Longtime readers here know I'm no fan of Phil Skell, the creationist academic at Penn State whose schtick is to claim over and over that evolutionary biology has no relevance to modern biology, and that we'd all be just fine without it. Now he has published one of his bubble-headed tirades in The Scientist (I'm also not a fan of some of the crap published there; that they'd regurgitate something from Skell is another strike against them). PvM takes him to task for a bit of quote mining, using a fragment from Adam Wilkins, editor of BioEssays, saying that "Evolution…would appear to be superfluous…".

Wilkins went on to say:

Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie them.

To his credit, this time Skell acknowledges the complete quote (I did cuss him out good last year for it—maybe he can learn), but goes on to mangle it thoroughly.

In reality, however, this passage illustrates my point. The efforts mentioned there are not experimental biology; they are attempts to explain already authenticated phenomena in Darwinian terms, things like human nature.

I was all over this stuff over a year ago, and posted additional material from the issue of BioEssays the quote was taken from. It's unadulterated blithering nonsense.

• "…attempts to explain already authenticated phenomena"…that's part of what good theories do. Scientific theories provide a framework for understanding what is going on. Why is Skell treating this as a deficiency?
• "The efforts mentioned there are not experimental biology"…do go look at the list of articles in that issue of BioEssays. It's all about evolutionary processes—the analysis of the forces that drive evolutionary change. These are genuine research articles. That Skell does not understand biology does not mean we are collecting postage stamps.

Skell babbles on:

Darwinian evolution—whatever its other virtues—does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit.

Carl Zimmer has an article that directly refutes Skell's claim. The study of chromosomal organization in different organisms, motivated by purely scientific interests in our evolutionary history, is constantly testing predictions from evolution, and is leading us to new insights about our past and our contemporary condition. And if you need to measure your science by "practical benefit", it's got that, too.

"Here you have a beautiful connection," he said. "The same thing that causes big-scale rearrangement between a human and chimp or a gorilla, these same sites are often the site of deletion associated with diseases."

The evolutionary model also opens up structural biology. Skell is just so pig-ignorant about biology that he is incapable of comprehending it.

So why is The Scientist publishing his drivel?