Why do newspapers continue to publish Discovery Institute press releases?

A reader brought to my attention this outrageously dishonest mangling of a quote by that creationist, Casey Luskin. He writes:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,”1 because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter“2 it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

First rule of reading creationist literature: never trust an ellipsis. They always leave something significant out to change the meaning. Second rule of reading creationist literature: if they don’t use an ellipsis, they’re still going to distort a quote. Basically, you can’t trust anything these guys say. Luskin is claiming to be quoting something from the National Academy of Sciences booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. How honest is his scholarship?

The first part of the quote is from page 52, near the end of the book. Here it is in context:

1There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Where do you think we’ll find the second half of his quote? Page 53, maybe? Page 54? No. You’ll have to thumb backwards through the book, to a place near the beginning: page 16.

2Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

So what Casey Luskin has done is to flip through the book and manufacture quotes by splicing together clauses from scattered sentences. Students who tried to pull this kind of unethical crap in a term paper would get an automatic “F” from me…yet Luskin reportedly has a law degree.

Aren’t journalists supposed to have some kind of ethical standards about this sort of thing? Do they simply suspend any regard for reasonable journalistic values when some right-wing think-tank like the Discovery Institute mails in some PR pablum?

Roland Emmerich: the upscale Uwe Boll

I’ve been seeing all the ads for this new movie, 10,000 BC, but I haven’t even been tempted to want to think about going to see it. Come on, people: One Million Years B.C., while even more grossly inaccurate, at least had Raquel Welch in that adorable bikini, and Quest for Fire had the invention of the missionary position. This movie has nothing but nicely modeled woolly mammoths, and I don’t see any teenagers stampeding the head shops for that poster to hang on their bedroom walls.

Anyway, here’s a review of the latest dreck from Emmerich. That’s as close as I’m getting to it.

The story that will not die

Good morning, anti-censorship intellectuals! Remember that story from January about Abunga Books, the online bookstore whose sole unique feature is that it claims to “empower decency” by enabling prudes to vote to censor their offerings? Now it has made ABC News. It’s amazing how much press this thing has received — I’m beginning to suspect there is some marketing genius behind the store who knows how to whip up a media frenzy.

They’ve got a couple of quotes from me and from the founder of Abunga, Lee Martin.

“Anything that irritates the right, they want off,” Myers told ABCNEWS.com “They can have a limited selection of books and select whatever political perspective they want. But [Abunga] is cloaking itself in democracy, and instead of being open-minded, they are being narrow-minded. It’s hypocrisy.”

Boy, I got that one exactly right. You should read how Martin defends himself against that charge.

In response, Myers’ readers mass e-mailed the company and logged on to Abunga.com to ban a number of religious books themselves, including the Bible.

“What they didn’t realize is that we control inventory from our members, and it’s pretty easy to see the difference of customers who are blocking ‘The Golden Compass’ and the Bible,” Martin said.

Martin insists his company has no agenda. “If you look at the books, we have a complete rainbow range of books, and we give to non-Christian ministries.”

(By the way, you’ll have a hard time finding a non-Christian ministry in their list of charities. They’ve got a few good secular groups in there, like regional hospitals and the March of Dimes, but it’s mostly a collection of openly evangelical organizations. I guess if you do stuff that actually works, like giving medicine, that counts as “non-Christian” to these guys.)

So they don’t have an agenda, and they’re just letting their customers control the inventory, but they can tell the difference between the ‘good’ customers who want to block The Golden Compass, and the wicked, nasty bad customers who want to block the Bible. We are all equal, except some of us are more equal than others.

Like I said, Abunga can have whatever bias they want, and they clearly want to be a right wing Christian bookstore. I don’t mind that at all, although they certainly wouldn’t be getting my business. My objection is that they want to pretend that they’re taking the high road and calling their bias “democracy,” when it clearly is not, and it is definitely not a noble enterprise — these are guys with yet another scheme to pander to right-wing ignorance and make money from it.

Of course, that’s my disagreement with their practices. The ABC News article takes a different approach that might be more effective in alienating their prospective clientele, by listing a selection of naughty books that are still easily available at Abunga. They’ve got a censorship filter, but it’s a mighty leaky one.

The Fall

I’m pretty darn sure after seeing the trailer that I want to see this movie, but there’s one little fillip, one name that gets briefly dropped, that really makes me wonder what’s going to happen. It isn’t explained in the clip, unfortunately, it’s just there, so I’ll have to cough up $5 to find out.

Oscars?

Does anybody care about them anymore? I didn’t watch it at all, and I also missed most of the nominated movies this year. We had the winner, No Country for Old Men, playing in town a few weeks ago, unfortunately coinciding with an exceptionally heavy work week for me, and I couldn’t find time to see. There Will Be Blood is playing at the Morris Theatre this week, and I may have to squeeze in a few hours to check it out…but not because Day-Lewis won an award.

Isn’t that what it’s about, anyway? If we’re going to take off 3 hours or more for some entertainment, it makes more sense to go see the movie than to watch a tedious show about the movies.