I haven’t been doing any Vulcan mind-melds, either

Contrary to popular myth, I do not sit around instructing my family in the fine points of evolutionary biology, nor do I subject them to tirades against creationists. In fact, I almost never discuss those subjects at home. So why is my daughter giving competent discussions of Intelligent Design creationism? I know it’s because her facebook pals have been babbling about creationism, but still…

I wish she’d absorb genetics and developmental biology out of the atmosphere around here, so she could go off and give my lectures for me instead.

The Haeckel-Wells Chronicles

Lately, the Discovery Institute has stuck its neck out in response to the popularity of showings of Randy Olson’s movie, Flock of Dodos, which I reviewed a while back. They slapped together some lame critiques packaged on the web as Hoax of Dodos (a clunker of a name; it’s especially ironic since the film tries to portray the Institute as good at PR), which mainly seem to be driven by the sloppy delusions of that poor excuse for a developmental biologist, Jonathan Wells. In the past week, I’ve also put up my responses to the Wells deceptions—as a developmental biologist myself, I get a little cranky when a creationist clown abuses my discipline.

In case you are completely baffled by this whole episode, here’s a shorter summary.

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Creationist email: weird company

I’ve mentioned before that I get lots of wacky email from creationists. I usually throw it out, but there’s this one kook who is persistent and sends me stuff like this:

Control must be taken from the people, and turned over to one individual, Satan!

Anyone with an eye towards God, and God’s word, can easily see the events of the Lord’s prophecies taking place around us today. The non-believers would have the world believe that mankind is in control of it’s own destiny without the benefit of our creator, Yeshua God. These Godless people today are preaching evolution, creation by accident, and that mankind has the answers to all of the problems we are facing today without the help or need of our creator.

It goes on and on in that vein for pages, with buckets of bible verses quoted to ‘prove’ that biblical predictions are true. Boring! Not even wacky enough to deserve a mention!

Except for one thing I happened to notice this time: the list of people it is being sent to. It’s a very short list which includes a few names I don’t know, but has a few I do. This guy thinks the best audience for his screeds contains me, Juan Cole, and … Ann Coulter.

It’s a discombobulating concatenation. I don’t think we’re exactly similar in our interests.

Would Chuck Terhark like a job writing science abstracts?

One of the subjects I mentioned at the Thursday Flock of Dodos discussion was that an obstacle to getting the public excited about science is the state of science writing. It’s a very formal style in which the passive voice is encouraged, caution and tentative statements are demanded, adverbs are frowned upon and adjectives are treated with suspicion, and all the passion is wrung out in favor of dry recitations of data. Now that actually has a good purpose: it makes it easy to get to the meat of the article for people who are already familiar with the subject and may not need any pizazz to get excited about nematode cell lineages or connectivity diagrams of forebrain nuclei. It makes the work impenetrable to those not already inculcated with the arcana of the discipline, however.

The City Pages illustrates the difference. On Tuesday, the Café Scientifique is going to be given by Cynthia Norton of College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, on the subject of snails. Just for comparison, I’ve put an example of a scientific abstract and the publicity copy for the talk below the fold, and you’ll see what I mean.

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Just be sure to put Jesus in the list of authors!

Our old pal Kazmer Ujvarosy of the American Chronicle has a long and boring rant against the whole system of peer review. There’s nothing really new in it; we know peer review is flawed, and practically every scientist can give you gripes about cronyism and bad reviewers and yadda yadda yadda, but at the same time, no system is ever going to be perfect, and we work within the bounds of what is effective. Ujvarosy, of course, is peeved because creationism doesn’t get any respect in the science journals. Changes to the policies of review, however, won’t change the fact that Intelligent Design creationism is baloney.

What I find interesting in his cranky essay, though, is that he reveals two things that have emerged before, but that the creationists deny.

In the final analysis if the scientific community is to remain productive intellectually, a protective system must be provided for the creative minority, however erratic or zany their ideas may seem to the incomparably zanier Darwinists. A repressive evolutionist environment, forced upon the community of scientists by a secular and aggressive Darwinist priesthood, stymies creativity and literally fossilizes thought. Science writers contribute to this unhealthy state of affairs by tending to accept wholesale anything these quacks — no matter what credentials they have — spoon-feed them in the name of science.

“a protective system must be provided for the creative minority”…what he’s asking for is a kind of special-case protectionism where non-science is given a slot in the science publication process. Like Behe admitting that one of ID’s goals is to change the very definition of science to allow the supernatural in, that’s what Ujvarosy is also asking for — special treatment. A redefinition of peer-review that will remove the normal (albeit sometimes poorly implemented) quality control. A system that allows authors to replace the usual demand for rigor with his idea of being “creative” (read: “insane”).

Here’s another, uh, revelation:

In any case the theory of creation positing that our universe has a seed origin, which seed is Jesus Christ, is so heretical in scientific circles that no editor conditioned to the doctrine of Darwinian evolution from a simple beginning would touch it.

That’s what we need! A system for evaluating scientific work that gives special privileges to Christians!