Thoughts in a Haystack

Well, it seems that even non-Rupert Mudochian conservative media outlets that mysteriously nonetheless go by the name The Sun produce effluent that smells as sweet. In a blazing example of someone being given the pages of a newspaper in which to speak of things he knows not, one Joseph Quesnel has managed to get just about everything wrong in this recent column with the exception of the spelling of his name ... at least if we only hold him to "Joseph."

Much of Mr. Quesnel's confusion is of the old, tired, exceedingly worn and willfully ignorant sort:

... Christian believers are refusing to hide the growing evidence undermining Darwinian evolution. ... Whenever I open the news, I am hearing about new findings challenging evolution.

Oh, right ... The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism.

Then there is the Righteous Right paranoia card being prominently played in complaints that one rather inept Canadian politician was mocked for his young-Earth creationism by being confronted by a Barney doll. Since I think mocking is the civilized alternative to the treatment that all politicians deserve -- flogging on a regular basis -- there'll be no sympathy from me. But Quesnel is typical of the breed to think that it represents "a strong prejudice against evangelical Christians permeating our society." I think this is wrong. Most people only get alarmed by ignoramuses who are in line to run major nations.

But the wrongest of the wrong is this:

Witness the case of Stephen Meyer, a proponent of intelligent design in the United States. Meyer wrote a peer-reviewed academic article in a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution about his ideas and almost lost his career. This is a scientist who is not a young earth creationist and yet he faced blacklisting by a prominent scientific organization.

Richard Sternberg, the editor of the journal, was shocked at the intolerance shown by these "open minded" scientists.

"Why publish it?" Sternberg said, in an interview with National Public Radio. "Because evolutionary biologists are thinking about this. So I thought that by putting this on the table, there could be some reasoned discourse. That's what I thought, and I was dead wrong." This shows how resistant mainstream science is to anything that questions the dominant ideas of Darwinian evolution.

Quesnel can't even get the ID urban legend right. Meyer (a philosopher, not a scientist) was Director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute at the time and hardly in any danger of losing his career in Christian evangelism. It was supposed to be Sternberg whose career was threatened. And if that is this week's defense of what he did, then his career should be endangered because of his utter lack of familiarity of the thinking of evolutionary biologists.

When is somebody going to come up with a topical stupidscreen?
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