...and Then I Turned to the Last Page

In yesterday’s post I got excited about an article in the latest issue of Scientific American, America’s premier popular science journal. The article about savant syndrome and the brain was very useful. Unfortunately, after glowing about that article, I made the mistake of turning to the last page of the magazine, where I was confronted by Steve Mirsky’s editorial piece entitled “The Trials of Life.” Right off I thought, “Here we go.” The word “trial” was a clue to where this thing was going. The sub-title read, "Because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, we have to talk about Intelligent Design again, sorry."

Before launching into a bunch of misrepresentations of ID and the Dover, Pennsylvania ID trial, Mr. Mirsky proceeded to characterize creation science as “oxymoronic and just plain moronic, and ID as a subtle form of creationism that refuses to identify the designer, “but," he sardonically adds, "it rhymes with Todd.” He then makes a demeaning sexist remark comparing the bacterial flagellum ("a whippy little tail") to a couple of well-known Hollywood actresses.

Now I ask you, what is this very unscientific, sarcastic, insulting piece of non-literature doing in a supposedly respectable scientific journal?

Then I flipped over the page to its reverse side and witnessed an amazing bit of irony: the “Ask the Experts” column entitled, “How and why do fireflies light up?” Here, on the very same sheet of paper as the anti-ID rant is a description of one of the most obviously irreducibly complex pieces of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry in the animal kingdom. Firefly bioluminescence has been the subject of scores of research projects and journal articles over the past several decades, attempting to figure out the anatomy and chemistry of the phenomenon. And the more that is known, the more amazing it becomes. In fact the anatomy of these insects—in fact, any insect—is so complex, so unique, that some well-known scientist (Fred Hoyle, as I recall) declared that insects must have come from outer space—they couldn’t have evolved on Planet Earth.

Back to Mr. Mirsky’s subtitle: “Because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty…” What kind of liberty are we talking about? The liberty to demean and insult anyone who questions Darwinian orthodoxy, but not the liberty to mention, in a government school classroom, the idea that there just might be Someone whose name rhymes with “Todd”?