Dear Creationists,
Do not try to feed me that tired old line about Job and dinosaurs in my Elfwood comments. It’s a load of crap, he was talking about hippos, and you ought to be embarrased to be grasping at straws like that. Do not try to debunk carbon dating in my presence with your pseudoscience and your gross misrepresentations of data. Do not trot out the watchmaker analogy. I read those comment mailings in the morning when I get up, and you put me in a foul mood all morning with the sheer unmeasurable depths of your willful blindness.
Above all, do not encourage me to “look into this!” as if I were some kind of tabula rasa of evolutionary things. I have sweated on my hands and knees over ichthyosaur bones. I have dragged water by the gallon five miles into the desert to dump over core samples. I know what the iridium layer at the K-T boundary is, and what it would appear to imply about the mass extinction right ’round there. I…okay, yeah, I’ve forgotten what ammonite forms that you use to date which beds and where they go on the timeline. But in my defense, that’s a shitload of ammonites, the issue doesn’t arise much these days, and I had to make mental room for the walkthrough to Dark Forces. My senior thesis was on human evolution. I can speak with great eloquence on hunter-gatherer subsistence levels. I can pronounce the ! in !Kung on a good day. (On a bad day I choke on my own saliva, but you can’t have everything.)(That had nothing much to do with human evolution, but I’m proud of it anyway.) I can identify a Homo habilis skull at fifty paces. I can identify an idiot at close range, and I’m looking at one right now.
And I’m an amateur. A dabbler. I’ve got a lousy B.A. I’m an artist. And even I can see how wrong you are.
Bloody creationists. You want to be a biblical literalist, knock yourself out. Not my place to stop you. But stay away from science. A hundred yards at all times, minimum. Just plain admit that you’re gonna believe the Bible over any scientific finding, and we can all be happy. That’s fine. We can smile and nod and politely not bother trying to convert one another. The two worlds do not need to collide, we can leave that out of the conversation, and get along just fine talking about the weather and chickens and art. But subjecting us to crappy pseudoscience where inconvenient facts are ignored and there’s no chance of a hypothesis ever being proved wrong is shoddy non-science, and does nothing but Piss Me The Hell Off, and you don’t want that before I’ve had coffee.
Thank you,
The Management
