Nathaniel Jeanson, newly of the Institute for Creation Research, gave a lecture in Boston last night entitled “Evolution: Bankrupt Science, Creationism: Science You Can Bank On.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with how creationist arguments work, but there was absolutely nothing new about his talk. As a freshly-minted doctoral graduate from Harvard’s molecular biology program, Jeanson is the embodiment of the very bleeding edge of so-called creation science: a dull intellectual wasteland rehashing decades-old arguments long since refuted, unable to be fertilized even by graduate-level training at an Ivy league university.
I attended the lecture with the Boston Skeptics. It was was mostly one stale, nonsensical creationist talking point after another, spanning everything from geology to astronomy to biology (in case you hadn’t guessed, by “evolution” he meant “every field of secular science that challenges Young Earth Creationism”), with bits of pieces of pure absurdity sprinkled in for flavor. I had to chuckle a bit when he brought up Irreducible Complexity; and here I had though Behe had gone out of style. There was, however, one claim he made late in his talk that caught my interest as a biologist: he suggested that the variation between species in a protein called cytochrome c (“cytC”) actually refutes common descent.
Aaron Golas is a microbial geneticist and Jack-of-all-trades currently living in Cambridge, MA.