I promised a thread on creationism and scicomm, so let's do this.

First of all, some background and caveats here before I get deep into this. I'm not a specialist in the creationist movement. So what you're going to get from me here is a mix of personal experience with creationists, some directed reading, and observation the Kitzmiller v Dover

Secondly, I do not come from a Christian background. I do not have firsthand experience as a creationist or growing up in a family of creationists. I also do not have a firsthand understanding of doctrinal differences between different Christian sects.

So, now that's out of the way, let's get into this. Over the weekend, science twitter discovered that a celebrity they had been interacting with held and promoted creationist theology. This led to a lot of accusations of bad faith back and forth between science twitter.

On one hand, you had people from paleontology and evolutionary biology trying to explain that (1) there is no scientific evidence for creationism and (2) that creationism is religion and not science

on the other hand, you had people from the broader scientific community who accused those evolutionary biologists of being intolerant against religious people or engaging in bad science communication.

This is based on some common misunderstandings about both religion in general and creationism/ID in particular

Creationism is an inherently political movement. It was political at the Scopes trial and it was political in Kitzmiller. It is pushed by orgs like Discovery Institute with million of dollars of revenue to be spent on political campaigning

That is not to say that the belief in a six day divine fiat creationism is not a deeply held belief by some people, but rather that the way creationism is packaged, sold, and pushed is political, and designed to have political consequences

A good starting place to understand modern creationism is in the Wedge document. This was an internal strategy document prepared by the Discovery Institute in 1999 and was a major point of discussion in Kitzmiller: https://ncse.ngo/wedge-document 

The Wedge document conceives of the creationism/evolution debate as the entry point into a broader debate about the role of Christian values in western society. The goal is explicitly to reimpose Christian values:

The idea is twofold. First, that pushing divine fiat creationism will result in a positive overall perception of Christian values and therefore move in that direction

Secondly, create an environment where Christian theology can become the basis for legislation:

The strategy itself is pretty simple: use public debates and apparent proximity to real science to both build credibility for Christian theology and erode the authority of actual science, then use this crisis of authority to push religion into law

If that strategy seems familiar, it is because this is the same strategy being used by organized racists in their promotion of race science, and it is the same strategy being used by the anti-vax movement to undermine medicine and public heath

I want to reiterate here that the goal of this movement is not to protect some deeply-held belief from insult. It is to challenge the credibility of secular institutions and promote theocracy

This is what Twitter scicomm collided with this weekend. This was not someone who was well-intentioned, who wanted to learn about science, and who was open to being corrected. This was a bad actor.

This reflects a bigger problem in online scicomm. There are a lot of bad actors who interact with science to build credibility for fringe political movements. For instance, genetics (esp human genetics) has a problem with white supremacist engagement https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000860

These people do not want to be educated. They want proximity to your credibility, which they will use to build credibility for their political ideology.

There was literally no way in which the scicommers involved in this weekend's mess could have done better scicomm, because it wasn't about scicomm. They were being played by someone with ulterior motives.

So how do you respond to this? Stop engaging entirely. Don't correct. Don't debate. Don't engage in discourse. They want proximity to your credibility.

Cut. Them. Off.

Secondly, know which fringe ideologies engage with your specific specialty, and know how to recognize them. Do your research.

If you start seeing language that looks like propaganda associated with those fringe ideologies, end your engagement with the person immediately.

Twitter scicomm failed this test this weekend. Hopefully everyone learned a lesson.