Greatest Smackdown Ever of Creationism/Intelligent Design

How to respond to requests to debate creationists
Category: Creationism
Posted on: February 18, 2009 4:15 PM, by PZ Myers

professor at the University of Vermont, Nicholas Gotelli, got an invitation to debate one of the clowns at the Discovery Institute. Here's what they wrote.

Dear Professor Gotelli,

I saw your op-ed in the Burlington Free Press and appreciated your support of free speech at UVM. In light of that, I wonder if you would be open to finding a way to provide a campus forum for a debate about evolutionary science and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, where I work, has a local sponsor in Burlington who is enthusiastic to find a way to make this happen. But we need a partner on campus. If not the biology department, then perhaps you can suggest an alternative.

Ben Stein may not be the best person to single-handedly represent the ID side. As you're aware, he's known mainly as an entertainer. A more appropriate alternative or addition might be our senior fellows David Berlinski or Stephen Meyer, respectively a mathematician and a philosopher of science. I'll copy links to their bios below. Wherever one comes down in the Darwin debate, I think we can all agree that it is healthy for students to be exposed to different views--in precisely the spirit of inviting controversial speakers to campus, as you write in your op-ed.

I'm hoping that you would be willing to give a critique of ID at such an event, and participate in the debate in whatever role you feel comfortable with.

A good scientific backdrop to the discussion might be Dr. Meyer's book that comes out in June from HarperCollins, "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design."

On the other hand, Dr. Belinski may be a good choice since he is a critic of both ID and Darwinian theory.

Would it be possible for us to talk more about this by phone sometime soon?

With best wishes,
David Klinghoffer
Discovery Institute

You'll enjoy Dr Gotelli's response.

Dear Dr. Klinghoffer:

Thank you for this interesting and courteous invitation to set up a debate about evolution and creationism (which includes its more recent relabeling as "intelligent design") with a speaker from the Discovery Institute. Your invitation is quite surprising, given the sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you yourself posted on the Discovery Institute's website:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/02/

However, this kind of two-faced dishonesty is what the scientific community has come to expect from the creationists.

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

"Conspiracy" is the predictable response by Ben Stein and the frustrated creationists. But conspiracy theories are a joke, because science places a high premium on intellectual honesty and on new empirical studies that overturn previously established principles. Creationism doesn't live up to these standards, so its proponents are relegated to the sidelines, publishing in books, blogs, websites, and obscure journals that don't maintain scientific standards.

Finally, isn't it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation at a little university in northern New England? Practicing scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science departments around the world, often on controversial and novel topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science, they would receive such invitations as well.

So, I hope you understand why I am declining your offer. I will wait patiently to read about the work of creationists in the pages of Nature and Science. But until it appears there, it isn't science and doesn't merit an invitation.

In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an evolutionary biologist, I can't tell you what a badge of honor this is. My colleagues will be envious.

Sincerely yours,

Nick Gotelli

P.S. I hope you will forgive me if I do not respond to any further e-mails from you or from the Discovery Institute. This has been entertaining, but it interferes with my research and teaching.

Why The POW Party Won't Let Sarah Palin Speak

So the POW Party is not letting Sarah Palin meet the press, take questions from the press, or come anywhere close to even hearing questions from the press. She is being tutored in foreign policy by the Quisling from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman. And we all know how well the foreign policy Joe advocates is doing. So she's not ready to face the press but she is ready to be President and take those three a.m. phone calls from her daughter complaining about morning sickness? And why Levi is coming home later and later from hockey practice. But there are other reasons she is being held in an undisclosed location (Cheney's pied-a-terre in Arlington, VA, formerly Cheney's undisclosed location). Here are some of her answers from the first Q and A session she had with her POW party handlers (all handling done by Lindsey Graham and Karl Rove since then there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, sexual about it).

Q: Sarah, your views on creationism?
A: Everyone knows the Earth is 6,600 years old. And so is John McCain.

Q: How proud are you to be running with a man who spent time in the Hanoi Hilton?
A: Extremely proud. When John McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton they didn't give bonus points, there was no free cable or internet, compared to today it was torture.

Q: How do you respond to those who say you were a member of an Alaskan secessionist party?
A: As a hockey mom I'm responsible for GatorAde and snacks for all the parties - tournaments, playoffs, and secessionist.

Q: You say you're against earmarks and special interests yet you hired a lobbyist with ties to convicted felon Jack Abramoff and got 27 million for Wasilla, a town with a yearly budget of 6 million?
A: And your question is?

Q: Sarah Palin, for or against earmarks?
A: John McCain, a true American hero, was a P.O.W.

Handlers (in unison): I think our work is done.