This quote from Richard Dawkins was so good I had to share it. The topic is the so-called “theory” of intelligent design.

What this does to science, is it wastes a lot of time of scientists who could be getting on with their work. As far as I’m aware in no other field of science does this happen. Physicists don’t have to fight a kind of rearguard action against sort of yapping terriers of ignorance the way biologists do.

I think I will have to co-opt the phrase “yapping terriers of ignorance”.

We linguists usually seem to get away without having to deal with any biblical fundamentalists trying to make the public believe that there is a scientifically respectable theory of language origins involving the tower of Babel, despite the best efforts of the wrathful dispersion theorists and the maintainers of conservapedia.

I think the problem faced by biologists stems from the fact that most people think they know how the theory of evolution by natural selection works. I bet far fewer people think they understand what the microwave background radiation is, or how its black body spectrum stunningly confirms the predictions made by the Big Bang theory.

The closest I got to having to waste my time with this kind of thing was during a discussion of the evolution of the human language faculty during a discussion section I was TAing. I was trying to press home the fact that whatever is unique to humans that allows us to have language must have evolved rather recently and quickly, since our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived some 5 million or so years ago. I was trying to get the class to think about what could be responsible for this difference between humans and chimps, and what could have been responsible for the rapid development of the ability to use language in our species. One student responded along the lines of Well, isn’t that just like God and nature? Like that’s just how we’re made? I think I was a bit harsh; I said something like That’s not an explanation at all; that’s just a restatement of the question, with the word God thrown in. Science is about explaining what we don’t yet understand, not just restating the problem and calling it God.

[The Dawkins quote is from a BBC show called A War on Science Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, which you can watch here. The program makes the creationists out like they're actually doing science, which is pretty misleading, because the fact is, they aren't. The section on Behe makes it seem as if he discovered the bacterial flagellum o something. He didn't. These people never do any actual science. They discovered that its much easier to get on the news by avoiding doing any science at all and going to court instead.]