Evolution of stupidity

A friend sent me a link to a lecture by the geneticist Roman Giertych, a well known (at least in Poland, if not in Europe) critic of evolutionism. (Un?)fortunately, this lecture is in Polish, and so unless you speak the language, you're out of luck. Or, rather, a lucky bastard, as Prof. Giertych is a living proof that you can amass a bunch of Ph.D.s and still be an idiot. Listening to him was a mild perhaps, but nevertheless a torture. Painful as it is for me to admit, after this experience I now understand the anger and hostility of people like Richard Dawkins much better. This doesn't make Dawkins less of an arrogant asshole, but at least I can see why he is so pissed off - it truly is a travesty that people like Giertych are allowed to call themselves "scientists" and thus gain instant credibility with their audiences, which they then proceed to bullshit with religious mumbo-jumbo.

As the imaginary god is my witness, I did genuinely try to approach this with an open mind. I've been very disilussioned with the politicization and dogmatization of science, where voices straying from the currently reigning dogma - whether it is "global warming" or "educational benefits of diversity" or evolutionism - are viciously attacked, ridiculed, supressed. And yet, listening to Mr. Giertych I found myself longing for a sort of credentialing body for scientists, which would have the authority to ban a person whose conduct or pronouncements are damaging to science, from calling himself a "scientist".

It isn't to say that the entire lecture was nonsense. In fact, Giertych has brought up some interesting points, including examples of sloppy, tendentious science. At the same time, it quickly became pretty clear that he was making these points not to lead his audience to truth, but to confuse and twist the truth in order to cast doubt on science and present it as just a system of belief, not much different from religion. He was shockingly disingenuous and manipulative. For example, he talked at length about the eruption of Mount St. Helen in Washington State and how geologists were supposedly stunned after discovering that this catasprophe had produced, in a matter of days, such ordering of geological materials that until then had been widely believed to require centuries. His conclusion? Well, maybe the Great Canyon was formed in the matter of months and not millienia, as claimed?

Even assuming that the geological "surprise" of Mount St. Helen was indeed such a huge surprise for geologists, I seriously doubt that it invalidated all the previous research and methods of geological dating, as Giertych seems to be suggesting. He jumps to a conclusion (or at least wants his audience to do that) that this one event and the anomaly it produced is not an anomaly, but evidence of how this must have happend in all the other cases of stratification. His purpose is clear: the Bible says that the Earth was created a few thousand years ago, so let's cast doubt on the evidence that it took much, much longer. Never mind that the evidence is ovewhelming - we'll just show one hole and the gullible and the biased will just see that hole and nothing else.

What about carbon dating? Oh, this is just a minor dissonance that Giertych just glides through, mumbling about "known problems with carbon dating". An example of these problems? The Turin Shroud. Now, what about this shroud, Professor? Wasn't it examined by two independent research labs, both of whom concluded that this was a medieval forgery? So wherein lies the "problem" with carbon dating, Professor? Oh, the Church says that the shroud has the image of Christ imprinted on it, and that doesn't square with the lab results, so these results must clearly be off... We just can't trust carbon dating, can we?

And so it goes. Perhaps the most revealing example of Giertych's illogic came in his answer to a question from the audience, when he contrasted science and the Church: it is science that keeps changing and whose theories are being proven wrong time and again; the Church's teachings stay the same. Hard as it is to fathom, Giertych actually believes that this makes science inferior! Science is only searching for the truth; religion already knows the truth - so there you go. You can ridicule the evolutionists, who still haven't found the "missing link", but the talking bush and the immaculate conception are not subject to scrutiny - these are facts. The Bible says so.

One thing I would like to give Giertych credit for is that he at least didn't seem to be especially concerned about sticking to the Intelligent-Designs-is-not-Creationism line. At least that's a sliver of intellectual honesty. On the other hand, he gave his talk at the catholic Stefan Wyszynski University, to an audience probably more sympathetic to creationism than evolutionism, so he could afford to be less careful.