Short­er David Kling­hof­fer, Dis­co. ‘tute scriven­er, We Called Out Dar­win­ist Crit­ic Carl Zim­mer, and He Fold­ed:

Why won’t any­one play my game?

Kling­hof­fer is upset that no one will come to the Dis­co. blog, let Dis­co. staff ban any out­side com­ment, and debate the mer­its of the book which sev­er­al Dis­co. staffers wrote and which Dis­co. self-published. 

Instead, crit­ics are feel­ing free to explore the book’s many fail­ings on their own blogs, and in com­ments on Disco.-affiliated Face­book pages. 

And when these crit­ics offer a gen­tle “I would pre­fer not to” in answer to Kling­hof­fer­’s poor­ly-writ­ten and ill-con­ceived invi­ta­tions, Kling­hof­fer­’s response is to demon­strate exact­ly why no one should sub­mit them­selves to his edi­to­r­i­al over­sight, by insult­ing and demean­ing not just the invi­tee, but the entire uni­verse of “Dar­win­ists.”  They don’t want to play foot­ball, they just want to mess with peo­ple they don’t like.

If Kling­hof­fer and his Dis­co. ‘tute col­leagues real­ly want the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to review their absurd and out­dat­ed essays, there’s a sim­ple way to do that.  Write them up as prop­er sci­en­tif­ic papers, and send them off to real sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals.  Edi­tors there will eval­u­ate the papers, and send them out to anony­mous review­ers for fur­ther scruti­ny.  Those review­ers will make sug­ges­tions, and if the Dis­co. kids can make the sug­gest­ed changes, or explain why they’re wrong to the edi­tor’s sat­is­fac­tion, the papers will be pub­lished for sci­en­tists to read.  Then the real peer review would begin: if no one else ever cites those papers, then they did­n’t mat­ter much.  If the papers are fre­quent­ly cit­ed by peo­ple who agree with their con­clu­sions, then they made a good point.  If the papers are fre­quent­ly cit­ed by peo­ple offer­ing anoth­er rea­son why Dis­co. is full of goose doots, then the papers failed.

Of course, the Dis­co. gang would rather set up their own van­i­ty jour­nal, and invent an ad hoc review sys­tem of blog debates than sub­mit them­selves to real review by the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty.  Any­one who accepts their invi­ta­tion is set­ting him­self up for a fall.