I get e-mail. I've mentioned before that I refuse to waste time with creationists in private e-mail, and tell them I'll take it to this website and address it publicly if they want, but otherwise, they can stuff it. Well, I screwed up.

I got a friendly note from an .edu address, asking me what I thought of a couple of quoted paragraphs. I assumed it was someone asking for assistance in dealing with a creationist, so I sent them back a brief critique.

If I'd looked a little closer, I would have discovered that the author was a third rate creationist, one Phil Skell, a chemist at PSU. He's one of these guys who frequents various web-based fora, and whose only routine is to dogmatically declare that biologists don't use evolution. Over and over. He's a kind of pedantic creationist screed machine, who generates these tedious declarations and never, ever responds to any criticism.

Anyway, I sent him my complaints about the creationist boilerplate noise without recognizing who he was, and he bounces right back with another message. He completely ignores what I'd written (which, I've since found, is entirely typical) and throws another set of demands at me. Now I wised up, and told him no, unless he's willing to do it publicly.

He refused. The coward.

I'm usually willing to just let these bozos go with that, but in this case, I'd already invested some time in, I thought, helping him out. So that's tough for him, I'm going to give you, the loyal readers of Pharyngula, a look at the kind of garbage I regularly find in my mailbox.

It's pretty bad. When I first saw it, my impression was that just about every phrase was muddle-headed nonsense, and that it could practically be torn apart word for word. It almost was. Follow the superscripts to see my criticisms.

The purpose of Darwin’s theory was to explain the happenings within the living domain over the past 3.5billion years¹. There is precious little that survived over that period² and thus little to explain³. That opened the door to wild speculations⁴ based on the worldviews of a tiny minority of the population⁵, which have been raised to the level of dogma⁵, which is forced on the unsuspecting students⁶, even to the point of labelling it as Fact⁷.

This theory is sold to the public as the source of all the greatly valued results from the admirably successful modern biology⁸­--the study of structure and function of living organisms with all the new instruments and methodologies⁹. The suggestion is clearly false and misleading¹⁰. The modern biology has no use for the theory¹¹, and manages very well by ignoring it¹².

This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers¹³. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology¹⁴. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning the structure of DNA¹⁵, the discovery of the complete genomes of many living organisms¹⁶, the discovery of antibiotics¹⁷, the discovery of resistance to antibiotics¹⁸, the discovery of pesticides¹⁹, the discovery of toxicity and resistance to pesticides²⁰, the discovery of medications²¹, the discoveries of problems with use of those medications²², the improvements in food production²³, in sanitation²⁴, in new surgeries²⁵, how the nervous system works²⁵, how our eyes function²⁶, what happens during ageing²⁷, the discovery and function of hormones²⁸, how an embryo develops²⁹, how to detect and cure cancers³⁰, etc., etc.. The only honest³¹ answers are: no relevance for the theory³². The only things to which the theory is relevant are speculations about matters largely lost in deep time³³, and the indoctrination of children to the worldviews of those true-believers³⁴.

This does not mean that the theory is wrong, or right³⁵. There is insufficient evidence for either conclusion³⁶, and the discussion of it is best done in a non-science class devoted to speculations about ancient ancient history³⁷.

There's a strong element of the ol' Gish Gallop in here. Look how much stuff he just throws out, demanding that the biologist explain it all to him. Imagine being confronted with that in a public debate: you might be able to discuss one topic in a brief and superficial way, and then he'd just turn around and trumpet that you'd failed to answer his eleventy-seven other points, and therefore he was victorious.

I'm not going to try to address them all in detail here, either. Here's a brief rundown; my general impression is that the man is a babbling idiot.

¹I have no idea where this 3.5 billion comes from. Darwin thought the earth was several million years old; physicists tell us now it is about 4.5 billion years old.

²We have lots and lots of rocks. We have a respectable fossil record beginning, oh, about 600 million years ago, not counting bacterial traces.

³The whole planet and the diversity of all life on it is "little to explain"?

⁴Evolution is built on a foundation of evidence, acquired by informed individuals. He's just waving his hands and trying to dismiss solid evidence as "wild speculation".

⁵It is true that only a minority of people invest the time and effort to understand all the details of any scientific theory. That's why we should listen to them.

⁶Well, yeah…education involves taking students who don't know something and teaching them something new, not confirming what they already believe.

⁷The observations that Mr Skell dismisses as not existing are the 'facts' that must be accounted for by any theory.

⁸No, not quite. Evolution is the theory that explains, informs, and integrates a very large body of information. It is not the theory that generates the information, although it can lead us to productive questions.

