Nicholas Gotelli, a professor of Biology at the University of Vermont, evidently received an invitation to debate someone from the Discovery Institute on evolutionary science and intelligent design. PZ Myers posted about it on Pharyngula, including the original invitation and the response from Professor Gotelli.
It’s one of the best responses I’ve seen to the shenanigans of the Discovery Institute and other Creationist nutjobs. Head on over and give it a read. You’ll see gems like this…
Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren’t members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.
That’s just beautiful.
[…] unprovable, and unscientific. If Comfort wants to advance his Creationist agenda, perhaps he should take Nicholas Gotelli’s advice and publish his ideas in some peer-reviewed scientific journals. As Professor Gotelli says, […]