With humor, of course. Here’s the opening of his talk at the University of Oklahoma last night.

He also responded by donating funds from the RDF to Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education…which brings up an important point. There are lots of smart Oklahomans who are really angry at the stupidity of these ignorant legislators. Listen to the audience in the video clip, too: they are laughing at the creationist clowns.

Keep laughing. And vote the fools out of office. Oklahoma can be a state standing up for reason.

One of the mysteries of my email is that there are noticeable waves of like content that come through. Right now I’m getting a lot of hate mail that rants and raves about how clever I must think I am … which is definitely not a theme that I’ve been pushing, so all I can assume is that somewhere out there is a website or email chain that is talking about my horrible egotism.

Either that, or they’re all just suddenly feeling very inadequate and are lashing out.

[Read more…]

As I mentioned the other day, the Oklahoma legislature was contemplating a resolution to condemn Richard Dawkins. It turns out that that was a moderate compromise — the original version of the resolution attacked the University of Oklahoma department of zoology. Look closely at the language in this motion:

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded institution which should be open to all ideas and should train students in all disciplines of study and research and to use independent thinking and free inquiry, not indoctrinate students in one-sided study and thinking; and

WHEREAS, the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma has, as evidenced on the departmental homepage, been framing the Darwinian theory of evolution as doctrinal dogmatism rather than a hypothetical construction within the disciplines of the sciences; and

WHEREAS, not only has the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma been engaged in one-sided indoctrination of an unproven and unpopular theory but has made an effort to brand all thinking in dissent of this theory as anti-intellectual and backward rather than nurturing such free thinking and allowing a free discussion of all ideas which is the primary purpose of a university;

Realize that John West and Casey Luskin toddled into Oklahoma a few weeks ago, and put 2 + 2 together. The DI has been coaching the infantile minds of creationist legislators again.

He’s on his way to Oklahoma (no, that’s not what rouses my envy), and an Oklahoma legislator has proposed a resolution to condemn him.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 52ND OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives encourages the University of Oklahoma to engage in an open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma.

Wow. This from the same crowd that gets all fluttery and happy at “academic freedom” bills — they want to kick Richard Dawkins out of the whole state. I thought I was the scary one when I was the guy getting kicked out of a mere movie theater.

Ray Comfort is sure that his new book is selling poorly because of a conspiracy among atheists to give it bad reviews on Amazon.

But he said he’s sure his book sales have been affected because of the negative reviews, “because people purchase upon other people’s opinions.”

Has he considered that the book might just be awful? No, apparently not.

Still, he said, the book can’t be too bad.

…

Comfort said the strong opposition easily is explained.

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

I know Ray is rather stupid, but who knew he could be that stupid. This has been explained to him multiple times: evolution does explain this stuff trivially. Populations evolve, not individuals, and male and female elephants evolved from populations of pre-elephants that contained males and females. Species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female — they arise by the diffusion of variation through a whole population, male and female.

Rather than a conspiracy of atheists falsely downrating his book, there is a simpler explanation for his lousy sales: it’s a piece of crap written by an incompetent and idiot, and his complaint just confirms that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“WE WILL BURY YOU!” seems to be his message in his latest complaint. He is very upset that The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is boycotting Louisiana, and he informs us all in a long argumentum ad populum that the ignorant outnumber us, addressed to the president and members of SICB.

Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don’t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They don’t share your passion for ideological purity in science classes. They have a quaint notion that science depends on the freedom to ask questions, and their insistence on academic freedom is catching on. They don’t want religion taught in the science classroom, but they know that students are not learning about all of the science surrounding evolution. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support academic freedom in the teaching of evolution in schools, and that number is rising fast — it’s up 9% in the past 3 years. People clearly resent your demand for censorship. After all, it’s their children in their schools, and they aren’t happy with a bunch of supercilious Darwinists telling them that they can’t even question Darwinism in their own classrooms. So if you’re going to boycott all the creationists who despise you, you’ll eventually have to hold all of your conventions in Madison or Ann Arbor. Keep up the arrogance and eventually you won’t have to boycott people at all. People will boycott you.

Whoa. I’m impressed.

Note the open admission that the Discovery Institute’s audience are the god-fearin’ creationists, and that the people they regard as “on their side” are plain-and-simple, unmodified creationists, not just the usual Intelligent Design creationists. That’s useful to see.

There’s also the usual distortions. People ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in the public schools — that’s what science is all about, and I would encourage kids to raise their hands and speak out in class. However, none of this argument is about squelching inquiry: it’s about whether weak and discredited ideas, like ID, ought to be given special privilege and elevated to the standard curriculum. They shouldn’t.

We’re also seeing the usual deprecation of expertise. SICB is an organization of thousands of scientists who have invested years of their life in the study of biology. They are experts. Against that, we have millions of people in Louisiana who, while competent in their own areas of work, have very little knowledge of biology. According to Michael Egnor, the people we should listen to on this relatively rarefied subject are the majority who know nothing about it. Would he be quite so sanguine if we dismissed his specialization, neurosurgery, and suggested that he needed to follow the suggestions of a roofer from Baton Rouge? Is it “censorship” that he doesn’t allow his patients’ families into the operating room to give him a hand?

