Wingnut Science

A couple of prime examples, courtesy of Ed Brayton. The first concerns that work of the devil, evolution -- or, as the wingnuts call it, "evolutionism":

He explained that Darwin accepted homology and morphology, believing common origins would be evident from similar body traits.

"The idea is that a man has a head, arms and legs and an ape has a head, arms and legs, so that shows similar ancestry and, therefore, a common lineage," Phillips said. "That was one of the fundamental bases of Darwinian thinking that came from the Galapagos."

However, he said even evolutionists don't believe that anymore because DNA has proven it's utterly false.

"We have eyeballs with retinas and rods and corneas, but so do giant squid - just like humans," he said. "Nobody thinks we came from the same common lineage. Creationists argue that it's because we have a common Designer, not a common evolutionary ancestry."

As Brayton observes, scientists don't believe in homology any more? That's a surprise, especially to scientists. And the evidence from biochemistry and genetics -- that is, DNA -- is overwhelmingly supportive of common ancestry.

My first thought on reading this one was that no one can be that ignorant. I'm still not convinced (although the example of head, arms and legs went a long way toward persuading me), but rather than assume mendacity, we'll be compassionate and assume stupidity -- after all, that's something they can't help, and deserving of our pity.

The second is the lie-fest around global warming, or, in the circumlocution du jour, "climate change." Brayton cites, among others, Nate Silver:

But let's be clear: Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did -- we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

It seems, however, that Andrew Sullivan has located the modus operandi:

The key to these bloggers' mentality is simply to find some tiny thing and focus all attention on that in order to persuade people that the bigger reality is untrue or irrelevant. This is not an argument; it's a technique. It's a technique to persuade people not to examine all the evidence, since the source of the evidence - secular humanist scientists - are evil suspects and against God and in favor of making your gas bill higher.

You can't actually persuade people that way, of course. But you can fortify their resistance to examining all the evidence.

I would argue one point with Sullivan: you can persuade people that way, particularly those who want to be persuaded. Or maybe I should say, not "persuade" so much as "confirm." The creationists have been doing it for years -- that's the root of all the so-called "controversies" in evolution: niggling details that haven't yet been resolved to everyone's satisfaction that the creationists blow up into a disparity that "disproves" Darwin's theory. As if.

So this is what happens when you practice faith-based science -- your grip on reality gets weaker by the minute.

Update: If you want to see how that sort of thinking carries over into real life, read this post at Mahablog. Quoting Steven Benen on the "stolen" 2008 presidential election:

One in four Americans — and a majority of self-identified Republicans — believes this was made possible due to the secret, carefully-executed, coordinated national efforts of a community group that can’t recognize fake pimps?

'Nuff said?