Creationists skittering about in the background

Would you believe an angry creationist tried to get Jeffrey Shallit fired for critically reviewing some creationist books? Of course you would. It’s what they do. I’ve had a couple of loons do the same thing, rifling through my university’s faculty list to get all the email addresses they could, and then send off bulk email to everyone documenting my crimes. It’s annoying, but it’s also incredibly stupid; every time it has happened, there’s a bit of a laugh among the people targeted, and it’s an uncomfortable laugh at these sad people with their weird delusions.

It doesn’t help their case that their arguments are always so awful. Here’s another example: David Klinghoffer, the Discovery Institute hack, is claiming that Proxima B calls evolution into question. How? I don’t know. But as Matthew points out, the logic is ridiculous.

If life is common, that’s evidence for intelligent design. But if life is rare, that’s evidence for intelligent design. Everything is evidence of your theory when you haven’t internalized the concept of falsifiability.

It doesn’t help that the Proxima B story is an example of ridiculously over-hyped nonsense: the observation that there’s a big rock orbiting a star almost 5 light years away does not imply that it is habitable or that anyone will be colonizing it soon. It doesn’t help that Klinghoffer quotes Mr Indiscriminate Hype himself, Michio Kaku.

It’s a “game changer,” the “holy grail,” only a “hop, skip, and a jump” away, physicist Michio Kaku tells CBS, which characterizes the planet as a possible “Earth 2.0.”

Jebus, but that guy is a pandering twit — it’s gotten to the point where, if I see his face appearing on the television, I turn it off, confidently secure that I’ve spared myself another trickle of bullshit. And really, life is contingent on a set of circumstances that we haven’t mapped out yet, so discovering that another planet either has no life on it or has independently evolved it (and neither of these things are known for Proxima B) says absolutely nothing about the validity of evolutionary theory.