To my post yesterday about Alex Berezow on Slate‘s coverage of evolution and related scientific matters, I must add that, if unwittingly, he also went straight to the heart of Darwinist strategizing. To borrow Berezow’s words describing a Darwin activist, the National Center for Science Education makes a specialty of the “purposeful conflation of creationism and ID” that is indeed “clichéd and tiresome.”
But it’s more than that. It’s deceptive — and “purposefully” so? We give them the benefit of the doubt and say they are misled themselves, by their own agitprop, but they make that charitable reading something of a challenge to sustain.
“ID is not creationism,” writes Berezow, and “it is patently unfair” to call it that. I noted this to NCSE’s Josh Rosenau, who brushed the point aside, advising me that he was too “busy” to comment.
@d_klinghoffer @DiscoveryCSC ITYM “busy.”
— Josh Rosenau (@JoshRosenau) May 27, 2015
Well, what else can he do? NCSE’s website insists that the equation of ID with creationism is valid (see “What is ‘Intelligent Design’ Creationism?“). Their “Friend of Darwin” Zack Kopplin hammers away at the equation and Slate gives him a prominent public forum to do so. But Alex Berezow of Real Clear Science, no advocate of intelligent design, called him out on it.
Why do I emphasize this? Because so much of the Darwin Lobby’s contribution to discussions of evolution and academic freedom consists of misleading the public, that is why. Read Casey Luskin’s post of earlier this morning (“Does Medical Science Need Evolutionary Science?“), which rebuts the bogus NCSE claim about how believing in Darwinian evolution is vital to modern medicine.
Meanwhile the media, with rare exceptions, fails to take them to task for these untruths. On the contrary, NCSE is the go-to source for complacent journalists. So the job falls to us.
Image by Patche99z (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons.