⁹Biology is more than that. We also study relationships and origins, something we can't do without evolutionary theory. We study processes and interactions. Mr Skell has a rather static and descriptive idea of what biology is about.

¹⁰That's what I was going to say. Since Mr Skell is making this suggestion, I will defer to his characterization of it.

¹¹As a modern biologist familiar with the literature in my disciplines of development and neurobiology, this is more nonsense. Open up an issue of Development or Developmental Biology, and article after article will discuss evolution and its importance to our discipline.

¹²Since biology doesn't ignore evolution, this is a most peculiar claim.

¹³Blatant mischaracterization of a scientific field by people who are clearly ignorant of it will cause people who do know something about it to protest, yes.

¹⁴I think taking normal breaths is sufficient.

¹⁵Geez, how much history can I cram into a footnote? What drove the interest in the structure of DNA was a long term desire to understand the mechanisms of heredity and the inheritance of variation, and Darwin invested much time and effort in trying to understand it (and got it wrong, unfortunately.) Biologists were trying to puzzle this out in the 19^th century, as you can see in this quote from EB Wilson from 1895.

…the chromosomal substance, the chromatin, is to be regarded as the physical basis of inheritance. Now, chromatin is known to be closely similar to, if not identical with, a substance known as nuclein (C₂₉H₄₉N₉P₃O₂₂, according to Miescher), which analysis shows to be a tolerably definite chemical composed of nucleic acid (a complex organic acid rich in phosphorus) and albumin. And thus we reach the remarkable conclusion that inheritance may, perhaps, be effected by the physical transmission of a particular chemical compound from parent to offspring."

After Mendel, the various factions wrestling with the problem of genetics were all deeply concerned with how it was to be incorporated into evolutionary theory, and the questions of replication, fidelity, and heritable error were all of great interest and importance to evolutionary biologists. Watson's and Crick's discovery fit elegantly into a grand story that had been building for a century.

¹⁶Evolution is taken for granted by the scientists sequencing genomes. The whole process builds on principles of common descent; all genome sequencing is done in reference to other genomes, using molecular tools derived from other organisms. The human genome could not have been done without the prior work of scientists using C. elegans and Drosophila, which was consciously done with the idea of developing general probes for studying other organisms.

¹⁷Mr Skell is no doubt thinking of the serendipitous discovery of penicillin, and assumes all antibiotic work is the result of luck. But no, it actually requires understanding of evolutionary relationships. Finding useful antibiotics requires knowledge of the properties of the branch of the evolutionary tree that you want to kill, and the other branch of the tree that you want to keep alive.

¹⁸He's got to be joking. The story of acquisition of antibiotic resistance is a perfect example of evolution in action.

¹⁹Like the work on antibiotics, developing pesticides requires knowledge of evolutionary relationships. If you want to kill mosquitos but not cats, you try to puzzle out what properties have evolved in the two lineages to distinguish them, and you target those.

²⁰How does Mr Skell think mosquitos acquire resistance to DDT? An arthropod angel flits down from heaven and blesses the most righteous mosquito family, or that it evolves?

²¹You can go a long way in finding new medicines using simple, blind trial and error. I can sort of see the simple minded position Mr Skell is taking: because Fleming discovered a useful medicine by just looking at a fortuitously exposed petri plate, any idiot can do it and you don't need any deep knowledge of the underpinnings of the discipline to succeed. It's like saying that because I found a quarter in the parking lot the other day, I really don't need to engage in that unpleasant "work" stuff to make a living.

²²A perfect example of why medicine doesn't rely on lucky finds: you need to dig deeper to understand why bacterium A is affected by your antibiotic, but bacterium B isn't.

²³Does Mr Skell think that practicing botanists do not value phylogenetics in identifying new food plants, or that the principles of genetics, central to our understanding of evolution, are unimportant in breeding new plant and animal varieties?

²⁴I'll give him this one. Garbage men really don't need to know evolutionary biology to do their jobs (just wait, though, somebody working on developing sophisticated sewage treatment facilities is going to complain that they need a broad knowledge of biology to do their job.)

²⁵Hmm. Without knowledge of evolution, someone might think it's a good idea to use baboon or pig organs for heart transplants.

²⁵Big mistake there. I'm personally very interested in knowing how the nervous system works, and by golly, evolution helps. You can study ion channels in single-celled paramecia, for instance, and look at the relationships between those channels and the ones used in our neurons.

²⁶Like this, you mean?

²⁷See Cynthia Kenyon's work on the role of insulin/IGF-1 pathways in aging…in nematodes. This is a regulatory system that she plainly argues arose early in metazoan evolution and is therefore relevant to humans.

