie’s gears are slipping. Sure, there’s a mechanism—that’s what Darwin came up with, but apparently and unsurprisingly, Charlie hasn’t read any of that. Instead, he babbles about how if you puree a frog he won’t come back, and dogs don’t change into cats.

• Finally, he leaves us hanging with the claim that “The World is not 4½ billion years old,” and he claims there is growing evidence that the world is young (not). He said he’ll get to that in another video, but sorry, Charlie, you bored me so much I couldn’t bother looking for it.

GodTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Him.” I think it should be “Reinforcing the stereotype that Christians are morons since 2007.”