PZ has done an interview. I have compiled some statements that interest us here at UD. Here is the first installment.
ON ID
Host Stephen Smith: “You spend a lot of digital ink, if you will, attacking intelligent design and the people who are behind that movement. They argue that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process, such as natural selection.” Why do you have such scorn for these beliefs?”
Myers: “Well, for one thing, they’re dishonest. They’re grossly dishonest about this stuff. That’s not really where they’re coming from. When they say this stuff, they say, “Oh, we’re taking an objective view. We’re taking a secular view of the universe in saying that there’s a designer behind it.” They’re misleading you. That’s not where they come from. Where they come from is typically a very religious background. What intelligent design is, is taking their religious beliefs, sanitizing them of any mention of God, and presenting them in this cleaned up format. The sole premise, the sole impetus for doing this stuff is their belief in God.
There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science in ways that I cannot forgive. At the same time, when you get to know them, when you talk to them, they’re generally nice people. They’re your neighbors. They’re ordinary people. So I would say, right off the bat, no, this is not about demonizing the individuals. It’s about demonizing really, really bad ideas.
What you find with these ideas that they present is that they have no evidence for them. The evidence, if you even want to call it that, is simply this negative form where they say, “Well, evolution cannot adequately explain this phenomenon, therefore, intelligent mystery, this invisible man did it.
But what you discover also when you start talking to these people is that they have no idea what evolution is all about, so they completely miss the story there. They are not qualified to tell us what evolution does not explain.
Last year I was in a debate with Jerry Bergman, who’s a creationist who came up to the Twin Cities to debate me. His main point, is that he claimed that we evolutionists were lobbying to get the periodic table of the elements removed from classrooms because the periodic table proves irreducible complexity. I know, weird. I’m just saying: brace yourself. There is nothing that is so crazy that a creationist won’t propose it somewhere. And you’re next.”
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/06/09/bright-ideas-pz-myers/