A feud is brewing between wingnut heavies Powerline blog, and young upstart Pharyngula.  PZ Meyers, the blogger behind Pharyngula argues that Powerline is out of the mainstream because they believe in creationism.  Powerline counters:

[T]his is the state of so much of today's left -- unwilling and/or unable to argue political issues (or scientific ones, as far as appears) on the merits. Under leftist logic, the fact that one of us doesn't believe a piece of scientific orthodoxy demonstrates, what, that our attacks on liberal political orthodoxies, falsehoods, and forgeries shouldn't be taken seriously?

Naturally, the Iron Mouth editors were compelled to respond via E-mail:

Big Trunk, I see that you assert ("Call Me Stupid"), that the Left is "unwilling and/or unable to argue political issues (or scientific ones, as far as appears) on the merits." I beg to differ.

First, since the efforts of religious conservatives to discredit the theory of evolution in school text books is certainly a political issue, discussion of it definitely has a place in the poltical discourse. Furthermore, I think its safe to assume that a professor of biology like the blogger you mention, who spends a huge amount of time on his blog discussing evolution, (indeed the very name of the blog indicates that evolution v. Creationism is the main topic of the blog), isn't going to go into the details of his position on the subject in a single post on the blog.

Indeed, the post which prompted Prof. Meyers to post on the subject is simply conclusory--there is no evidence to back up the assertions about evolution other than: "I think that Darwin’s theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds." Much like the post of Prof. Meyers which you singled out for criticism, the statement on evolution in your post was conclusory.

Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to support evolution. First, it is clear that evolution does occur in the natural world now. There is a reason the doctor tells everyone to take all of the antibiotics which they are prescribed--because otherwise, a resistant strain of bacteria will evolve out of the non-resistant strain the patient is infected with.

The only question is whether or not that process also created the forms of life we see today. It is clear that there are fossil records of extinct life forms almost everywhere on Earth, some of which can be dated using objective scientific methods--dated to millions of years in the past. These forms are different from our own.

Creationists like those on www.Powerlineblog.com would have us believe that a process proven to occur in the world today to result in changes to the forms and genetic code of living beings simply did not work in the past. This statement is hard to swallow for most people with science backgrounds, as well as for much of the general public. It seems to go counter to Occam's Razor, which calls for the most parsiminous explanation to be credited.

The fact that bloggers on your site support creationism without providing any real evidence for it does call their judgment into question. It seems to indicate that they do not do their homework and operate on belief rather than reasoning. Rob W

We await a response.