After the giddiness of yesterday's victory in Dover, now we have to stop and think about the real problems. Winning in the courts does block idiocy from rising to new levels and protects a fragile public school system, but it does not address the source of the silly creationism debate: the same leaders and the same vast crowd of supporters are still out there, seething and scheming to find some new way to make their goofy doctrine the law of the land. They aren't going to go away because a judge pointed out all the obvious flaws in their ideas—scientists have been saying these very same things over and over for years.

An article in Salon takes a glum look at the decision. It's a strange piece of work; it does point out the plain facts of the Discovery Institute's poorly concealed religious and conservative agenda, but it lets their dishonesty slide by. It also lets scientists clearly state their opinions, and then points out that scientists often don't make their points well. We do have some problems to overcome.

The creationists lie.

They lie like snakes. We can see that already in the Discovery Institute's responses to the decision.

West bristles at the idea that I.D.'s success is due to good P.R. "Darwinists like Forrest don't seem to understand that by caricaturing I.D. they ultimately undercut their own efforts," he says. "When students or scholars who have been exposed to Forrest's straw-man version of I.D. actually read science journal articles or academic books by I.D. scholars, they suddenly discover for themselves that the evidence and arguments for I.D. are a lot more impressive and sophisticated than they've been led to believe. And once they start to engage the real issues raised by the scientific evidence, the spin and scare tactics pushed by Darwinian fundamentalists like Forrest don't cut it."

You know this is going to get repeated over and over, with much fury and lots of spittle, yet it is false from the very first word. The trial was not about a caricature of ID; some of the Discovery Institute's favorite pseudoscientists were on the stand, and spent days freely discussing the fine points of their ideas. It's not true that their books are sophisticated or impressive; they appeal to people predisposed by their religious indoctrination to accept excuses for a supreme being, but others see their science as shallow and often wrong.

This was a case where both sides got up and had to present their evidence in detail, no polemics and no emotional appeals, and it's clear where that lands you: on the side of evolution.

Expect the campaign of lies to escalate. This is often hard for scientists to deal with, because we generally expect that our opponents and critics are operating in good faith. Intelligent Design creationists are not.

The media are complicit.

The Salon article isn't bad, even if it is confronting us with some uncomfortable realities about how evolution is perceived outside academia. But it also commits a common journalistic sin. In response to West's mad frothing that I quoted above, here's the next sentence from the journalist:

Whether I.D.'s scientific core is "impressive and sophisticated," as West says, is debatable.

Aaaaaaargh! No, it is not "debatable" in the sense of being open to reasonable disagreement. West lied. Read Judge Jones' decision, and it's clear that he is addressing directly and appropriately the specific claims of major figures with the ID movement, not a caricature. We can't expect the public to read books by Miller or Forrest and Gross or Scott, or even that 139 page decision; it sure would be useful if we could trust journalists to understand and digest that stuff, though, and if it were part of their obligation to use that knowledge to point out when the creationists are not being honest.

Science is often dry.

One part of the article made me very uncomfortable, not because the journalist was failing to do his job, but because he did it very well and illustrated a genuine problem on our side (would that he had been as effective at bringing out the root problem, the phoniness, of the other side…). It's also a criticism of one of the good guys of the NCSE and the Panda's Thumb, Wesley Elsberry.

The reporter sat in on a lecture series at Chabot College, in which an evolutionist (Wesley Elsberry), a young earth creationist (Ken Malloy), and an ID proponent (Phillip Johnson) gave lectures.

Elsberry launched the series to a standing-room-only crowd, with a detailed review of the history of evolutionary theory from pre-Darwin days until now. It was thorough and fair and totally lacking in hype or flair. As one who has long studied evolution and natural history, I managed to follow along. But judging by the drooping heads and the dozen or so empty seats when the lights came up, I'm not sure how many of the Chabot students did.

At one point, as Elsberry was zipping through his talk about the synthesis of species, the young woman next to me muttered "Jesus" in exasperation before abandoning her frantic effort to take notes. For the rest of the talk, she just sat there, eyes half shut, letting the names, facts and figures wash over her like a foreign language.

Elsberry's commitment to detail and lack of rhetorical flourish sent Sperling into a bit of a panic. "Dr. Elsberry is a wonderful and meticulous scientist, but I don't think he really could see how little of what he was saying his audience even understood," she said after his lecture. "And now, to be brutally honest, I'm worried that I may be undermining my own science teaching." In other words, she was afraid the next speakers, the anti-evolutionists, might win the day.

It's true: we aren't trained to be showmen. We are very good at talking to other scientists—I'm sure Wesley's talk would have been a pleasure for me to listen to, and I would have learned much and been appreciative of the substance—but most of it would have whooshed over the heads of a lay audience. I wrestle with this in my public talks, too. There's always this stuff that I am very excited about and that I know my peers think is really nifty and that gets right down to the heart of the joy and wonder of biology, but it's so far from the perspective of the audience that it is well nigh impossible to communicate. And I know that when I try, I usually fail.

Another problem is that we're used to giving lectures that people are required to attend in order to absorb the raw information they need to do well on a test. I don't think my students show up for the visceral joy of hearing me talk.

The two creationists in the series, on the other hand, are simple and clear (and the young earth creationist has the advantage of being entertainingly insane). They don't have any complex data to explain, so they aren't tempted to try, and they put everything in terms everyone can follow. An absence of evidence can be an advantage in a talk, because then everything rests on well-honed rhetoric; the scientist's reliance on actual information means we often skimp on the presentation.

I've heard Johnson speak, and he's smooth and confident, and slyly appeals to his audience's prejudices. Of course, he also lies like a  censored . It simplifies lecture preparation if you can simply make up glib lies to fill in the holes, another strategy to which scientists will not resort.

This is another hard problem, and I can't pretend to be a great speaker myself. I do think that what we need, though, is to be able to give talks with fire: a passion for the subject and well-warranted anger at the distortions of the creationists. We need to be able to both communicate the meaty information (the real strength of science) and the concrete meanings of that often abstract data. This is hard work. It's also work that is rarely effective in a one hour talk, and takes a generation and a multitude to push the message across. We're behind the creationists on that, and we need to get working on it.