The smug and rather imbecilic face in this video belongs to Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, who was interviewed on a conservative talk show, Fox & Friends. Watch it at your peril. Like the recent Matthews/Tancredo incident, it’s two people who know nothing about science babbling at each other.

At the beginning, the host says,

Your main problem with science books is that they take a one-sided look at evolution.

No one seems to notice that this is a show that claims to be examining a “white-hot controversy” with one guest discussing only the Discovery Institute’s position. Hmmm.

Luskin parrots a couple of Discovery Institute talking points, and he lies, lies, lies. He claims all the biology textbooks are completely wrong, and that all they want is for good science to be taught. His evidence? The first thing he talks about is Haeckel’s embryos, and repeats the oft-told canard that Haeckel’s embryos are presented uncritically — that they are fraudulent, the biologists know it, and they still use them.

Oh, dog. Not again. I have been all over the Haeckel story so many times. It’s not true: relatively few textbooks use the Haeckel/Romanes diagram, and when they do, they present it in a historical context. And the Discovery Institute doesn’t object to the obsolete figure itself, since they also castigate textbooks that use photos of embryos. Vertebrate embryos at the phylotypic or pharyngula stage do show substantial similarities to one another that are evidence of common descent. That’s simply a fact. The creationists are just frantic to suppress that piece of information, I guess.

The second piece of ‘evidence’ Luskin throws out is another one that pisses me off: he cites the New Scientist article that claims Darwin was wrong! I told you all that we were going to be seeing a lot of quote mining of that blatantly misleading cover — as I also told you, they ignore the content that says the opposite, and they ignore the strongly worded rebuttals that scientists have published. New Scientist has a lot to answer for; these creationists are desperately mendacious and will be flaunting that rag at us for years to come, claiming that New Scientist has shown that Darwin’s tree of life is all wrong, yet we still keep teaching it.

Luskin’s new twist is that “when you look at one gene, it gives you one version of the tree of life, and when you look at a different gene, it gives you an entirely different tree of life”. Of course, if you actually read the NS article, it’s about horizontal gene flow in bacteria making the root of the tree of life more syncytial, saying nothing about the variation you get when you look at single genes. Luskin’s argument is completely bogus. It’s like saying that when we look at the history of the English language and pluck out one word, it may have a different etymology and rate of change than another, therefore English could not have evolved.

Luskin has had this stuff explained to him repeatedly, and it never sinks in…or more likely, as a dishonest propagandist, he chooses to disregard all the demonstrations of the problems with his claims. How he can accuse scientists of peddling fraudulent evidence when he sits there and lies nonstop is beyond me.

Chris Matthews, who has lately been hammering the Republicans for their problem with science in general and evolution in particular, had a guest on to ‘debate’ the issue: Tom Tancredo, the ignorant Republican congressman who ran for president in the last election, and was one of the candidates who proudly announced that he did not believe in evolution. It was awful. Two people who know nothing about the science babbling at each other. While Matthews’ heart might have been in the right place, he was more interested in stammering out apologies for believing a god might have guided evolution, and sat their stunned and incomprehending as Tancredo blithered out falsehood after falsehood. Tancredo was simply inane.

What an appalling waste of time. At one point, the two were proudly comparing their backgrounds in science — they both went to Catholic schools as kids. In other words, all the knowledge they have is based on the brief high school level exposure to evolution they might have gotten 30 or 40 years ago, and both have gone on in careers where they’ve never had to think about science again. Why are they debating evolution with one another, and why does MSNBC think this tripe is worth airing to a national audience? Both were out of their depth.

Matthews should have brought on someone qualified to address the topic. We have a host of smart scientists who seem to be fairly comfortable standing before a lay audience and explaining the basics of evolution: bring in Eugenie Scott, Neil Shubin, Jerry Coyne, Kevin Padian, or even Ken Miller (especially if you want to go over and over that nonsensical line that god did it via evolution): any one of them would have destroyed Tancredo. Or even me: I don’t have the prestige of any of those luminaries, but even a guy from a small liberal arts college can demolish Tancredo’s awful arguments.

So what did Tancredo claim?

“There’s Darwinian evolution, and there’s Intelligent Design…the one is equal to the other in terms of the number of people who support it in terms…especially of their backgrounds and the research out there.” Absolutely false. If you go to any biologist, there is maybe a one in a thousand chance you’ll find that he or she gives even a moment’s consideration to intelligent design. ID is a fringe theory held by a tiny minority of scientists. The number of IDists in biology is probably about equal to the number of kooks who have made it through graduate school. To claim parity is simply a damnable lie.

“Crossing a species there is no evidence of that you have to make an assumption. I’m just saying that assuming that is just as tough as assuming that there is intelligent design.” No. We do of course have direct evidence of interspecies hybrids, if that’s what he’s talking about; we also have evidence of species evolving into new species, if that’s what he’s trying to say. His conclusion is sloppy thinking: it is easier to assume natural processes occurred than to postulate magic events without evidence. At least for a scientist, that is — deranged right wing politicians may differ.

“In intelligent design, there is no argument about whether the world was made 8 thousand or 8 billion years ago.” This is a symptom of a problem, not a virtue. The evidence is overwhelming that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Any so-called scientific discipline that believes there is ambiguity and that 8 thousand years is just as good a guess as 8 billion is bankrupt.

“You can see on the micro level we see evolution but we cannot make the assumption on it about the macro level cause there’s nothing there to look at, we have no scientific data.” I have a special level of contempt for people who make this bogus macro/micro level argument — they always get it backwards. Macro evolution is on rock solid ground, and has been for 150 years. Darwin’s work was largely on a macroevolutionary level: the evidence from paleontology, biogeography, systematics, comparative anatomy and physiology, and embryology, all disciplines that Darwin drew upon, describes the big picture of life’s history, and shows common descent. In recent years, molecular biology has provided an even greater body of evidence; where Darwin had to speculate that maybe there were multiple origins for the different kingdoms of life, we now know that they can all be traced back to one common root. When a developmental biologist compares the molecules behind the evolution of eyes in a sea anemone and a cow, he is describing macroevolution. We have scientific data out the wazoo on this one.

In Darwin’s day, micro evolution was the wobbly leg of the structure of evolutionary theory. He didn’t have an explanation for heredity. That has also changed, of course: we now have a robust understanding of genetics, and especially of population genetics. Speciation is complex and there are all kinds of details that we don’t fully understand, but it also is not doubted by scientists.

“Here’s a group of people highly educated, well rounded, and well respected in their field who believe in evolution, Darwinian evolution. Here’s a group of people, highly respected, who believe in intelligent design. These are two theories.” The people who believe in intelligent design do not have any kind of parity with the proponents of evolution. Few IDists have any training in the relevant biology; most are philosophers, theologians, lawyers, engineers, and dentists, among other fields. The few who do have legitimate qualifications in any kind of biological sub-discipline, like Michael Behe, are either pariahs in their own departments or have to seek shelter under the umbrella of conservative think tanks, like the Discovery Institute.

And no, they are not two theories. Evolution is a legitimate theory in the scientific sense: it is well supported by the evidence, and provides a productive, integrated, explanatory framework that guides ongoing research and ties together a large body of data. Intelligent Design creationism does not qualify as a scientific theory at all. At best, it is a highly speculative hypothesis, one assembled without any reasonable evidence, and so far it has been a spectacular failure at provoking any useful research.

Tom Tancredo is an ignorant old fool who knows nothing and simply puked up creationist talking points. Chris Matthews also knows nothing and was a lousy representative for the scientific view. The whole show was pointless, except as an aid to creationists who want to sow doubt and confusion.