A few months ago, William D. Rubinstein, a history professor, embarrassed himself with his very public ignorance about evolutionary biology. At this strange website called Social Affairs Unit, he has a new defender, Myles Harris, who has written another bizarre and rambling broadside at biology titled Bishop Dawkins' Priest Holes—or what are the evolutionists afraid of? He begins by telling a story of a devout Marxist who stuck by her beliefs no matter what horrible things happened in East Germany, and then asserts that those darned "radical Darwinists" are just like her.

That argument rests on the fact that his East German Marxist was in denial of the reality around her, however, and the comparison would actually be more appropriately directed at Rubinstein and the creationists. The people who are actually studying and testing theories in evolutionary biology are finding it powerful and useful and productive…it's only clueless twits who get their biology from books by Michael Behe who think there is some kind of jarring discord between reality and what biologists are describing.

Harris presents Rubinstein's anti-evolutionary diatribe as if it were merely reasonable disagreement on issues of fact.

Two months ago Professor William D Rubinstein challenged Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection. He made no claim to scientific expertise, denied being a creationist and declared himself quite happy with the idea that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. His objections to the theory were that there were gaps in the fossil record, very few transitional forms and that he found it hard to believe in species transformation. These are doubts often expressed by lay people, much as they express doubts about the theory of Big Bang or confess themselves unable to understand quantum theory.

Unfortunately, that's not what he wrote, and Harris has inaccurately reduced the absurdity of Rubinstein's claims. The Rubinstein article consists mostly of a long list of his objections to evolution, all of which are appallingly ignorant errors of his own. He suggests that evolution implies cats would give birth to kangaroos or raccoons, that there are no fossil intermediates, that no one has observed evolution in action, that the examples of evolution in the textbooks are fraudulent, that transitional forms can't possibly occur, that food chains disprove evolution, that punctuated equilibrium is saltationism, and that life is too complex to have formed without intelligent guidance. When I took this apart before, I pointed out that it's like a "parade of creationist cliches"—these were bad and oft-refuted arguments.

The objection to Rubinstein's article wasn't to the conclusion that he reached, but that his reasoning was so stupid and uninformed that it was a disgrace for a professional scholar to publish it. He was trading on his reputation as a professor to spew out ridiculous tripe as if it had some credibility. It is true that he has no scientific expertise—a fact he demonstrated in his article—but it is not true that he was making no claim of authority. His entire opening paragraph is a plea to respect his opinion, even if he doesn't have any scientific background.

Myles Harris seems to be continuing in the Social Affairs Unit tradition, talking out of his ass and making up lies to support his points. That's the only way I can interpret this unreal mess:

Nowadays people are not only terrified of attacking the theory of natural selection, (it is professional suicide to do so in a university biology department) but even fear mentioning the possibility that it might not be a complete description. Listen to any discussion of Darwinism on the radio or TV and sooner or later you'll hear on of the participants hastening to assure us that they believe 100%, (perhaps 200%?) in the theory of natural selection, and that nobody of any repute in the biological sciences doubts it.

There are observations of the natural world that you would have to be "ignorant, stupid, or insane" to argue about—the earth is roughly spherical, you cannot leap off of tall buildings and fly unaided, and the earth has a long, long history of organic change—but it is plainly and simply a lie that evolution is a lump of static dogma with no active questioning going on. We do have standards such that the babbling idiocies of William D. Rubinstein do not constitute respectable dissent, but it is absurd to claim that biologists are afraid of criticizing the theory. Has Harris never heard of Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margulis, or Mary Jane West-Eberhard? These are all respected voices in the scientific community who have been actively offering challenges and alternatives to unadorned natural selection (which, by the way, is not synonymous with evolution). The difference between them and hacks like Harris and Rubinstein is that they are actually acquainted with the data and the principles they are criticizing, and tend to marshal actual, testable evidence in support of their viewpoints.

Harris tries to present the late John Maynard Smith as one of the gatekeepers of Darwinian dogma. Has he never heard of Stephen Jay Gould? Maynard Smith and Gould were in blistering disagreement on many aspects of evolutionary theory. It didn't seem to hurt either one's career.

Harris does not seem to be aware of reality, and his article degenerates even further before the end. Citing the concerns of Richard Dawkins about the growing political strength of creationism, Harris just closes his eyes and pretends it isn't true:

Reading this you get the impression of an organised conspiracy against evolution, a world in which the lights are going out on rational thought, a world in which evolutionists are an embattled minority. In fact, rather than being embattled, the evolutionists are winning the argument and the battle for the public mind.

I can forgive him a little bit for this belief, since he's in academia and in England…but if he were living in America, where social pressure has all but expunged evolution from public school classrooms and where the Republicans are trying to pass laws to mandate the teaching of creationism, it's an argument that would make him certifiable. Of course, it's also curious that he and Rubinstein are making creationist arguments yet claiming that creationism isn't winning the battle for the public's mind.

This, though, is simply nuts. Evolutionists have invented creationism?

My feeling is that Creationism is evolution's straw man. There is a good reason why some of Darwinism's more obsessed and insecure defenders feel it necessary to set it up. Like Marxism, the attraction of the theory of natural selection is that it can imprison thought in an epistemological straight jacket. Marxists tried to imprison economics in a rather similar mechanical, reductionist formula. Darwinists - terrified of the implications of modern discoveries in biology and physics - long for the comforting certainties of Victorian science.

So, like, the NIH set up the Discovery Institute as a front? Harris has just accused scientists of being conspiracy theorists, but his alternative is that the millions of creationists in the US are lackeys of the Darwinists, and the attempts to insert creationism into curricula are cunning wag-the-dog ploys to increase support for the scientific establishment.

I wish. Now that is a mind-boggling conspiracy theory.

That kind of kooky thinking does make it easy to dismiss the rest of his article, though, in which he somehow babbles on about quantum consciousness and the universe. I have no idea how that relates to the rest of the article, but that kind of rambling is one of the hallmarks of the clinically insane, so maybe it is of a piece—this is Harris's attempt to mimic a schizophrenic.

What of William D. Rubinstein, the author of the original nonsense? He has a new article in Social Affairs Unit, too, in which he argues for the truth of stories of ghosts, reincarnation, and near-death experiences.

Reports of ghosts have been made innumerable times down the ages, in every culture. Apparently, about ten per cent of the British population claims to have seen a ghost. While, needless to say, many of these reports can be dismissed as nonsense, fraud, wishful thinking, misreporting, or the product of spirits in a glass bottle rather than the supernatural kind, there is a residuum which can simply not be explained away.

Ah, right…this is the kind of argument that would also allow us to argue for the existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Ever had a Christmas present that lost its tag, and you weren't sure who it came from? That's the residuum that shows jolly old Saint Nick is real.

I've also heard that the halls of academe are full of pretentious, empty-headed stuffed shirts with dotty ideas, and that England is populated with weird old eccentrics. Rubinstein and Harris seem to be that residuum who demonstrate the germ of truth behind those prejudices, too.