Most of you have probably already heard of this insane California lawsuit—creationists are demanding that legitimate universities accept transfer credits from Christian schools' "science" classes that use substandard textbooks and don't meet the standards of the University of California. You really must take a look inside one of these Bob Jones University-quality textbooks:

The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second…If…at any point God's Word is not put first, the authors apologize.

Case closed.

This is something we have to deal with at universities all the time. We get transfer students, too, and we have to evaluate how their prior classwork corresponds to our requirements—after all, if they transfer to this university, and are planning to get a degree from this university, we're not going to give the degree to them because they met the standards of some other random university. Every year we get several students who want transfer credit from a community college or some other institution, and we review their class syllabus, look at the textbook used, ask whether it was a lab course or not, etc., and make decisions about whether it's good enough for UMM.

Looking at those excerpts, there's no way we'd accept a course taught with that book here. If this lawsuit isn't laughed out of court, I know what I'm going to have to do: set up a mail-order university in my basement, offer courses in Advanced Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics taught out of comic books, and tell people all they have to do is give me $200, I give them 100 credits in basic and upper level biology courses, and then they transfer to UC Berkeley, take a few basket-weaving courses, and graduate with a prestigious Berkeley biology degree. They have to accept any ol' trashy transfer credits, after all.

That'll pay the bills when the creationists get their way and gut science teaching of its content, anyway. Let's not beat around the bush on that, either: their goal isn't to teach new ideas, it is to throw out good science and replace it with a vacuum. A Daniel Dennett op-ed today, Show Me the Science, explains that well.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider^*, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

This is going to be one of my major points in that creationism lecture I'm giving in our introductory biology course this term. I'm planning to walk in with a stack of books by creationists, and hand the students a list of creationist texts, and invite them to read them (yeah, we biologists aren't afraid of this stuff at all; I've got a fair number of creationist books, and if any of my students want to read them, I loan them out), and then I'm going to explain that there is nothing in them. None of these books ever propose any answers, except the older creationist books, which say it's all in the Bible. The ID stuff is embarrassingly vacuous. All they contain is diatribes against "Darwinism", as flawed as Dembski's trick above, with no proposal to replace it.

(By the way, I'm also going to teach Flying Spaghetti Monsterism to our students this year. It may be a parody that some creationists can't understand, but it is actually a better idea than what the IDists peddle. For one thing, it actually offers a hypothesis.)

The absurd creationist lawsuit and Dembski's sleazy tactics reinforce one thing I've said before: it is not enough to politely refute these guys. As we can see, what it has led to is a situation in which creationists aren't at all embarrassed about publicly proposing some of the most incredibly stupid ideas—they know they'll get some well-mannered press which soberly recites their lunacy, and for balance, adds a quote or two from some science geek somewhere. They know this is a win:win situation for them: even if they lose the case, they get attention and respectful comments in a big-name newspaper somewhere. They might even get some wrathful right-wing commentator to openly defend their claims for them. At worst, they get some no-name professor cussing them out on an obscure weblog.

At least some of us are saying it plainly, though: these people are ignorant idiots. They are anti-scientific snake-oil salesmen. And they are damaging this country.

^*If you haven't read Scheider's knockout, here it is. Although it does have some technical bits, I don't think it is difficult at all to get the gist of it. He points out huge holes in Dembski's ideas…

These increasing and reductional mappings were not modeled by Dembski. In other words, Dembski "forgot" to model birth and death! It is amazing to see him spin pages and pages of math which are irrelevant because of these "oversights". Dembski's entire book, No Free Lunch, relies on this flawed argument, so the entire thesis of the book collapses.

…and I don't think it's hard to grasp the point that a mathematical model that claims to refute evolution, yet fails to include birth and death, has some serious logical errors.

Schneider also point out Dembski's incomprehension and distortions of other problems:

Schneider thinks that he has generated complex specified information for free, or as he puts it, "from scratch."

This statement represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the paper. The phrase 'for free' does not appear in the paper. The claim in the ev paper is that the information appears under replication, mutation and selection, commonly known as 'evolution'. It is not for free! Half of the population DIES every generation! In the standard example given in the paper, to gain 4 bits required the (virtual) deaths of some 32 organisms x 704 generations = 22528 deaths. On average that's 22528/4 = 5632 deaths per bit. Note that theoretically one could get 1 bit of information with only 1 binary decision. So the evolution is, not surprisingly, a rather inefficient information generating mechanism. No biologist has ever claimed any differently!

Note that "from scratch" does not mean the same thing as "for free". "From scratch" refers (obviously) to the initial condition of the genome which is random in this case so that Rsequence = 0 bits. That is, there is no measurable information in the binding sites at the beginning of the simulation. "For free" would mean "without effort", and the paragraph above demonstrates that there is quite a bit of effort and (virtual) pain for the gains observed.

See? A few technical bits, but the central point—that Dembski does not understand that which he criticizes—shines through clearly.

You can see a scan of a page of the Christian biology textbook here.