One has to be amused. A right-wing maroon named J. Bowen is incensed that one of my co-conspirators at the Panda's Thumb used insulting invective…which he addresses, ironically enough, in this way:

If you should ever see a jackass wearing a mortarboard exiting a biology department, it might well answer to the name "Hoppe". From a post attacking someone who dares to dissent from evolutionary dogma, quoth Richard Hoppe:

What a fine example of IOKIYAR! Of course, since I know two fine Hoppes—the above mentioned Richard, and another who is a colleague in the UMM biology discipline—I have a rather different impression of the name.

What's got poor Mr Bowen all worked up? That Richard Hoppe had critized…William D. Rubinstein! You recall him: the outrageously clueless wanker historian who went on and on with genuinely stupid complaints about evolutionary theory. Both Hoppe and I have done more than insult him—we've vivisected his poor arguments with links to easily accessible refutations. I guess Bowen noticed that Rubinstein was smarter than he was, so all our put-downs of a certain Welsh historian also applied with even more force to him.

Bowen has nothing of substance to say, but he does manage to pull of a lovely example of egregious creationist quote mining. In this case, Bowen quotes five paragraphs from a speciation FAQ at the talk.origins archive…the five paragraphs that discuss the relatively sparse documentation of speciation events in the scientific literature. From this he concludes:

I guess you can't help but admire the faith of these biologists in things not actually observed. Sorry, but these inferences of speciation events simply aren't any more scientific than inferences of creation events.

One strange thing is that he doesn't actually bother to link to the FAQ containing those five cautionary paragraphs. If he had, the reader could have looked beyond them to notice that the author goes on to list about 30 observations of the speciation process. And there's a link to another FAQ with a couple more. I guess by neglecting to link and only quoting the bits he likes, he can claim that speciation is "not actually observed".

He also doesn't seem to understand the word "inference". Inference is a valid and reasonable technique based on evidence. When you observe two similar but distinct species separated by an isolation mechanism (for instance, the Kaibab and Abert squirrels, populations split apart by the Grand Canyon), speciation by natural, documented mechanisms is a perfectly reasonable inference drawn from the observation. Assuming that an invisible super-being zapped them into existence exactly as they are is not an inference—it's more of a wild-assed brain fart—since the conclusion has no flanking evidence to give it reasonable credibility.

Bowen is obviously familiar enough with the talk.origins archive to cite it, but he's not smart enough to comprehend it. It consists of pages and pages of solid evidence, yet he somehow comes away with the impression that all it contains is apologies for missing pieces of the story.

Let the crying begin: Some of the fossils are gone! We haven't found them all yet! Many of the species have soft bodies and are not adequately preserved in the fossil record! Evolutionary processes take a long time! And so on. The answer to them all is tough luck, kid - the evidence is supposed to be there to support your theory.

Here ya go, kid: evidence. Although I suspect Bowen actually knows its there…he's just doing his damnedest to give the impression there isn't any supporting evidence. It's hard to say, though. Creationists tread a fine line between stupidity and dishonesty, sometimes.