Focus on the fallacy

From a New York Times story about the upcoming blockbuster "Alexander" and its historically accurate portrayal of Alexander of Macedon as having both a wife and a male lover:

"There will be people who see Alexander the Great's bisexuality as applauding that lifestyle, and unfortunately it will lead some young boys, young men down a path that I think they'll regret someday," said Bob Waliszewski, a film critic with Focus on the Family, a Christian group.

I'm not sure what's most offensive: that this "film critic" thinks seeing Colin Farrell in a love scene with Jared Leto could turn some blokes "gay", that he thinks being gay is a "path of regret", or that this Focus on the Family thing is basically a multimillion-dollar business that enjoys tax-exempt status despite propagating lies and bigotry.

The founder of this corporation, James Dobson, has claimed, unsurprisingly, that evolution is a fallacy: "Darwin tried to tell us that the various life forms evolved on earth from a single-celled organism swimming in a primordial 'soup.' ... From that spontaneous beginning in an African swamp came a dazzling array of evermore complicated species." It seems there's some subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) racism here. (Complicated species from an African swamp? Seems doubtful to any white supremacist.)

But beyond that, it's also highly offensive the way he uses his manifest lack of comprehension of science, the scientific method and the theory of evolution to smear perfectly good science:

"Now, after 135 years of exhaustive research, the transitional forms still have not turned up. They don't exist in the geological record. This and other convincing criticisms of classical evolution make it difficult to understand why so many intelligent and highly educated men and women still hold a position that is not supported by verifiable scientific data."

First off, there's a key difference between verifiable data and verified data. As in, just because we haven't found proof of a "missing link" doesn't mean the theory of evolution can be definitively refuted. Certainly I don't think Dobson will wait with bated breath as archaeologists search for such a fossil record. And, indeed, evidence is completely irrelevant to the agenda he's pushing. But all that aside, even if we claim Dobson is correct to say that evolution is unverifiable, that doesn't inherently disprove the theory. The nature of scientific knowledge is such that we can never really, truly prove that a "theory of gravity" is true, but it does seem to offer a pretty satisfactory explanation for why bureaucrats end up gravely injured when defenestrated from Prague windows. I would hope that even Dobson won't argue that point. My point about evolution, however, is that even if we can't conclusively prove it, no one has disproven it, and it remains the most probable theory yet posited for how humans came to be. Not to mention, we do have all those fossils of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men that show humans to have evolved over the past several thousand years.

Of course, the irony of it is that Dobson's own theory -- that of faith -- is profoundly unverifiable, by definition even. Yet I don't go around calling it a crackpot theory -- not until he starts passing it off as science.