The leaves are turning as I write in early October. Also turning is my stomach, from the accounts coming out of something called the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. According to Sarah Posner writing online in Religion Dispatches, talk-radio host Bryan Fischer went out of his way to attack me. And probably you. Anybody, really, who accepts science as an arbiter of reality. Fischer told the assembled that America needs a president who will “reject the morally and scientifically bankrupt theory of evolution.”
Evolution is a strange process indeed, to cobble together organisms who so completely and emotionally reject it. Well, evolution concerns itself only with differential survival, and brainpower may not be a crucial factor. Fischer may as well have gotten out of a car at the convention center and proclaimed that the car had not brought him there and did not in fact exist. To thunderous applause. One’s only reasonable response to this whole scene is to bring forefinger to mouth and rapidly toggle the lips while humming, so as to produce a sound roughly in accord with a spelling of “Blblblblblblblblblb.”
A few days before the summit, over in the rational world, Saul Perlmutter won a share of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. He and his fellow laureates, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, showed that the universe is not only expanding, the expansion is accelerating. (On hearing this news, my brother asked me if there was a limit
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