The past six months have dealt a barrage of blows to the ever faithful creationsts.
In the past week, the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned the teaching of "intelligent design" in public school in the UK. Also last week, the Howard-Hughes Medical Insitute released research results showing that very simple changes gave bats flight. It takes only very few genetic changes to accomplish huge morphological shifts - in the case of bats from fingers made for walking to fingers made for flying.
In a recent Science paper Bridgham et al. explain the evolution of a molecular key-and-lock mechanism by small steps. Such mechanisms have repeatedly been mentioned by creationists as "too complex to evolve by natural means". Of course, the people at the Discovery Institute are frantically denying the relevance of the research ("we meant systems of three not of two components!"). The most hilarious reaction was that they are happy that "intelligent design" is at least being talked about in the scientific community. If that is a success in the light of several widely covered lawsuits (e.g., the Dover case), US school board elections, the gigantic, million-dollar lobbying campaigns and pervasive, world-wide media coverage of their efforts, what is defeat?
Then of course there was Tiktaalik, the adorable fish with legs, iconographic in its own right and probably the most talked about fossil of some decades to come.
Before that were the gliding insects, the uneffectiveness of prayer and the in vitro evolution studies.
Especially hard to swallow must've been the evidence showing the genetic changes from apes to humans and the first self-replicatiing robot.
My guess is that after such a massive number of direct hits and the defeat in the Dover case mentioned above, the religious nutcases may soon turn to more profitable areas of "controversy": gravity, anyone, or entropy?

Tags: evolution, creationism