For the past week, a group of Cleveland's less cerebrally engaged have taken to protesting outside my research suite at Case.  (I can hear them once in a while from where I'm sitting and writing this.)  It's been a mix of locals mostly, but a few students have brought placards on their way to class as well.  One of my colleagues snapped a few photos yesterday.

The groups haven't been especially large, maybe a dozen or so people at the most--and today there seemed to be a few fewer than yesterday--but they've been pretty vocal and confrontational.  On Wednesday, one threw his shoulder into mine as I tried to pass on the sidewalk leading into the building's entrance.  This guy below, whose shirt pretty much sums up the general message of those assembled, occupies a special place in my heart--it's too bad the image doesn't show you what his sign says, as my name assumes a bold font near its top.

 

The genesis of the brouhaha kicked off about  a year ago, when I had an article published  in the journal Nature about some of my research on primate genomes.  My statistical modeling turned out a wrinkle in the mutability of their sequencing that suggested a great deal more change were occurring than what a gradualist model of natural selection suggests.   I really wasn't sure what was behind the genetic mechanics of it at the time, but I hypothesized it had something to do with somatic mutations splicing into the germ line and getting replicated for subsequent generations.  I described the process as 'catalytic evolution', and presumed I'd give it a better name under better light.

Little if anything would have likely come of the article, certainly not in a popular sense, had it not been for the creationists' knack for picking out what they wanted from it and distorting my statements to read like an indictment on Darwinian theory.  But pick they did.  Rick Warren even mentioned my research in a footnote to his latest edition of A Purpose Driven Life, as part of a "...[b]urgeoning body of science in support for a young earth."  (No, I haven't read it--and it's a veritable miracle I even heard about it.) 

Then an article in Time magazine came out on some of my research, for which I agreed to grant, what later became, a truncated interview.  Oh, those brights at Time are something else.  Having read it, you would have thought I were advocating that the earth is 10,000 years old and that Genesis has been taken as fact by any and all sensible scientists.  As you might imagine, the blogosphere of the right lit up with this nonsense, and I've burned through three email accounts just so I could communicate professionally without having to filter through the three or four dozen emails I'd been getting every day from people (the less cerebrally engaged) congratulating me on my research.  I've received at least a dozen emails from students and faculty at Bob Jones University...how endearing. 

Now it seems every yahoo with a bible tucked under the bed is qualified to speak about my research.  Here's a little video from a pastor in Lewiston, NY--where?!--who worked in some of my research to "support" his laudably cogent understanding of geology:

Particularly after the Time article, I thought I should do something about the way my research has been abused--and the papal colors in which I've been painted.  So I fired off an essay to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Toledo Blade, and a few other local papers, and did a short interview for the Channel 5 evening news.  When I made it clear in these media I didn't buy into the whole rib and resurrection farce, the same fanatics who had been cheering me on turned on me pretty abruptly, and hence the amicable flocks presently congregating on the sidewalk outside my building. 

Now, instead of getting notes that read--and this is an actual one: "...it's about time a respected researcher called out the psuedoscience [sic] of geologic dating.", I've been getting hatemail the likes of this--another actual note: "...you ought to slither back into the pit of vile from whence you came."  Whence, wither, art, thou...is archaic diction any more attractive when it's spewed from the right?

Anyway, I'm hopeful the ruckus outside my workstation simmers down soon, but I have a feeling it won't.  I'm scheduled to speak at the Freedom From Religion Foundation's annual meeting next month in Madison, WI, and I'll be on 'Speaking of Faith' on NPR next month--to the latter, especially, I'm looking forward.  More fuel for the fire in all likelihood.

Only in America.