Those are two subjects that leave me queasily nauseated, so this time I’ll let John Lynch have the honor of poking about in the puke.

And it’s a dud. They’ve got two complaints against Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos posted, neither of which are particularly stunning.

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The other day, I shredded Pat Boone for mindlessly parroting the Lady Hope story. You’ll have to take a look at the Pat Boone evolution article now, though: mysteriously, that entire paragraph has vanished without acknowledgment. Aren’t computers wonderful?

Alas, the rest of the article is still there, and it’s still crap. If we take it apart paragraph by paragraph, can we make the whole thing disappear?

Correcting Jonathan Wells’ misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He’s been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he’s just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he’s trying to argue for his abuse of the term “Darwinism”, which has steadily become a term of art for the rantings of creationists in addition to its more specific meanings.

Here’s his most unpromising start to his letter:

In a recent column (“Churches shouldn’t buy into Darwinists’ ploys,” 1/29), I distinguished between “evolution” as change over time, and “Darwinism” as the theory that all living things are descendants of a common ancestor, modified by unguided processes such as random mutation and natural selection. I criticized Evolution Sunday for disguising the latter (which is scientifically and religiously controversial) as the former (which nobody denies).

Evolution Sunday originator Michael Zimmerman responded (“Writer missed point of Evolution Sunday,” 2/5) that “Darwinism is a term that is almost exclusively used by creationists to attack evolution.” Yet prominent biologists Ernst Mayr (“The Growth of Biological Thought”) and Stephen Jay Gould (“The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”) often used “Darwinism” as I used it above, and the term occurs regularly in scientific journals. By trying to discredit the more accurate (though controversy-provoking) term “Darwinism” and insisting on the more ambiguous (and innocuous) term “evolution,” Zimmerman proves my point.

It’s the old microevolution vs. macroevolution shell game with different names. He wants to relabel microevolution as evolution, and “Darwinism” as macroevolution, while also making the false claim that evolution/microevolution is undeniable (correct), while “Darwinism”/macroevolution/common descent is scientifically controversial (it isn’t, except in the specific details).

He should have stopped there, and I would have just rolled my eyes at the boring old creationist boilerplate, but no…in his second paragraph he goes on to try and support those claims. If you know Wells like I know Wells, then you also know that whenever that guy attempts serious scholarship, you’re either going to witness a hilarious pratfall or a con man’s sleight of hand, or both. And when he cites an authority like Gould or Mayr, who also happen to be dead, you can trust him to completely misrepresent their views.

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Carl Zimmer tells us that there are going to be showings of Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos all across the country next week—do you know where your nearest exhibition will be going on? Here it is for us Minnesota people, along with a little rebuttal of a Discovery Institute hissy fit:

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Smarmy Sal Cordova, the Eddie Haskell of the Intelligent Design movement, is at it again, with a post in which he pretends to be competent at information theory. It is with great delight that I watch Tyler DiPietro and Mark Chu-Carroll hand his ass back to him. I know full well the creationist clowns are utterly ignorant of biology; it’s interestingly consistent to see that they also know nothing about astronomy and mathematics, and as the Dover trial showed, they’re complete boobs about the law. What exactly are they supposed to be good at again?

It isn’t just biology that creationists like to mangle—watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of “stellar evolution”. She trots out the whole menagerie of creationist canards in a bizarre attempt to defend the wacky Walt Brown and dismiss whole chunks of physics and astronomy.

It just goes to show that there’s something about the word “evolution” that unhinges these kooks. Everyone does know that biological evolution and stellar evolution are completely unrelated processes that don’t share any mechanisms, right?

Pat Boone has another article on evolution in WingNutDaily. It does not disappoint in its off-the-scale stupidity. Just one paragraph is enough to tell you it’s a waste of time.

But in a fascinating book, John Myers’ “Voices from the Edge of Eternity,” we find the detailed personal account of Lady Hope, of Northfield, England, who visited the aging scientist often at his bedside during his last days. It’s too long to recount well here, but she tells of the Bible he was reading constantly and of the worship services that took place regularly in the summerhouse in his garden. She says that when she brought up the controversy still raging between believers in the Genesis account of creation and the growing group of scientists and teachers dismissing that account in favor of his “The Origin of Species” and related theories, he seemed distressed. And “a look of agony came over his face as he said ‘I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time about everything. To my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.'”

Lady Hope was a good evangelical Christian—that is, she was a shameless liar, fraud, and fool. I can see where Pat Boone might feel some affinity for her dishonest propaganda. It also explains how he can close with a quote from another liar for Christ (Moonie version):

Now, Dr. Jonathan Wells states flatly, “I think in 50 years, Darwinian evolution will be gone from the science curriculum. People will look back on it and ask how anyone could, in their right mind, have believed this, because it’s so implausible when you look at the evidence.”

But 50 years could be enough to destroy the faith of two generations of our young, enough to replace it with a bankrupt false religion. Will we have the courage, the gumption, to make sure that doesn’t happen?

Wells is wrong, of course; the only way we can strip evolution from the science curriculum is by destroying science in this country altogether. If that’s the promise of these creationists, let’s hope we have the courage to destroy faith even more quickly.

We’ve been found out. We’ve been trying to pass as simple, innocent, law-abiding members of society, but insiders have spilled the beans: we evilutionists are actually murderous, deranged terrorists.

Tens of thousands of French schools and universities have received copies of a Turkish book refuting Darwin’s theory of evolution and describing it as “the true source of terrorism.”

Oh, yeah. Much worse than fundamentalist Islam. And it’s more than just a vague accusation: they deliver the specifics.

The book features a photograph of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center with the caption: “Those who perpetuate terror in the world are in fact Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that values and incites conflict.”

Those guys who hijacked the planes and flew them into buildings? All in the name of Darwin. It wasn’t the promise of virgins in the afterlife that got them motivated, the night before they were busily totting up all their relatives and estimating IBD coefficients, and blew themselves up in the name of inclusive fitness.

I’m sure all those madrassas have got copies of the Origin rather than the Koran; it’s such a great book for stirring up the bloodlust. Mohammed Atta was probably waving a copy around to rally his co-conspirators.

The source for all this astounding information was Harun Yahya, the Islamic creationist…would a creationist lie to you?