AP Wire | 04/08/2005 | Evo­lu­tion hear­ings like­ly to be one-sided:

Steve Abrams, the state board­’s Repub­li­can chair­man, called the con­tention that board mem­bers have decid­ed the issue “bull malarkey,” and said the hear­ings will take place even if evo­lu­tion defend­ers don’t show up.

“If they’ve got the guns on their side to defend (evo­lu­tion), then why not defend it?” he said. “Instead, what they are going to do is take pot­shots, they are going to do the one-lin­ers, they are going to do the 30-sec­ond sound bite instead of com­ing in and try­ing to tes­ti­fy and defend a posi­tion that they say is the only posi­tion in the world.”

Dr. Abrams is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but this is hilar­i­ous. Com­pare The Evo­lu­tion Project to The Non-Evo­lu­tion Project. See how there’s been tons of research pub­lished on evo­lu­tion in the last 3 months, and none on the “alter­na­tives,” or even under­min­ing evo­lu­tion­ary biology? 

Sci­ence isn’t about peo­ple, it’s about ideas. What ideas will the cre­ation­ists bring? They’ll bring mud, and they’ll sling it. But sci­ence is a process that clears dirt off of good ideas, and lets the bad ones get buried.

As Eliot Sober says in Phi­los­o­phy of Biol­o­gy,

It would be a dis­tor­tion to call cre­ation­ism a research pro­gram in biol­o­gy, because cre­ation­ists real­ly do not to bio­log­i­cal research at all. They crit­i­cize evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry, but they have not devel­oped a pos­i­tive expla­na­tion of their own of the adap­tive com­plex­i­ty found in nature. Here I am talk­ing about peo­ple, not propo­si­tions. Cre­ation the­o­ry [his empha­sis] may be thought of as an idea that can be eval­u­at­ed in the long term by see­ing whether it can sole prob­lems that rival research pro­grams are unable to address. There are many ver­sions that the the­o­ry can take; only by explor­ing a good num­ber of these can we reach a fair assess­ment of the the­o­ry’s plau­si­bil­i­ty. A sin­gle set of obser­va­tions may impugn one ver­sion of cre­ation­ism, but to give the idea a real run for its mon­ey, oth­er ver­sions must be explored.

If we view cre­ation­ism as a flex­i­ble doc­trine that can be for­mu­lat­ed in numer­ous spe­cif­ic ways, how should we eval­u­ate it? The long-term track record of “sci­en­tif­ic cre­ation­ism” has been poor. Phrenol­o­gy [dis­cussed ear­li­er] even­tu­al­ly was dis­card­ed; although it showed some promise ini­tial­ly, it failed to progress in the long run. Cre­ation­ism has fared no bet­ter; indeed, it has done much worse. It was in its hey­day with Paley [in 1805], but since then the idea has moved to the fringe of seri­ous thought and beyond. Per­haps time enough has passed for it to be dis­card­ed on the rub­bish heap of history.

I high­light­ed the bold text. Any­one who enjoys the argu­ment for its own sake, but does­n’t want all the bio­log­i­cal detail of an evo­lu­tion text or a pop­u­lar book on evo­lu­tion, should read Sober’s book. 

The point is, while cre­ation­ism or the design argu­ment (which he deals with and dis­miss­es) may once have been of some inter­est, and may even be sci­en­tif­ic state­ments, they have been so thor­ough­ly reject­ed already as to be worth­less, or as Dr. Abrams might say “bull malarkey.”