Walking a mile in PZ Myers’ shoes
By I’m off 24 hour news channels pretty much as a rule, but I still tune into some CNN at the Gym. I was unfortunate enough to catch a Larry King roundtable on intelligent design. The lineup went like this:
On the “The earth is between five and ten thousand years old” team: Some idiot minister.
On the “teach the controversy” middle-ground team: Brownback, some Discovery institute clown, and CNN’s pet mystic new age weirdo, Deepak Chopra.
Representing the reality-based community: Barbara Forrest, who seems to actually know something about science, and Christopher Shays, who really ought to stop voting with these nuts if he wants his outrage to be taken seriously.
It’s hard to describe King’s utter ineptitude as a journalist with only the words available to us in the english language, so I won’t try, in general. The six members of the roundtable were asked bizzare, non-sequitor questions seemingly at random, giving the whole affair a rather disconnected and surreal feel to it.
One question from King was so bad and so bizarre that I won’t try to comment on it. I can’t, however, not share it. King asked the one serious person on this giant panel the following question:
KING: All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?
Later, noted reasonable centrist Deepak Chopra will explain that while of course he believes in evolution, but it’s time for scientists to start to consider the possibility that the sacred texts of Darwin might not be entirely infallible:
Now, I do agree with Dr. Richards, who says that there is evidence that we need to understand Darwin’s theory a little bit better, or you know, it’s a little more than 150 years old.
Later, the creationist minister will explain, forcefully and without any actual reasons, that the existence of DNA conclusively proves that intelligent design is the only plausible worldview for a scientist to take.
The whole trainwreck can be found here, but I don’t recommend actually reading it.
…I see PZ has discovered Deepak Chopra’s silliness about DNA. He actually manages to figure out what he’s trying to say enough to actually why it’s so wrong, which is more than I could do.