Short­er Dis­co. ‘tute’s David Kling­hof­fer: Paul McBride, Dar­win­ist Hero of the Hour:

Why don’t real sci­en­tists take our book seek­ing to throw out all of pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gy – self-pub­lished by a lawyer, an insect geneti­cist, and a bac­teri­um geneti­cist – seri­ous­ly? That pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gist who tore it to shreds does­n’t count: he has­n’t got good enough credentials.

Hon­est­ly, here’s David Kling­hof­fer­’s actu­al open­ing:

The debate about evo­lu­tion is con­duct­ed in large part on blogs… Defend­ing Dar­win­ism from crit­ics and advo­cates of alter­na­tive sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries like intel­li­gent design should be a top pri­or­i­ty for evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry’s online boosters.

The debate over evo­lu­tion – the legit­i­mate sci­en­tif­ic debate – takes place in sci­ence jour­nals.  Not van­i­ty press­es like Disco.‘s BIO-com­plex­i­ty, but real jour­nals that have rig­or­ous edit­ing and seri­ous com­pe­ti­tion for pub­li­ca­tion.  Peo­ple who are inter­est­ed in mak­ing evo­lu­tion as strong a sci­ence as it can be are focused on what hap­pens there.

What hap­pens on blogs is fun, but is not the main stage of the evo­lu­tion debate.  The bit that hap­pens online – the only bit Kling­hof­fer appears to real­ize exists – is about the pol­i­tics of evo­lu­tion, a mat­ter of gen­er­al­ly lit­tle inter­est (for bet­ter or for worse) to most scientists.

That dis­tinc­tion large­ly answers the ques­tion posed by the ‘tute’s scriven­er, why more of evo­lu­tion’s defend­ers pre­fer not to spend their time read­ing cre­ation­ist books: 

At best, they’ll find some­one else who claims to have read it and rely on his say-so that the book or arti­cle is no good.

I find this sus­pi­cious. They seem to be afraid of direct­ly con­fronting ID argu­ments. Why would that be?

But the answer is sim­ple: Because the books and arti­cles are no good.  There’s too much good sci­ence pub­lished every day for any researcher to read.  Why would they waste time on self-con­tra­dic­to­ry, out-of-date, self-pub­lished nonsense?

Not long ago, a group of cli­mate change deniers tried to jam up the EPA using an argu­ment like Kling­hof­fer­’s.  The EPA, they claimed, had moved too quick­ly in declar­ing that car­bon diox­ide emis­sions are harm­ful to the air and water (and thus are sub­ject to reg­u­la­tion under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act).  The deniers insist­ed that EPA was wrong to rely on the sci­en­tif­ic judg­ments of, inter alia, the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, the Inter­na­tion­al Pan­el on Cli­mate Change, and the US Glob­al Change Research Pro­gram.  They want­ed the EPA to redo all the sci­ence, to rean­a­lyze the data and work back through all the pri­ma­ry lit­er­a­ture and decide on its own what effects adding car­bon diox­ide to the atmos­phere would cause.

The DC Cir­cuit Court of Appeals rec­og­nized that argu­ment as the bull­shit it is, telling the deniers:

EPA sim­ply did here what it and oth­er deci­sion-mak­ers often must do to make a sci­ence-based judg­ment: it sought out and reviewed exist­ing sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to deter­mine whether a par­tic­u­lar find­ing was war­rant­ed. It makes no dif­fer­ence that much of the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence in large part con­sist­ed of “syn­the­ses” of indi­vid­ual stud­ies and research. Even indi­vid­ual stud­ies and research papers often syn­the­size past work in an area and then build upon it. This is how sci­ence works. EPA is not required to re-prove the exis­tence of the atom every time it approach­es a sci­en­tif­ic question.

This is how sci­ence works.  ID was wrong yes­ter­day – fac­tu­al­ly wrong where it makes testable claims and philo­soph­i­cal­ly wrong to claim that its cen­tral, untestable, claims are sci­en­tif­ic – and it will be wrong tomor­row.  We don’t have to rede­bunk it, and a good debunk­ing is just as good com­ing from a “blog that no one before ever heard of” as from any­where else.  And until some­one from the Dis­co. ‘tute hus­tles up an answer to Paul McBride’s seri­ous and thought­ful cri­tique, they might do well not to gas on about oth­er peo­ple not address­ing their critics.