How odd. That little crank site that Bill Dembski runs has intentionally removed itself from the Google indexes: no search is going to turn up a link to Uncommon Descent. Elsberry speculates that it’s to remove the possibility of their penchant for revisionism being discovered.

I applaud this move. I suggest that the next step is to voluntarily remove their url and ip address from the DNS registry. We shall all be simultaneously dazzled by their technical prowess and absolutely confounded by our inability to point to the stupidity of the Dembskiites. That’ll teach us.

This weekend, I read a couple of stories about people teaching about evolution. As you might expect, these generally aren’t articles that fill me with joy.

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Chris Mooney gave a talk in Seattle, and you know who else is up there in my home town: the Discovery Institute. They tried to go on the offensive and sic their version of an attack dog on him…which was, amusingly enough, Casey Luskin. This is the kind of attack dog that goes “yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap,” though, and annoys you by peeing on your shoes. His initial volley was this:

Why do so many people eagerly listen to a journalist with neither scientific nor legal training discuss a complex scientific and legal issue like intelligent design?

It is awkwardly ironic for an unqualified stooge of the Discovery Institute to question anyone’s credentials; if we start down that path, it’s going to lead to pointing out that very, very few of the people at that institute have any credentials in biology at all, and that maybe we should wonder why anyone should listen to a collection of ideologues with degrees in philosophy and law and theology when they pontificate on science (although, to give the other side of the argument, one of their favorite people, Ann Coulter, thinks “biologists are barely scientists,” so maybe they think the dearth of fellows with training in evolution is a plus).

But I’m not going to go down that path. I don’t think the formal credentials are as important as that gang of poseurs and con-men would like to believe.

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Red State Rabble declares that we must stand united against the common enemy, creationism and such anti-scientific forces of unreason that threaten our secular institutions. That’s a nice, fuzzy statement, which I personally suspect is unrealistic and unworkable, but let’s give it a try.

Our first test: the Pope has made an interesting statement.

Pope Benedict XVI on Monday issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory, calling it “unreasonable”.

Speaking to a 300,000-strong crowd in this German city, the former theological watchdog said that, according to such theories derived from Charles Darwin’s work, the universe is “the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable”.

He has also just spoken out against secular societies—it seems that secularism is a greater problem than radical Islam.

But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech, and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s worries.

I presume we all going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in agreement that the Pope is wrong, he has completely misrepresented evolutionary theory, and that he should not be concerned about secular society—it is every person’s privilege to refuse to participate in any religion? We should all deplore his fallacious intrusion into a scientific matter, and all of us who are together on the side of science should unambiguously repudiate his opinion.

In the spirit of our shared community, I’ll step aside and refrain from chewing out the Pope, and defer that privilege to my colleague, Ken Miller, who is always willing to draft letters criticizing those who harm the cause of getting the public to recognize the validity of science. Perhaps he can draft a rollicking good letter telling the Pope where he can get off? I think it should definitely mention that Pope Benedict’s clerical status gives him absolutely, positively no credibility or status in assessing biological issues, and perhaps points out that we all stand as one against efforts to undermine science, whether they’re made by a creationist pope or some uppity god-hating atheist.

It should be something we can all agree on.

To unity!

Wilkins is keeping us busy lately: he also has a a whole series on why creationists are creationists. The short answer to the problem he gives is to teach them the process of science, not the rote solutions, and to catch them early—I agree, college is too late. I think he missed one other corrective though. He has a diagram illustrating the forces on a growing mind that drive people towards science, or towards pro-tradition, strongly anti-science attitudes. I can’t help but notice that all the “folk-based heuristics” are driving attitudes towards the anti-science position.

There must be some folk-based heuristics that promote good science. Shouldn’t one of our strategies be to root out the anti-science forces at the earliest ages, replacing them with those science based heuristics or even folk heuristics that promote science? When there’s forces of ignorance dragging our children down, maybe we should also think about opposing the bad as well as promoting the good.

The Pope speaks, John Wilkins replies. Wilkins is sufficient, but I just had to comment on one silly thing the pope said about the consequences of evolution.

Man, “would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless,” said the Pope.

This is terrible news. Forget evolution; I am the chance result of one out of trillions of my father’s sperm meeting one out of hundreds of thousands of my mother’s ova. And, oh no, the allelic content of each of those gametes was the result of chance molecular events in meiosis. And each of those gametes contained a handful of random mutations. I can see in my brothers and sisters that chance could have resulted in rather different outcomes.

Whoa … my exalted manliness was also the result of a roughly 50:50 chance—it’s like one of the primary qualifications for Ratzinger to have become pope was little more than a coin flip.

So chance makes everything meaningless? I guess my life must be nothing, then, and the papacy too is just random noise. I guess in his recent get-together with his students on evolution, his reported willingness to listen was all a sham.