I’m trying to get caught up on a couple of things from last week. Here’s one of them. You may have seen this on Pharyngula. As PZ Myers explains:

A couple of college students in Toronto…took offense at the patent absurdity of the “Bible and Bible Studies” section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult.

I actually did something similar on a much smaller scale last year. One of the culprits of the Toronto incident describes the event in more detail at his blog, Phaedron Rising.

What I wanted to bring to your attention, though, was his follow-up article:

Many comments on Pharyngula suggested that Science shelves should be bereft of such gems as Michael Behe’s intelligent-design manifestos, or any book on new-age pseudoscience.

It’s with this that I must take issue. When, in my email to Dr Myers, I referred to the democratic marketplace of ideas, I was not paying lip service. It is a fundamental tenet of western democratic society that as long as nobody is literally hurt, every opinion has a right to be heard. I’m not saying that every opinion is worth the paper it’s written on, just that anyone has every right to make their case. This is especially the case in the rigours of the scientific process, where any theory—new or old—is continually vetted by a process of peer review and critique.

In the case of Behe’s ID idiocy and New-Age acupressure guides, they belong squarely in the science section. The questions that they address (Who are we? How did we get here? How can the flow of Chi affect my basement grow-op?) are fundamentally scientific ones. Just because a particular author’s answer to a real scientific question is completely insipid does not mean that it does not belong on the Science shelf.

Call me Naïve, but I truly want to believe that in the great marketplace of ideas, theories will ultimately rise and fall on their own merits.

If you want to rid your local science section of wastes of wood-pulp like Behe’s books on Intelligent Design, here’s how to do it.

Let his opinion be heard.

There is only one appropriate response to a ridiculous proposition, and that response is thorough ridicule. Give Behe and his ilk a seat at the table. Engage him. Expose his ideas for the unscrupulous shams that they are. I’m not advocating that anyone treat fools with kid gloves—far from it. All I’m saying is, give these people just enough intellectual rope to hang themselves with, then help them build their gallows.

That article sums up some of what we do here at BoF. It’s great fun pointing out how foolish the “freedom fighters”, Concerned “Women”, and Family “Researchers” are, but our fun has a very real purpose. These people want to pull our society back to the Dark Ages. Ridiculing these ideas is one of the best ways to expose them for the frauds that they are.

Maybe we haven’t seen our “friend” in the last few days because of a mine collapse.

The 87th Skeptics’ Circle came out a couple of days ago at Action Skeptics.

The absolute best post of the bunch is Bing McGhandi’s story of his contest to sneak a fraudulent article past the “peer review” of Answers in Genesis’ creation journal, and the contestant who almost pulled it off.

Of course, the granddaddy of all Family Circus parodies is the Dysfunctional Family Circus. It went for 500 panels back in the 1990s, before being shut down by the lawyers. Lucky for us, the whole shebang is archived here. Here are just three examples from that site.

“…and please allow Daddy to continue to use his unfunny comic strip to impose his Christianity on America.”

“OK, Mom. Take the RU-486, squat on this jar, and we’re off to the pro-life rally.”

“Son, if God had wanted you to catch that ball, you would have. It’s that simple. So the question is not ‘Why did I botch that pop fly’, but ‘What have I done to make God angry?’ You haven’t been touching yourself again, have you?”

Few things on this Earth are more horrid than The Family Circus. Bil Keane is now 85 years old, and he still won’t quit. That won’t matter anyway, because his son is poised to take over the strip. Except for the oblong heads and massive thighs, Keane is actually a fairly good artist. The strip could have been funny. Where he falls down are the captions.

Loyal BoF reader Ericsan has called my attention to The Other Family. This is a website that takes Keane’s comics and recaptions them. The three panels I’ve reproduced here are from that site.

It’s really a shame that Bil Keane has been phoning it in for the past 48 years. If he’d apply just a little effort, he could write captions as funny as these.

Possummomma calls our attention to Kent Hovind’s blog. As you’ll recall from the last time we discussed this creatard, not only was he committing crimes against education (by telling people the Earth was only 6000 years old and poofed into existence by a magical sky daddy), but he was also committing crimes against the government. Specifically, tax evasion. He is now serving a ten-year sentence for the latter crime. He’s gotten off scot-free on the former.

Apparently being locked up isn’t good for this guy’s mental health. He was obviously crazy before, but now even more so. A lot of his posts are his fantasies of talking to God. OK. Lots of theists think they talk to God. But Hovind’s are clearly the mind of a crazy man.

While I was torturing myself by actually reading the blog, I came across this gem in the comments. (You can find it in this thread.) It’s by somebody calling himself “for Jesus’ name: Phillip-George (c)1974”:

…the bible got it right. basically there is no biblical distinction between planets and stars:_ the modern distinction between a planet and a star is arbitrary and scientifically useless.…

the modern distinction between planets and stars has yielded nothing useful.

Yesterday we looked at the advertisement that crackpot creatard Kevin Wirth wrote to try to get us to buy his crappy Expelled knock-off, a book called Slaughter of the Dissidents. The book is written by non-expelled young-Earth creationist Jerry Bergman.

