A reader sent me a link to Truth for Youth, a hip'n'happenin' site full of comic books to teach young men and women of a peri-pubertal age all about the wickedness of homosexuality and evolution and birth control. In particular, take a look at the creationist comic book, The Truth About Evolution. It's bad. It's awful.

It belongs to that genre of creationist literature exemplified by Chick's Big Daddy: brave, eloquent Christian schoolkids speak up in class to refute the evolutionist dogma of the teacher, leaving the poor sap flustered and frazzled. I suspect that the scenario appeals to creationists on several levels. It feeds their anti-intellectualism, since it shows scientists and teachers to be fools, and it pumps up their self-esteem, since it sends the message that all you have to do is read a comic book and one chapter of Genesis to be smarter than all them uppity eggheads.

I'm going to be kind and take pity on the young creationists out there, and give you a simple suggestion: don't do it. Don't think you can read these things and be prepared to confront your instructors. All you'll get out of an attempt is a lot of embarrassment. The happy little play-acting game of "stump the teacher with creationism" doesn't happen.

I've had a few students try it. They don't get far. I'm sure I look a little uncomfortable and reluctant when they bring up creationism in class, and they may suspect they've got me worried about their troubling 'facts', but that's actually not the case: I may look a little concerned, but it's because I don't like publicly humiliating my students. I usually suggest that we get together at my office hours to discuss it privately…because I know they're going to get all of their objections shot down, most brutally and thoroughly.

If I did let them hijack my lecture to waste time on creationism, though, it wouldn't go down like these comic books illustrate. For example, take a look at this one page from The Truth About Evolution, where our creationist heroes are in the middle of crushing poor Professor Johnson with their flood of 'facts':

You see, every panel is a lie. These poor students don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about, and every sentence shows them as, well, kinda stupid. A competent instructor would be torn between choking back laughter at their pathetic efforts, or tears at the sad state of these kids' minds. If a teacher were to let the discussion sink this far into lunacy, and if he weren't a doormat like this cartoonish dweeb, there'd be a very different result.

Start with the first panel. One odd thing these kids are doing is calling everything "Something Man": Ramapithecus Man, Australopithecus Man, etc. You can tell they're getting their terminology from the creationist literature, because no one refers to these two as "man". I'd be asking them right away for their sources, because they certainly aren't scientific. They also talk about a hypothesis being "proven", another giveaway, and while I'm carping on terminology, on a previous page they refer to evolution as "only a theory". They simply don't talk like people who have any knowledge of science at all, which shows that the author of this tract didn't even do the minimal amount of background research on his topic.

The panel talks about Ramapithecus as an orangutan. This isn't right; it most definitely was not an orangutan. It's one of several Asian Miocene apes, and is thought to be a member of the orangutan lineage. It is not any kind of evidence against evolution, since it is part of the puzzle in understanding the evolutionary history of our cousin species.

Similarly, Australopithecus is definitely not "just another ape". It is distinct from us and other apes, but is clearly near the root of our branch of the family tree. You can read more about the species and the fossils in Jim Foley's hominid FAQ; the "just another ape" nonsense is straight from Gish and the Institute for Creation Research. So, yeah, Australopithecus has been dismissed…by creationist cretins. Guess what? Doesn't count.

I will give them one thing: Piltdown was a hoax. However, it was never very enthusiastically received, and even from the beginning was a rather marginal specimen that had most paleontologists puzzled. The kids in this comic are purportedly pointing to an illustration of it in their brand new science textbook—ain't gonna happen. If Piltdown is mentioned at all in any current text, it is as a fraud.

In the second panel, our poor kids continue their unbroken streak of silly errors. They list Neanderthal man, Java man, Peking man as members of Homo erectus, which is simply false for Neanderthal (Homo sapiens neandertalensis). The others are members of H. erectus, but they certainly weren't "ordinary men"—they were members of a different species, with their own distinct morphology.

The cartoonist then puts his own misconceptions in the mouth of the teacher, having him talk about rocks being "carbon-dated at 500,000 years old". Carbon dating isn't used on rocks (it's for carbon from organic sources), and it is limited to about 50,000 years at most. No one competent would make such a claim.

The third panel parrots some very well known creationist canards. Carbon dating measures the ratio of isotopes in a source, and can be confounded by specimens that have absorbed what is called "dead carbon" from very old sources that are depleted in the ¹⁴C isotope. The seal they describe was collected from an Antarctic source with deep, old upwelling water that was low in ¹⁴C, and so dated older than it should. The snail tale is the same story, animals collected where a significant part of the dissolved CO₂ was from Paleozoic limestone. The story of the old hawaiian rocks is another common creationist fable, and in this case it is from a legitimate paper discussing issues in radioactive dating, describing a problem with inclusions of old, unmelted rock in lava, called xenoliths.

I really am being gentle here, and am warning students not to think these comics reflect reality in any way. They are bad and full of lies, and you're really sad and stupid if you think you can snow a teacher with this kind of babble. Seriously, your teachers have spent years looking into this material, and you are deluding yourself if you think ten minutes with a comic book gives you a deeper understanding than they have.

The last panel should have my colleagues in the humanities feeling insulted. They blame it all on their history teacher, who seems to have thought all this baloney was just lovely. I know history professors, and they are, if anything, more hard-nosed about the proper evaluation of sources than we are in the sciences. These students have been credulous, accepting rather low quality (to put it mildly) sources as valid, without bothering to look for the easily accessible refutations of the very points they are making. Their history teacher should have given them an "F" on that report. And if he hadn't, I'd be over there at the end of class to chew him out.

I'm reluctant to tear into a student, but I have no such hesitations when dealing with someone who is supposed to be a professional. I also don't hesitate when dealing with organizations that are sinking money into teaching lies to children with slickly packaged PR. They are contemptible idiots.