Casey Luskin has an excellent article up now at The Blaze pointing out something I hadn’t really thought about ("Defenders of the Evolutionary ‘Consensus’ Could Benefit from More Fact Checking").

Much as they hate us — and I don’t think that word is too strong in some cases — Darwinists need us, if nothing else, for quality control. Some will remain fat, happy, and complacent no matter how we check their facts for them, but there can be no doubt that others are more careful about their claims for the all-powerful, all-knowing Darwinian theory because they fear the "creationists" are always watching and will catch them out when they err. That’s healthy.

As illustrations, Casey cites the amusing example of "Tailgate" — Karl Giberson’s use of a Photoshopped image of a tailed baby, to shore up his case for common descent — as well as erroneous assertions by journalist Chris Mooney and others concerning Tiktaalik as a "transitional form" linking fish and tetrapods, a claim upset by the discovery of tetrapod tracks predating Tiktaalik by nearly 20 million years.

These cases will likely be familiar to our readers, but another black eye for Mooney is a scoop, including a private admission from biologist Ken Miller. The topic is human chromosome 2, another icon of the case for common descent:

Mooney promulgated another serious error in a February Mother Jones piece polemically titled, "This Picture Has Creationists Terrified." He maintained that human chromosome 2 appears to be composed of two chromosomes that are fused end-to-end, and this supposedly demonstrates our common ancestry with apes. Another successful "prediction"?

Hardly. The fusion story, even if true, only suggests that somewhere in the human line, two chromosomes became fused. It says nothing about whether we share a common ancestor with apes.

Mooney didn’t mention this logical rejoinder. Instead he took aim at a creationist biologist named Jeff Tomkins who had searched gene databases and discovered that the purported "fusion" point in human chromosome 2 is actually part of a functional gene. Quoting Kenneth Miller, an evolutionary biologist from Brown University, Mooney wrote:

But that’s just wrong, according to Miller. The fusion site is "more than 1,300 bases away from the gene," he says, based on a review of major gene databanks. "These increasingly desperate efforts to ‘debunk’ the chromosome 2 story have failed before, and they’ve failed this time, too," Miller concludes.

Actually Mooney was wrong. When challenged privately, Dr. Miller conceded that the fusion point was only far away from the gene when one excludes results from a genomic database called "refseq." When refseq is included, a longer gene transcript is found — produced by a section of DNA that includes the fusion site.

Miller admitted the mistake to Tomkins: "In this transcript, the fusion site is in the middle of the first [gene] exon as you note." Somehow Mooney failed to mention that inconvenient fact.

Mooney apparently wanted to give the impression that the "fusion site" is useless junk DNA, produced by random evolutionary mutations. The evidence suggests otherwise — it’s an important, functional gene.

That is delicious. Casey points out that in any marketplace — whether vendors are promoting consumer products or ideas about evolution — competition improves the products and the service. The absence of competition almost always results in shoddy products and poor consumer service, as anyone who has visited a socialist country can tell you. Darwin advocates should be thanking us.

Of course the flipside to all this is that for every orthodox evolutionist who is made more judicious and truthful in what he argues, there’s probably another who prevaricates about the meaning of scientific data, because "What will the creationists say?"

Still, on the whole, they and everyone else who cares about getting at the truth in science ought to be glad we’re here.

I’m on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

Image: Tiktaalik, Field Museum, Chicago/Jamie Bernstein, Flickr.