By PZ MYERS, PHARYNGULA
Added: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:00:00 UTC

The NCSE is an excellent organization, and I've frequently urged people at my talks to join it. However, it's also a limited organization, and this post by Richard Hoppe at the Panda's Thumb exposes their flaws. It's blind. It's locked in to one strategy. It's response to people who try to branch out in new directions is to discourage them, often in a rather patronizing way. This is not a good approach to take when we've been deadlocked for years and they offer no prospects for future victory.

I've been making the argument for some time that the NCSE is our defensive line, and they are great at that...we don't want to lose them. In fact, they are so good that we haven't lost a creationist court case since Scopes, in recent years thanks to the invaluable assistance of the staff at NCSE, and we've built up such a body of legal precedent that we can feel fairly secure that they creationists are going to consistently get their butts kicked in the courts (it also helps that the creationists are incompetent at both science and the law). With that success, however, comes complacency and overconfidence and a belief that their approach is is the One True Way…and now, a gradual drift into identifying more with the opposition than with a significant percentage of their own team and their own fans. They also seem determined to ignore reality — we live in a country that is split in the middle on the topic of evolution, and the creationists are not in decline. Victories in the courtroom are not the same as victories in the minds of the population.

Continue reading:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/foot_soldiers_who_lack_vision.php

TAGGED: COMMENTARY, EDUCATION, SCIENCE