Madison and Ann Arbor are both lovely places to have conventions, and I certainly wouldn’t complain if SICB held their meetings there — it’s much closer to home, for one thing. But Egnor left out a few cities. How about Berkeley and Eugene, Seattle and Tucson, New York and Philadelphia, Austin and Cleveland, Champaign-Urbana and Chapel Hill…and I could go on. These cities and university towns are all part of America, too, and they are places where we find majorities who do not accept the ideology of creationism…because their populations are better educated and less shackled to religious dogma. These are good things.

I’m also confident that the people of Louisiana are a mix of the uninformed and the scientifically competent, and that many are good people who deserve better than the falsehoods institutions like the Discovery Institute will ladle out. It would be great to have more scientific conventions in New Orleans (if nothing else, because the cuisine is fabulous). However, when the government of the state promotes policies that are damaging to science, scientists have no choice but to reject them in any way they can.

If you’re not careful, “creationists” (80% of Americans) might notice this irony: you boycott their states, but you forgot to boycott their money. If one percent of the people you’ve censored and boycotted wrote letters to their congressmen demanding a defunding of evolutionary research — a boycott of you — the grant money currently allocated to advancing Darwinist ideology (it’s ideologues, not scientists, who censor) would be re-allocated to genuine non-ideological science.

There’s a word for this: demagoguery. What Egnor proposes here is nothing less than a naked threat to use the ignorance of the mob to attack science. And you haven’t heard anything yet. Look at this attitude:

Your arrogance and disrespect for academic freedom demeans the scientific profession, and your boycott of people who don’t capitulate to your censorship is risible. You’re actually debasing Darwinism, which, after eugenics and a century and a half of third-rate science, is no mean accomplishment. Most people don’t see your refusal to visit their state as a “threat.” Honestly, they’d rather you made your boycott all-inclusive, so you’d miss all of their legislative sessions and federal court hearings as well. So back off the “boycott” stuff. Just say you misspoke, or pretend you never said it at all. You Darwinists are good at covering your tracks (remember “junk DNA”?). Keep in mind that you’re living off the people you’re censoring and boycotting. Your livelihood is dependent on their largesse, and, in “comparative biology” vernacular, it’s unwise for parasites to boycott their hosts.

My advice: just keep suckling at the public teat and pretend the boycott never happened.

Now we see exposed the Discovery Institute’s opinion of scientists: they are parasites, suckling at the public teat, and that a scientific organization’s boycott of a state is just fine…and that we should be divorced from civic responsibilities altogether.

We also see his ignorance of biology on display. Evolutionary biology is a third rate science. Why is “comparative biology” in quotes? When did parasitism become the provenance of comparative biology? It’s a concept in common use, you know. And of course we remember junk DNA — we know that most of the human genome is junk. There is no covering of any tracks there, so I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s probably yet another delusion of the creationist mind, like a schizophrenic babbling about his satellite-based mind control rays.

What we really have to remember henceforth is exactly what the Discovery Institute’s agenda actually is, and there it is in Egnor’s freely expressed opinion: the incitement of an intentionally misinformed public to silence scientific inquiry, all in the guise of ending an imaginary censorship.

But let’s leave laughing. There’s a convention in much of the kook email I receive that they howl at length at me, and then sign off with a conventional and inappropriately friendly signature that is entirely at odds with everything they wrote. Egnor fits right in.

Cordially,

Mike Egnor, M.D.

Phillip Skell has a long and sleazy history of lying to support creationism. His usual tactic (actually, his only tactic) is to claim that evolution is irrelevant to science, denying the importance of the theory to understanding discoveries about the natural world, and refusing to believe that it has any application at all to anything. In a clear and straightforward op-ed, Stuart Faulk points out how easy it is to pick up any popular science magazine and find counterexamples to Skell’s claims. And then he picks up a knife, sticks it in, and twists:

Given how easily Skell’s arguments can be dismissed, it is reasonable to ask why he would make them in the first place. He is just as capable of reading Scientific American as I am, and probably more qualified.

The short answer is that this is not a debate about factual truth and science, but about public opinion and religion. What Skell neglects to mention (but any Web search will show) is that he has long supported creationist causes. His guest viewpoint is but one of many letters supporting “intelligent design” and opposing the teaching of evolution in public schools, which he equates to “indoctrination of students to a worldview of materialism and atheism.”

That’s an important approach we have to take more often. The vocal charlatans of creationism are actually relatively few in number, and their histories need to be directly addressed and made public. Skell is most definitely not an impartial scientist looking at the evidence objectively: he has his made up, ignores the evidence (where he is even aware of it—professionally, he is a chemist), and then uses his faux authority to claim that the biological sciences lack substantial evidence that we actually have, all in the service of his religious dogma.

One interesting fact emerges at the end of the piece. Stuart Faulk is Skell’s son-in-law. I’d like to know how the family copes with Skell’s uninformed obnoxiousness…

After all, he says nice things about me and not-so-nice things about Ben Stein.