The Kamloops News has obligingly published a couple of reactions to my appearance in their fair city. There is a very abbreviated summary of what I discussed on Friday: Prof shoots holes in creationism. Yes, that’s about right. I specifically addressed the fallacies of Intelligent Design creationism.

Now, though, the editor of the newspaper, Mel Rothenburger, has responded: Name callers are just stupid. He begins with this:

I didn’t take in the presentation by American associate professor Paul “PZ” Myers, and I’m glad.

Gosh, I’m chastened already. He objects to the fact that I said creationists were “ignorant and stupid and don’t know anything about history,” facts which I backed up in the talk. Also, facts which were then confirmed in his very own paper, by publishing a letter from David Buckna, the same ignorant, ahistorical creationist I mentioned in a previous post. He showed up with a double-sided list in small print of his objections to evolution; his letter is titled Some questions for Prof. Myers, and it is nothing but the first couple of points from his list.

On May 6 professor of biology P.Z. Myers (University of Minnesota Morris) gave a public lecture (Evolution is True; Intelligent Design Isn’t) in Kamloops.

Questions for Prof. Myers:

Edward Blyth, English chemist/zoologist (and creationist), wrote his first of three major articles on natural selection in The Magazine of Natural History, 24 years before Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was published. Why then, do evolutionists think of natural selection as Darwin’s idea?

Why do textbooks claim the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how the cell’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth, when repeated experimentation has never demonstrated this claim? Efforts to replicate the supposed origin-of-life events have produced embarrassingly small amounts of cell building blocks (eg. trace amounts of amino acids, sugars) with the majority of the mixture being a toxic tar.

On page one of Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, he writes: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” If living things look designed, then how do evolutionists know they weren’t designed? What is the criterion for “apparent” design?

How does geology explain dinosaur bones with soft tissue, supposedly dated at “80 million years”? (Schweitzer et al, Science 324:626). Bones with red blood cells, including hemoglobin, and blood vessels, which are still elastic.

Most geologists believe diamonds formed deep below the earth’s surface, one to three billion years ago. How do these geologists explain the presence of carbon-14 in a number of diamond samples?

How does evolution explain non-winged pterosaurs gradually developing fully functional wings, with its long bony fourth finger?

These are the very same questions I answered to his face in a two-hour session after my talk. The Schweitzer reference is the same one he has been haranguing me about in email ever since. I already answered him, and here he is simply disingenously repeating the same questions as if I’d never heard of them before. He’s dishonest and contemptible; he’s fairly typical of creationists.

There are answers to his questions in the comments in the paper. I’m not going to bother, since Buckna has amply demonstrated that he’s not going to accept any answer, but will continue to parrot the same oft-answered objections over and over again.