You may recall the event a few weeks ago at the University of Minnesota in which John West of the Discovery Institute attempted to tell us how Darwin was responsible for eugenics. Greg Laden has mentioned that we now have an account from Mark Borrello, who rebutted West in a too-brief ten minutes after the talk; he gets to stretch his legs a little more online and tears West’s premises to shreds. In addition, Jim Curtsinger, who missed the talk but watched it online, gets to tell us something about the practice of teaching science: we Darwinists often talk about eugenics in our classes (I did, just this week), and we tell our students not that the strong must destroy the weak, but that eugenics is unsupported by our modern understanding of evolution.

Keep those two articles in mind next time you hear a creationist spout off about the evils of survival of the fittest, trumpeting their simple-minded misunderstandings of evolution. And you will hear that, many times over.

I’ve already mentioned that the Texas biologists are coming out on the side of science, but there’s also another group gearing up to fight: would you believe that they are oxymoronically (or perhaps, just moronically) called Texans for Better Science? They’re no such thing, of course — they want Intelligent Design creationism taught in the schools.

When will they learn that naming your organization dishonestly merely testifies to the fact that if people learned what you actually want, they’d dislike you, so you need to mask your motives? It seems you only find right wing crazy groups doing this. Other groups don’t. The World Wildlife Fund, for instance, is honestly and upfront admitting that they are raising money to preserve wildlife; you don’t see them misrepresenting themselves with their name to raise cash by misleading people — they aren’t called “Gun Lovers In Favor Of Increasing Game Populations”.

They’re violent, murderous bastards. Rudi Boa, a scientist, got into an argument with Alexander York, an ignorant ass, while on a backpacking trip in Australia. Boa was arguing for evolution, while York was arguing for idiocy. Later, under the influence of alcohol, York attacked, stabbed, and killed Boa.

York was just tried and sentenced to five years in jail, eligible for parole in three. The judge apparently thought York was a man of good character.

As Greg Laden put it, “Stabbing an evolutionist to death, in Australia, is not considered a serious offense if you are a person of good character.”

Hector Avalos sent me his response to the Discovery Institute’s ‘shocking’ revelation that people had been discussing Guillermo Gonzalez’s affiliation with Intelligent Design creationism before they denied him tenure. It’s a classic pointless objection: of course they were, and of course his openly expressed, unscientific beliefs which were stated as a representative of ISU were a serious consideration. It does not speak well of the Discovery Institute that they had to cobble together quote-mines from the email to try and make a non-case for a non-issue.

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