An open letter to Dylan Lovan

Mr Lovan,

I want to thank you for your coverage of an important issue. It is an under-covered area of education, and it has profound implications for science literacy and American competitiveness. I would, however, ask you to make one point completely clear in the spirit of objective journalism, and that is that hokum and unverifiable claims do not make it into the story without corrective editorial content. I am, in particular, referring to the claim by the Bob Jones University spokesman:

"Wile countered that Coyne 'feels compelled to lie in order to prop up a failing hypothesis (evolution). We definitely do not lie to the students. We tell them the facts that people like Dr. Coyne would prefer to cover up.'"

You could go into any biology lab at any university and verify that Coyne is not lying; you could go with any paleontologist and see how well evolution predicts what they find in the field. As I am currently teaching a course about conspiracy theories, I found it remarkable how easily Wile slipped into conspiracy, and this is important. By extension, every single biologist publishing in peer-reviewed journals for the last 100 years has to be LYING. What an extraordinary claim, but before it is dignified and repeated by the AP, it needs to be bolstered by correspondingly extraordinary evidence. The real story, of course, is that there is not a single peer-reviewed creationist or intelligent design article in any of the relevant scientific literature and that people are still teaching the Bible as science. This is also important because as it stands editors can decide to redact your work in a way that is not consistent with the balance you sought to achieve, as you will note in the version of your article that I sited.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that science doesn't suffer "balance for the sake of balance," which seems to be a newsroom virtue. This seeming virtue actually cripples science journalism and elevates nonsense to an equal status as peer-reviewed science. I do hope that you can be an advocate of accuracy over illusory "balance" at the AP.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter.

HJ