Creationists: Champions of Lunacy, Enemies of Discourse and Democracy
I recently saw, as many readers of this blog have likewise seen, the announcement that science is a mere three to ten years away from creating the very first artificial life in the laboratory. For those who understand evolutionary biology, this isn't necessarily a big deal for the theory of evolution itself in terms of the origins of life. That's abiogenesis, which is beyond the scope of the theory itself. Nonetheless, it's a huge achievement for science overall and promises to greatly further our understanding of the nature of the very first life forms that gave rise through the principles of evolution to the spectacular diversity of form and function we see in the world today. By any account, it's certainly a marvelous achievement and, when it happens, I would imagine there will be nominations for appropriate Nobel prizes coming hard on its heels.
This also harkens us back to the dumbest of all anti-evolution arguments, the one that concludes that only by constructing a cell de novo in the laboratory can evolutionary theory be proven, but that doing so only proves that all life must be "intelligently designed." When I saw the announcement of how close we are coming to creating protocells, my first thought after marveling at the possibilities was, "I bet people who make stupid arguments in favor of divine intervention in the history of life will find a way to twist this into something unrecognizably ridiculous." Such speculation was soon rewarded by dimwitted punditry like this moronic release from the Discovery Institute that absolutely miss the mark:
Materialists predict they will create "artificial life" in a test tube in the next 3 to 10 years. I have a counter-prediction: They will succeed only by re-defining "artificial" and "life." For example, "artificial" will cover any human manipulation of an existing organism -- so replacing a few genes or enzymes in an already-living cell will count as creating "artificial life." And "life" will be anything that can undergo "Darwinian evolution" -- such as an artificially engineered system of molecules -- even though it can be sustained only in a carefully controlled laboratory environment...We could almost forgive a know-nothing like the author of this blather, Jonathan Wells, if this weren't being advanced as a prediction by a group with such a long history of misleading the credulous. After complaining for years that scientists couldn't create artificial life in the laboratory, Wells has now shifted the goalposts and is complaining that science can only create artificial life in a laboratory. How clever of him to shift the emphasis! Of course his characterization of the work being done as "replacing a few genes or enzymes" tells us all we need to know; the actual ongoing work entails synthesizing cell membranes and manufacturing new genomes from amino acids as has been stated in the studies comprised in this wide-spread research. All such "predictions" to the contrary are absolute sleight-of-hand by Wells.
Wells' complaint boils down to the fact that the earliest life forms were little more than collections of molecules that could only exist within narrow environmental limits and underwent evolution (the phrase "Darwinian evolution" is meaningless here unless Wells can provide sound evidence of mechanisms other than those predicted by evolutionary theory, just as his claiming that "materialists" rather than "scientists" are performing this work is just as valid as claiming that "mammals" are invading department stores). Of course these novel life forms are "artificially engineered" (as opposed to what, naturally engineered?) in laboratories. That's where scientists work. Perhaps it would have been better if someone had whipped up cell membranes in the tool shed outback and coupled them with genetic material synthesized at a shoe shop? Even for Wells, this is some pretty sloppy rhetoric and certainly some of the more duplicitous nonsense he's spewed in his long career as an agent of the Disenlightenment.
Still, perhaps there's some light at the end of the tunnel for Wells' bunch. After all, Adnan Oktar, the Islamic creationist knuckle-dragger and mastermind behind the pseudonymous Harun Yahya, has recently succeeded in getting all of WordPress blocked in Turkey because it "libeled" him by, first, exposing the fact that "Harun Yahya" is an authorship assigned to anything that Oktar finds and publishes that denies evolutionary theory. He does that even when such material is every bit as misleading, dishonest, and belittling of the mental capabilities of the true-believers as he and Wells are themselves. More on Turkey's embargo of all Wordpress blogs can be found here. Secondly, of course, the truth is offensive to Oktar's version of fundamentalist Islam which, far from being an instrument to provide any framework for understanding of the world seeks to close its adherents off from it in favor of the pronouncements of mullahs who've never quite transcended the 11th century.
Also in favor of Wells and his lot, a professional litigant and fellow science-denier named Stuart Pivar is suing PZ Myers, author of the Pharyngula blog, over his negative reviews of Pivar's latest bit of creationist drek, Lifecode. Myers not only panned the book on the basis of its gross misreporting of scientific knowledge but also discovered incidences of quote mining; the sources cited in Pivar's book confirm that they have been misquoted and even plagiarized. As befits someone who would create such a dishonest work in the first place, Pivar is now seeking to silence his critics through litigation in much the same way that Oktar is attempting to stop word of his own dishonesty from becoming even more well-known than they already are. This isn't anything new; Christopher Mims has done a little research and found that Pivar has done this on at least 25 previous occasions, in fact.
This is what these creationist theologians are all about in the end. They produce no research, only mountains of misleading, dishonest junk to foist off on the gullible. They protect their claims and their meal tickets not by producing anything useful, not by being able to demonstrate points of error in competing hypotheses and entire theoretical models that simply work in the real world, but instead by attempting to silence real science and by gagging voices that advocate truth and knowledge. These aren't just harmless crackpots, these are full-blown sociopaths willing to overthrow human progress in the name of protecting unsupportable theology. If democracy, let alone science, is to be founded upon knowledge, upon an understanding of the world untinged by superstition, then people like Wells, Oktar and Pivar need be seen for what they are — enemies of reason, advocates of religiously-based censorship, and ruiners of anything even vaguely resembling useful discourse. We are at least lucky that their holy retributions are confined by modern society to a courtroom; if people like Oktar had their way, public stoning would no doubt be the preferred method of dealing with the heretics that inhabit research laboratories.
