A little while ago I remarked on how some people are absolutely desperate to use one’s name provided that they can take things you’ve said and quote them out of context.

Sometimes it’s great to challenge people – to taunt them, to dare them to do just that. So when I go out on the stump as a Nature editor I am fond of tossing a few lexical grenades into the audience such as

Everything we publish in Nature is wrong – and I’m proud of it!

Now, I’m sure that there are people out there who will lift that very quote out of this blog and use it as a stick with which to beat me. But I should like to make it known that such people are dribbling morons, and that if you, gentle reader, feel the urge to hunt such people down and string them up by their genitalia until they recant, then I shall not stand in your way.

The more thoughtful reader will instantly see the thought coursing beneath that inflammatory slogan (for the hard-of-thinking, it’ll be too subterranean for their feeble minds to penetrate, but such are the cadmium rods in the nuclear pile of intellectual activity).

That thought is this – that science is in the business of identifying and circumscribing hypotheses – provisional solutions – and not there to identify unassailable, absolute truths. This is why creationists are formally right in saying that ‘evolution is only a theory’, even though they twist this phrase by wilful denigration of the word ‘theory’.

Following my logic, it is therefore true that even the most breathtaking scientific advance can only ever be a provisional solution. Someone, somewhere, maybe next year, maybe in several hundred, will come along and modify that finding, or even refute it.

Darwinian evolution by natural selection is a theory in the formal sense that it is a hypothesis that has been tested, repeatedly, and found to be consistent with all the evidence that we can throw at it. Much of this evidence, from the fossil record and from genetics, did not exist in Darwin’s time, and it is a testament to Darwin’s prescience and the elegance of his theory of evolution by natural selection that it has proved so robust, so all-encompassing, so right.

But that doesn’t mean that someone won’t come along, someday, and find evidence that doesn’t square with Darwinian theory, and create new theories in which natural selection is enveloped in an even greater, grander framework.

That doesn’t mean that Darwinism would be refuted, necessarily. Here’s an analogy to explain what I mean. General relativity is a more encompassing model for gravity than Newtonian mechanics, but apples didn’t stop falling out of trees in the time-honoured fashion when Einstein turned up.

Needless to say, creationist challenges to evolution are all wrong, a priori, because they are unscientific. That is, they tend to pre-select evidence that fits a favoured conclusion rather than letting the evidence take them where it will. This seems so blindingly obvious that I am amazed, frankly, that anyone still buys creationism in any form, but there’s one born every minute, I guess, and the hard-of-thinking will always be with us, twisting our words to suit their idiot purposes. I cannot put it plainer than this: Evolution is Elegant, Creationism is Crap.

Creationism aside, in the great scheme of things, and given enough time, everything that Nature (or any other science journal) publishes will be wrong. Because that’s the way science works.

And why am I proud of that? Because I am in the business of promoting science to its highest standards, which means being open to the evidence, and therefore that the world and Universe are full of boundless and unexplored possibility, circumscribed neither by the sayings, respected though these might be, of avoteinu v’imoteinu back in the Bronze Age: and neither by that view which calls itself science, but which is really a zero-sum game, an ersatz religious view that promotes atheism, a faith like any other, as the handmaiden of the desperately unscientific view that science is all about shining brighter lights of our absolute truth into ever-shrinking puddles of their ignorance and superstition … and then persecuting as unscientific those rigorous scientists who have a keener appreciation that by assuming less, science can discover more – and also that the scientific method and faith are distinct, and preserving any shred of awe or wonder at the possibilities of the infinite without feeling the need to explain it. No, no, not the comfy chair! [Have you been at the eggnog again? – Ed].

But I digress. A few years ago I wrote a book called In Search of Deep Time in which I challenged the traditional method of re-telling the history of life on Earth as a story, a grand narrative, in which defunct historiographic concepts such as Manifest Destiny are implicit, and which is based on a bastardized, Haeckelian view of evolution as progressive, with memory and foresight, and with destiny in mind. I challenged evolutionary biologists to cast aside such silly, unfalsifiable notions and cleave to cladistics, a rigorously logical scheme of evolutionary reconstruction.

Now, cladistics is a hard sell in a popular book, and I loaded the text with as many eye-catching statements as I could think of. I was warned that creationists would mine my book unmercifully for statements which they could use for their own grubby offices, and, indeed, such has happened. Here is a site in which many of them have been lovingly transcribed.

My book ruffled feathers among some evolutionary biologists because of this gift I offered to the creationists. One was Eugenie Scott of the NCSE, tireless scourge of creationist bollocks, who has taken me to task for expressing such sentiments. My response was – and is, and always will be – that I refuse to modify or moderate my views, couched as they are in terms of science, for fear that some agent of darkness and unwisdom might turn my words to ill. Were I to do that, then darkness and unwisdom would have won.

In any case, creationists will always be with us, and will always misuse the things one says, no matter what. Creationists are the cultural equivalent of herpes, I said. To which Eugenie responded that one should in any case practice safe sex. I shall leave you to ponder the strength, or otherwise, of that metaphor.

Although I do not advocate safe sex with regard to creationists (Go F**k A Creationist Today! It is Christmas, after all!) I am all in favour of such measures for spammers. Just recently, this blog has been the target of rogue rolex-peddlers, itinerant theosophists and such. I flatter myself that this is because The End Of The Pier Show has become sufficiently popular to have become a target for such entropic pests. What is to be done?

I could simply turn my charisma down a notch, etcetera, etcetera. But that would be akin to dulling one’s own views on science for fear of what creationists might say or do. So instead I have, with regret, activated the feature that allows me to screen any comments that come in, before they are published. I don’t get so many comments that this would be a chore, but it does remove some of life’s splendid spontaneity.

And with that I wish you all the compliments of the season. Gloria In Excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the Highest), Et In Terra Paxo Minibus (and on Earth, a Truckload of Sage-And-Onion Stuffing). Amen.

Postscript: In my Hebrew Class we are doing pronouns, and enjoying the joke that in Hebrew, Who is He, and He is She. My homework over the Christmas holidays is to translate

I Am The Eggman
We Are The Eggmen
I Am The Walrus
Goo-Goo-Ga-Choob

into Hebrew. Wish me luck.