The Discovery Institute is stepping up their smear campaign against Randy Olson and Flock of Dodos, and the biggest issue they can find is their continued revivification of Haeckel’s biogenetic law. They’ve put up a bogus complaint that Olson was lying in the movie, a complaint that does not hold up, as I’ll show you.

First, though, let’s simplify the debate. The Discovery Institute position is that any text that shows Ernst Haeckel’s ancient diagram of various embryos is guilty of fraudulently distorting the evidence for evolution. They have accused scientists of a conspiracy of lies, of using this known false diagram to buttress evolutionary theory.

If this were the case, then the worst case of mass market fraud around would have to be Wells’ own Icons of Evolution: it contains 4 versions of the Haeckelian diagram, including the original, and talks about it for 28 pages. Obviously, this is a criminal conspiracy to promote phony evidence for evolution.

Wait, wait, you protest: Wells’ book was explaining that Haeckelian recapitulation was wrong, and that there were both errors and intentional misrepresentations of embryos in that old work. That should be acceptable.

I would agree, except that the textbooks Wells is damning in Icons often do exactly the same thing! Those that do mention Haeckel and his biogenetic law do so as an example of a historically significant error. Some go on to explain what was correct and what was wrong in his ideas, but basically all are merely pointing out that here was an interesting but failed explanation from the late 19th century, that nonetheless exposes an interesting phenomenon that needs to be understood.

I would add that progress in evolutionary biology has led to better explanations of the phenomenon that vertebrate embryos go through a period of similarity: it lies in conserved genetic circuitry that lays down the body plan. Intelligent Design creationism has contributed absolutely nothing to either refuting Haeckelian ideas, which was the product of working biologists at the end of the 19th century, nor has it generated any better, testable explanations for the conservation of embryonic body plans.

Now what about the Discovery Institute’s claim that Olson was lying about Haeckel’s representation in modern texts?

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This is absolutely brilliant. MnCSE has taken advantage of Google’s ability to set up custom search filters to create special purpose search engines.

• MnCSE Real Science Search Engine: This one explicitly excludes over 300 creationist sites from its results—if you want to search for a general topic of evolutionary interest while cutting out the worst of the crap, this is the one for you.

• MnCSE Snow White Search Engine: Quite a bit narrower in scope, this one only returns .edu and .gov sites.

• MnCSE "Eat the Apple Dearie" Search Engine: Want a laugh? Searches here return only stuff from the 300+ sites excluded in the first search.

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?