That right there is an interesting point. This whole “doubting Darwin” campaign is the brainchild of the “Intelligent Design” folks, such as the Discovery Institute and Kevin Wirth’s own adorable Access Research Network. These old-Earth creationists insist that their “theory” has nothing to do with religion. So what do they do? The Discovery Institute goes out of their way to promote Ben Stein’s movie, which directly links ID creationism to religion. Then Kevin Wirth goes out of his way to publish and promote a book written by a young-Earth creationist. These people are even incompetent at hiding the religious basis of their “theory”!

I took Kevin up on his offer of receiving a free chapter from the book. He sent me chapter 18: “The Peloza, Bishop, and Johnson Cases”. Apparently that’s all this book is, just a long, itemized list of all the alleged cases of “Darwin doubter discrimination”. What a scintillating read that must be! Well, let’s get scintillating!

As a result of attempts by Darwin skeptics to secure a place both at the table of scientific discussion and in the classroom…

These so-called “Darwin skeptics” don’t belong in the classroom until they secure a seat at the table of scientific discussion. And they don’t belong there until they actually come up with some evidence. Whining about being left out or going to court isn’t the way to remedy things. The answer is much simpler. Just give us some scientific evidence. They’ve had 150 years, and they’ve yet to provide any.

…the federal courts have put evolution “virtually beyond criticism.”¹

That superscript leads you to the footnotes for this chapter. It’s five whole pages of footnotes! Almost every footnote is to document some quotation that they mined from elsewhere. There’s a total of 78 footnotes for this chapter alone! This book is just one giant Kevin Wirth quote dump!

Court rulings in cases involving those who are open critics of Darwinism have been blatantly discriminatory, dishonest, and unconstitutional. Indications now exist that the Supreme Court is aware of this and may try to correct this problem in future rulings.

So Bergman, a non-lawyer/non-Constitutional scholar, thinks that when his side loses, the ruling is unconstitutional. Protecting the First Amendment is the definition of a constitutional ruling, but Bergman is pouting that impartial courts clearly see that his guys are wrong. Then he tells us that the Supreme Court needs to step in. Why? So the activist judges can legislate from the bench?

In past cases involving Darwin skeptics, my research of over 100 cases over the past 30 years indicates that schools typically presented trumped-up and often obviously bogus reasons for dismissal or denial of tenure such as incompetence, erroneous claims that a faculty member falsified documents, or other allegations that were clearly proposed to cover up the real reason—religious discrimination.

Of course it never crosses Bergman’s mind that maybe those were the actual reasons! Remember that the movie Expelled presented just a few cases of alleged discrimination. You would think that those cases would be the strongest examples. Yet in every case, discrimination is not the real story.

Bergman then gets into the specific cases that this chapter is devoted to: The Peloza, Bishop, and Johnson Cases. I don’t have access to all of the materials that Bergman does, so I have no way of knowing what the real story is. It’s fair to assume that these cases are no stronger than those portrayed in Expelled.

The Bishop case is a possible exception to this. On its surface, and as portrayed by Bergman, it does appear that maybe the courts went too far. Allegedly, Bishop, a college professor, mentioned very briefly that he “doubted Darwin”, and that’s the extent of what he said. Supposedly he spent no more than 2–5 minutes out of the entire 2250 minutes of class time. I have no problem with a professor very briefly mentioning this. In fact, I would think it’s beneficial for the students to know what the professor’s biases are, so they can be aware of how they might color his instruction.

As we’ve seen from Expelled, cases like this are seldom exactly as portrayed by the creationists in their whine-fests. I would certainly be open to finding out more about this case, but I can’t take Bergman at his word here. His book has not managed to prove its credibility in the rest of this chapter.

Throughout Bergman’s discussion of these cases, he repeatedly makes two assertions: That evolution is atheistic and that creationism isn’t religious. Both of these assertions are false.

Evolution is atheistic in the same way that history is atheistic. Neither assumes a divine influence or guiding hand. What’s doubly puzzling is how Bergman can “see” the atheism in evolution, but he can’t see the obvious religion in creationism. He tries to frame the creationism as merely “anti-Darwin”, but this is a mere word-game.

Creationists like Bergman get so hung up on linking evolution to Darwin (apparently trying to paint biology as a cult of hero worship) that they get snagged on the many parts of evolution that are non-Darwinian. Darwin only proposed natural and sexual selection as the mechanisms by which evolution took place. Our understanding is much more complete now. The scientific literature is full of non-Darwinian articles. This fact alone puts the lie to everything Bergman writes in this book and Stein says in his movie.

Inspired by the minor motion picture! You’ve gagged through the movie, now gag through the book! Yes, if you couldn’t get enough of the movie that is coming soon to a $1 bargain bin near you, now you can read about even more made-up stories of “Darwin-doubter” persecution!

Crackpot creatard Kevin Wirth hopes to cash in on the Ben Stein blandwagon. He’s publishing a book by one of the “hundreds” of alleged expellees, Jerry Bergman. As we saw yesterday, Bergman wasn’t “expelled” for being a creationist. He was fired for lying about his credentials.

