Latest Quack Unearthed by Media

The Times of London has a patently silly item that is a case study in how the media dig up the most obscure academic "study" to press into the service of the enlightened orthodoxy. This time it is a non-academic "paleoartist and free-lance paleontologist" taking naked cheap shots at religion and offering up the notion that we'd have alot less social problems if we just studied evolution a bit more. Now, I'm not an Intelligent Design kinda guy, but this sort of flimsy advocacy masquerading as journalism makes me ill.

The Times calls the author, Gregory S. Paul, a "social scientist" when it looks as if he is a man who draws dinosaurs extremely well. The "study" is published in what the Times calls an "academic journal" when it would be more accurate to describe it as an obscure journal with a six-year history published out of a small, Jesuit university in Nebraska. Not that there is anything wrong about being small, new, Jesuit or from Nebraska, but given the enormous scope of academia and the well-known hierarchy of stature within the world of academic publishing, don't you think at least some context would be useful? Maybe, give us a hint if we are dealing with a big leaguer or weekend warrior and let us look into it further if there are any obvious red flags? Nah. Just make it look like it is the equivalent of the splitting of the atom and move on.

I looked at the study and it is a joke, completely flawed from the get-go, yet I will have to leave it up a qualified social scientist to rip this thing to shreds, because that is what they do and not what I do.