²⁸Mr Skell keeps making the same mistake. We don't usually discover hormones using evolutionary theory, we understand them. Evolutionary biology explains why fish would have prolactin, for instance.

²⁹Yeesh. That's what I'm mostly interested in, the relationship between development and evolution. It's one of the hottest fields in biology today. And Mr Skell thinks evolution doesn't help us understand development? What about this?

³⁰Has Mr Skell ever thought about what cancers are, what causes them, or what strategies organisms have evolved to prevent them? I mean, considering these questions requires that you get into cell cycle control, signalling, and the origins and mechanisms of multicellularity, all issues where evolution is important.

³¹I don't think Mr Skell knows what this word means.

³²This is the assertion of a fool with no grounding in any of the various topics he flung out. It's an argument from raw ignorance. I think the reason he told me to take a deep breath was so he could take it away when he mentioned something as stupid as that my field, developmental biology, does not find any relevance in evolution.

³³No. Darwin formulated the theory to explain phenomena he observed right there in his own time, and we use it now to explain the greater detail we can see right now. Even simple questions, like, "Why do we have five fingers?" are matters that we need evolutionary biology (and other disciplines!) to explain.

³⁴Has anyone else noticed this absurd relativism of creationists, that they try to claim observations about the material universe are just "worldviews" or "opinions?"

³⁵We need a philosopher of science to weigh in on this (Wilkins?), but I at least don't usually think about scientific theory in these kinds of black and white terms. It either works adequately to explain the phenomena I'm seeing, or it needs revision. Evolutionary biology is a vast collection of ideas, some of which have been discarded, some that will be discarded, some that will be changed, all gathered under a broad framework. If sympatric speciation proves to be an unusual special case, it doesn't mean evolution is "wrong", but that a piece of it needs to be tweaked.

³⁶Again, Mr Skell doesn't understand what he is talking about. Evolution has been tested over and over again, and it has held up extremely well—the evidence suggests strongly that it is a good explanation for the phenomena we observe.

³⁷I teach a course in modern developmental biology that tries to explain how modern plants and animals are formed. This is not "ancient ancient history", people have babies all the time. If you want to know how animal embryos know which side is dorsal, you kind of have to explain decapentaplegic (as one piece of the puzzle) and its homologs, and talk about the relationships between flies and humans. Otherwise, why are we messing with all this Drosophila crap in order to discuss how Homo sapiens genes interact?

I told you my disagreements with the substance of his arguments sailed right over his head, and were just ignored. I'm sure he'll continue echoing them over and over again. But here's his next request:

With regard to the literature, I invite you to do a gedanken experiment. Put one of those papers on your computer and ask it to substitute for the evo words something ridiculous such as Creationism, or Buddhist Cosmology, and then, if it is a paper with experimental content(not historical biology), re-examine it. I found the work had lost none of its value. That is consistent with my conversations with many modern biologists(you excepted) who responded to my question "Would you have done your research any differently if you had been convinced Darwin's theory was wrong, or insufficiently evidenced for what it claims?", by allowing that in their work it would have made no difference, but they were certain it would for others. Remarkably, all said the same--always others.

You know what, gang? I don't need to do this. You can all have fun with it yourselves! Here's the abstract from the Fondon and Garner paper I described yesterday. Try it. Take all the important words about evolution, like "evolution", "variation", "selection", "comparative", and "mutations", and replace them with random terms from Buddhism or a Batman comic book or whatever. Does it still make sense?

Mutations in cis-regulatory sequences have been implicated as being the predominant source of variation in morphological evolution. We offer a hypothesis that gene-associated tandem repeat expansions and contractions are a major source of phenotypic variation in evolution. Here, we describe a comparative genomic study of repetitive elements in developmental genes of 92 breeds of dogs. We find evidence for selection for divergence at coding repeat loci in the form of both elevated purity and extensive length polymorphism among different breeds. Variations in the number of repeats in the coding regions of the Alx-4 (aristaless-like 4) and Runx-2 (runt-related transcription factor 2) genes were quantitatively associated with significant differences in limb and skull morphology. We identified similar repeat length variation in the coding repeats of Runx-2, Twist, and Dlx-2 in several other species. The high frequency and incremental effects of repeat length mutations provide molecular explanations for swift, yet topologically conservative morphological evolution.

Skell is playing games with his own ignorance. I'm sure all of modern biology looks like gobbledygook to him, so replacing words he doesn't care for with random nonsense doesn't change a thing…for him. For those of us who know something about the subject, though, the words and concepts matter. This is a paper that makes no sense except in the light of evolution.