Kevin has given his book the rather salacious title Slaughter of the Dissidents. Let’s see what Kevin says on the book’s web page:

By now you’ve probably heard about that infamous movie so many people are talking about called EXPELLED, starring Ben Stein.… I urge you to hurry up and go check it out while it’s still playing for a limited engagement at your local theatre.

It’s a limited engagement, because the auditoriums are empty! Despite a strong opening weekend (due to subsidized tickets), word of mouth killed this turd deader than Kevin’s chances of actually understanding evolution.

Slaughter of the Dissidents picks up where that movie “Expelled” leaves off.… On another front, perhaps you’ve heard about the Evolution Academic Freedom Bill making the rounds in various states these days?… The purpose of this bill is to protect the rights of students and educators to dissent with aspects of evolution without fear of reprisal. Yep, it’s become so bad we need to pass a law to protect these people! Actually, our existing laws should be sufficient, but the courts have seen fit not to uphold the rights of victims of this type of discrimination.

That’s because there are very few, if any, victims at all. The courts have found in almost all cases that no discrimination occurred.

As you read it you’ll discover that one of the most precious things we own is at risk, right here in America. What is that? In a word,

FREEDOM

Freedom to disagree without losing your job or being denied an earned degree. Freedom to tell people you dare to question any aspect of evolution on scientific grounds - without referencing any religious text.

Really, Kevin? And just what would those scientific grounds be? You never present any. Instead, you just whine that people who pretend to have some and never show it are victims.

Now How Much Would You Pay?

And speaking of religion, it looks like we live in an era where freedom OF religion has been twisted to mean freedom FROM religion.

Actually, Kevin, freedom of religion has always included freedom from religion. But that sure is a bizarre thing to bring up right now, isn’t it Kevin? I thought your whole argument for your creationism these days was that it wasn’t religious. Now you suddenly need to bring up religious freedom? Why does that cut so close to home when you’re talking about doubting evolution?

And the reaction of those who seek to harm Darwin skeptics for their crime of doubt is palpable, almost visceral.… The modern evolutionary elitist thugs leave no stone unturned in the wake of their rabid assault againt [sic] the freedoms of Darwin skeptics.

Kevin’s putrid purple prose is pathetic. People with such overwhelming persecution complexes are usually confined to mental institutions. When’s the last time you were evaluated, Kevin?

The root of this issue is freedom (not the self-serving sanctity of science as the opponents of Darwin skeptics argue…)

No Kevin. You’re wrong on both counts. It’s not about the “self-serving sanctity of science” (whatever that means). It’s that creationists like you are pretending that there is reasonable doubt about evolution, so you can sneak your disguised religion—”intelligent design” creationism—into the public schools, in violation of the First Amendment. You are the enemy of freedom here. You are trying to infringe upon our most precious freedom. The freedom of (and from) religion.

The author of this book, Dr. Jerry Bergman, has been the victim of this type of discrimination himself.

No. As we discussed yesterday, he hasn’t.

There is no one better qualified than Jerry to bring you this book.

No. Somebody who actually was the victim of this type of discrimination is better qualified than Jerry to bring us this book. Tell you what, Kevin. You go find that person, if he exists, and then we’ll read your book.

But Wait! There’s More!

Next, Kevin gives us some highlights of this book. OK, if we must. Let’s slog through them:

Which sitting jurist actually ruled on one of these cases before he was appointed to the Supreme Cour? [sic]

I don’t know, but I hope your book is better proofread than this ad.

When is it OK to teach ID or creationism at most universities?

In comparative mythology classes.

What are the landmines you absolutely must avoid if you are an educator?

Teaching creationism! (duh!)

What is the most common (but incorrect) assumption made by most Darwin Doubting educators that often leads to their termination?

Believing that there is legitimate scientific doubt about evolution.

What are the various situations that have spelled doom for the careers of hundreds of educators and scientists?

Wasting time talking about creationism instead of doing legitimate research and getting published in peer-reviewed journals.

Is it really true that there are no peer-reviewed articles published in reputable science journals written by Darwin skeptics?

No. Anti-evolutionists have been published, but they confine their articles to matters not directly linked to evolution. There have been no creationism articles published in legitimate peer-reviewed journals.

What academic institutions have had incidents where educators were let go, or were pressured to change their curricula, or were thwarted in some way from getting a degree or were marked down on their grades?

I don’t know. There sure weren’t any in Expelled.

But You Won’t Pay $300! You Won’t Pay $200! In Fact, You Won’t Even Pay $100!

As is typical in internet marketing, there’s no price listed at the end of the ad. In fact, you can’t even buy the book. He says it’s being released on May 30th. Instead, he tries to get you onto his mailing list, where he can ply you with spam after spam, extolling the virtues of the book, until he’s managed to expel every one of your brain cells and you buy the book. In exchange for getting spammed, Kevin promises to send you a free chapter of the book.

I’m taking a bullet for you people here. I gave him my email address, so I could get the free chapter. We’ll look at that tomorrow.