State senatory Raymond Finney of Tennessee (a retired physician—hey, we’ve been making Orac squirm uncomfortably a lot lately) has just filed a resolution that asks a few questions. Actually, he’s demanding that the Tennessee Department of Education answer these questions within a year or … well, I don’t know what. He might stamp his foot and have a snit.

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This fellow Mike up around Toronto asked me for assistance a while back—he was planning to attend the Bible Skeptics Conference, an event put on by the Institute for Creation Research. I couldn’t say much, but I did suggest he get in touch with Larry Moran at the U Toronto.

Well, he attended and survived. It’s a good summary of the usual combination of drivel and lunacy that comes out of these events. He also attended a second talk by Bruce Malone. Malone, by the way, was the fellow who was speaking in the Twin Cities last week, to whose talk on Mt St Helens as evidence for a young earth I was invited by a creationist. This is the instance where I begged off by saying I wasn’t a geologist…and, amusingly, the creationist admitted that was OK, since the speaker wasn’t, either.

There’s going to be a third write-up soon. I’m pretty sure his sanity survived the harrowing, although I do have one concern. Mike told me in email that Larry Moran was a “nice guy”—I’m suspecting that there might have been some residual impairment of his mental facilities. Everyone knows that Larry is godless curmudgeon.

Let this be a lesson to you: being a moderate will not spare you from the reactionary criticisms of the lunatic right. Chris Mooney is an unbeliever, but he’s also one of those softies who thinks atheists ought to be less vigorous in their assault on the public sphere (I recall arguing with him a few times about that). I confess to feeling a little schadenfreude that now the Discovery Institute pillories him for daring to be a secular humanist. The DI doesn’t like theistic evolutionists either, though, so it’s not like it’s a big surprise that they’d have the vapors over a secular humanist.

Also, it’s Casey Luskin, attack mouse, leading the charge. It’s hard to get too worked up over a squeak from that incompetent joke.

He’s baaaack. That creationist surgeon, Michael Egnor, keeps flaunting his ignorance — and his verbosity — in the comments.

Your assertion that you answered my challenge ‘perfectly’ is, well, not perfect. I asked for a measurement of new information, not anecdotes about new functions. You and Nick have managed to generate molecular ‘just-so’ stories, anecdotes without actual quantitative measurement, for your central hypothesis that Darwinism can account for biological complexity. I guess ‘just-so’ stories are in your genes.

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It seems to be a theme here lately: people with serious credentials in science and medicine who then profess their belief in gods and magic and make public asses of themselves. Next up: Brad Harrub.

Dr Harrub has a Ph.D. in neurobiology and anatomy from the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee. He is a member of the Church of Christ, director and founder of Focus Press, Inc., co-editor of ‘Think’ magazine, and a featured writer in various Christian journals. Books he has co-authored include ‘Diamonds in the Rough: Nuggets of Truth from God’s Word’, ‘Investigating Christian Evidences’, and ‘The Truth About Human Origins’.

Now listen to an interview with him on Radio NZ. He’s a young earth creationist of the most pathetic kind, believing in a literal world wide flood (with dinosaurs on the ark!), that the earth is less than ten thousand years old, that mammals evolved from dinosaurs (therefore the fossils prove evolution false), and a whole succession of silly ideas. The interviewer, Kim Hill, does an excellent job of drawing out all the nonsense from this degreed clown.

The other day, the Time magazine blog strongly criticized the DI’s list of irrelevant, unqualified scientists who “dissent from Darwin”, and singled out a surgeon, Michael Egnor, as an example of the foolishness of the people who support the DI. I took apart some of Egnor’s claims, that evolutionary processes can’t generate new information. In particular, I showed that there are lots of publications that show new information emerging in organisms.

Egnor replied in a comment. He’s still completely wrong. The Discovery Institute has posted his vapid comment, too, as if it says something, so let’s briefly show where he has gone wrong.

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I guess Phillip Johnson stepped down from on high to deliver a thunderbolt of a defense of Intelligent Design creationism. At least that’s the impression you get from the IDists.

Ho hum. To me, it sounds more like an old man farted.

You can get an assessment from the rational people on the side of evolution, like Shalini, John Pieret, and Joe Meert. I think Larry Moran summarized it most succinctly.

Like most IDiot arguments, this one relies on two main points: (1) evolution is wrong, (2) the bad guys are picking on us. There isn’t one single scientific argument in favor of intelligent design.

Johnson whines and whines and whines, and is disappointed that “influential scientific organizations formed a solid bloc of opposition to the consideration of whether evidence points to the possible involvement of intelligent causes in the history of life.” There’s a reason they’ve opposed ID; the proponents never get around to offering any of that evidence we’re supposed to consider, and Johnson’s latest emission is no exception. Instead, we get a lot of nonsense about how Anthony Flew converted, sorta, and how we shouldn’t be afraid to let God into our science.

The gasbag of ID is slowly deflating, and the intellectual flabbiness is becoming apparent. Rather than rejoicing, the IDists ought to be dismayed that this is the best they can do, after years of phony triumphalism.

Take a look at this interesting discussion of a recent PLoS article in which publications in medical journals are reluctant to use the word “evolution”:

According to a report released last week in PLoS Biology, when medical journals publish studies about things like antibiotic resistance, they avoid using the “E-word.” Instead, antimicrobial resistance is (euphemistically, I suppose) said to “emerge,” “arise,” or “spread” rather than “evolve.”

This decision has consequences, too—popular press descriptions of the work then tend to avoid using the word “evolution”, too. This is exactly the kind of run-around that allows kooks like Phil Skell to claim that modern biology doesn’t actually need evolution (although, truth be told, Skell is so looney that he claims papers on evolutionary biology that use observations of fossils or gene frequencies don’t really need evolutionary theory).

Of course, what this is all about is really just to have an opportunity to tweak the noses of the good doctors here at Scienceblogs, like Orac and Revere and Charles and Craig—what’s wrong with these M.D.s? Are they poorly educated, cowardly, or do the granting agencies or journal publishers actually pressure them to avoid ‘controversial’ words?

There is some degree of seriousness to the question. This habit has effects; what can we do to correct it?