I don’t see why you think it’s horribly ineffective. All evidence points to vast ignorance and dangerous credulity amongst American evangelicals, a problem so pervasive and so deep that it literally threatens our democracy. The answers in this thread point to the reasons why someone would choose this kind of dishonest ploy. The audience loves it. They gorge on it. They need it.
I don’t know why you think your rhetoric is more effective. I dearly wish it were true but the news tells me, starkly, otherwise.
How many times does someone scientifically knowledgeable have the opportunity to directly call it out? Remember the DI permits no negative comments on their YouTube channel and no comments at all on Evolution News. If someone reads the misleading term in an article or book there is no one to correct the wrong. I’m sure the DI doesn’t care if the ruse gets called out once out of every five hundred times it is repeated.
There is much in ID Creationism that only makes sense when you realize that its proponents mostly know they are lying. Behe may have managed to swindle himself, but surely most of them simply know they are lying, all the time, and they know what they are trying to accomplish by doing it.
I really think you might find it enlightening to read the recent DI books. I’d have a look at the DI-published ones, starting with Foresight, by Eberlin; Zombie Science, by Wells; and Darwin’s House of Cards, by Bethell. I think that if you read those (that sounds like a lot, but they’re short and they’re all written at a grade-school reading level) you’ll see that there is no question at all that the entire movement is grounded in willful deceit. I think this may help you see what the most productive way to respond is.
I mean this politely, as a serious suggestion: A number of times, you’ve said “I haven’t read that”. You should very strongly consider reading the texts these discussions are based on before participating.
It’s pretty obvious that it is. Look at what people who come to this forum are all asking. If you abandon natural selection, then what do you have left to explain all the immensely impressive adaptations of life? Why are organisms so well-adapted to their environment? What explains the shape of the claws on lions? The eyesight of owls and eagles? The streamlined shape of fish? The catalytic efficiency of enzymes? Why bacteria have essentially no junk DNA? Those fascinating gears on the planthopper’s legs?
Even when it comes to things that really do have neutral-theory related explanations, I think biologists could also do a better job at pointing out that natural selection is still there in constructive neutral evolution, for example as negative selection against strongly deleterious mutations, and preserving compensatory gene duplications. Constructive neutral evolution helps explain why the spliceosomal complex is so ridiculously complex, but it doesn’t explain why the structure exists in the first place. Natural selection does.
There may have been many neutral, permissive mutations contributing to the evolution of the flagellum, but it’s main functions have most certainly been shaped by natural selection. Every extant facsimile of the “steps” in it’s gradual evolution is useful in some microbial niche, or in some fundamental cellular process.
Besides it being a rhetorical mistake to not talk about natural selection as a strong explanatory factor in shaping many attributes of life, it’s also factually wrong to leave the impression that it’s been somehow largely abandoned by evolutionary biologists. It most certainly has not.
Yes, the contributions of genetic drift and the neutral theory of molecular evolution have been added to the theory of evolution because they too help explain many puzzling attributes of life that don’t make sense as natural-selection driven changes (particularly at the molecular level, and mostly in multicellular eukaryotes with relatively small population sizes and large genomes), but you just can’t explain everything with neutral change.
Maybe it is working. It depends on what the goal of the ploy is.
How much money does Behe get from book sales and speaking engagements, compared to other biochemists with similarly unimpressive academic achievements?
When creationists refer to “Darwinism”, they are not referring simply to Charles Darwin’s theories . “Darwinism” refers to the general belief/theory that all life on earth evolved naturally over deep time from a common ancestor. So “Darwinism” includes the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Whether well intended or otherwise, it is at best sloppy language that tends to take the conversation away from substantial exchange. Many creationist use “Darwinism” because they want to present evolution as a personality cult, and frame the discussion as a clash of ideology instead of a matter of evidence. We do not refer to relativity as Einsteinism, quantum mechanics as Planckism, cell biology as Hookeism. Simply using “evolution” generally communicates perfectly well, and reserves Darwinism for appropriate historical references.
But the whole point of the OP is that this is not how science or scientists use the term… and that using it this way leads to misunderstandings and cross-purposes, even when all concerned are engaging in good faith.