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News

Ken Miller just can?t win
Brown biology professor attacked by Darwin-hating fundies and leftie atheists alike
What?s an honorable man to do?

Photo: Richard McCaffrey (taken at the Providence Athenaeum) DARWIN?S SPOKESMAN What happens when America?s top evolutionist goes to church?

Brown University biology professor Kenneth R. Miller is, perhaps, the nation's most important Darwinist.

He has spilled considerable ink in defense of evolution. Debated creationists in Rhode Island and Florida. He was the star witness in a high-profile Pennsylvania schools case that put creationism's latest iteration, intelligent design, on trial.

And when President George W. Bush suggested in 2005 that intelligent design make its way into the classroom, everyone from The O'Reilly Report to National Public Radio came calling.

But lately, there has been a curious turn in the tale. Miller has come under heavy attack from Darwin's fiercest acolytes: the New Atheists, a collection of sharp-elbowed intellectuals who have filled the New York Times best seller list in recent years with provocative broadsides against God.

A flush-faced Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, shook his finger at Miller during a tense panel discussion at New York University a few years ago. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great, accused Miller of doing "damage to the good name of science" ? and worse ? in a recent on-line debate.

And Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biology professor who penned Why Evolution Is True, wrote a lengthy essay in The New Republic last year attempting to dismantle Miller and his intellectual ally Karl W. Giberson.

The source of their concern: Miller, a practicing Catholic, has made a very public bid in the last decade or so to square religion and science; to mix church and state, in their view. "It's an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline," says biology professor and prominent atheist blogger PZ Myers, "with foolishness."

Holy hell broke loose six months ago when a self-appointed truth squad sponsored by a right-wing propagandist broadcast an Internet video that appeared to show African-American employees of ACORN counseling a white pimp and his equally Caucasian hooker on how to dodge a variety of laws.

The always agitated mad dogs of the conservative blogosphere began to foam with unusual intensity. The four horsemen of the cultural apocalypse ? Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, and Beck ? saddled up and spread the alarm to their audience of shut-ins, traveling salesmen, and other political illiterates collectively known as the tea baggers.

The heat mounted. Cable sizzled. Broadcast fumed. Congress acted. Fox News got particularly riled up. And ? in a dénouement that connoisseurs of such controversies have come to cherish ? the liberal, left-wing, progressive, sodomite, antichrist Beelzebub known as the mainstream media (especially the New York Times) suffered a flogging for not exposing ACORN in the first place, and for not trumpeting the hysteria in banner headlines above the fold.

Now comes the news that the ACORN video was ? not to put too fine a point on it ? a malicious manufacture, a hoax, a deception, a vicious pack of lies.

On March 1, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, after a five-and-a-half month investigation, said with the eloquence so many prosecutors favor that "no criminality has been found." The full tapes that showed what looked like an effort by ACORN to sidestep the law were so heavily edited as to be distorted ? in effect falsified.

EAT AT JOE?S: Ligotti is a force of nature on the airwaves, but the plus-size gadfly truly gets loose over a plate ? or several plates ? of food.

Even in a world of Howie Carrs and Jay Severins, Joe Ligotti might be the most bizarre broadcast talent working in New England talk radio. And not just because the weekend WTKK host is a foul-mouthed mountain of a man weighing in at 400-plus pounds.

The 44-year-old Ligotti ? better known as The Guy from Boston from a series of YouTube tirades he began detonating four years ago ? has a growing following among conservatives and so-called moderates who worship cultural anomalies. His popularity is no surprise; for three hours on Saturday afternoons, Ligotti and his co-host Lawrence "Huggy" Bergman enliven ? or, depending on your perspective, pollute ? the airwaves with artful rhetoric that ranges from the familiar to the phenomenal.

For now, Ligotti occupies a small slice of the Hub's talk ozone. But the recurring Fox News contributor and onetime Tonight Show guest has the potential to surpass his yapper contemporaries and tread nationally. Anything is possible in the Scott Brown era ? especially for Ligotti, who campaigned alongside the Wrentham Republican, and who often raps with the senator on and off the air.

To appreciate the girth of his personality ? from amiable Everyguy to seething hatemonger ? it is best to catch Ligotti off the microphone and over a plate, or several plates, of food. That's what I did over spicy tuna rolls and much more at Jae's in the South End.

The threat that gaming poses to arts and culture may not seem obvious, but that's exactly why the arts community is asking the caucus to be its white knight.

Arts advocates are convinced that gambling, whether in the form of "resort-style" casinos or race-track slot parlors, will cut directly into the money that households spend on the arts. Their fear is that a green light for gambling will be the death knell for performing-arts centers and organizations, both large and small, which are already suffering financially.

One reason for the fears of theater owners in particular is that state casinos might include performance arenas, which in their opinion will provide unfair competition ? unfair because, for the casinos, entertainment is a loss leader to bring people onto the premises to gamble. Casinos can thus offer more money to performers, and charge less to patrons, than standalone performance centers can.

For a good idea of what kind of model arts organizations here in Massachusetts will be up against, one need look only as far south as Connecticut, where the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos have become entertainment meccas, each with several theaters presenting acts ranging from stand-up comics, such as Jerry Seinfeld, to musicians, such as Jay-Z, who plays Mohegan Sun this Saturday.

The year is still young, but when the time comes to look back at 2010's media lowlights, the embarrassing demise of Sally Quinn's Washington Post column, "The Party," will almost certainly rank near the top of the list.

Some quick background: Quinn is the wife of Ben Bradlee, the legendary former Post editor who presided over the paper's history-changing Watergate coverage. She and Bradlee have a son, Quinn, who's engaged to DC yoga instructor Pary Williamson. The two lovebirds were originally scheduled to tie the knot in October. But then, after Williamson learned she was pregnant, a decision was made to push the date earlier. (As the groom-to-be told politicsdaily.com, his fiancée "didn't want to be a big mama walking down the aisle.")

Here's where it gets juicy. The new Bradlee-Williamson date ? April 10 ? happens to be the same date that one of Ben Bradlee's grandaughters, Greta Bradlee, is getting hitched. (Greta is the child of former Globe deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr. and his ex-wife, ABC newswoman and former WCVB-TV reporter Martha Raddatz; Bradlee Jr. is now married to Boston PR bigwig Jan Saragoni.)

Family dysfunction is always fascinating from the outside, and family dysfunction among the rich and famous is even more intriguing ? so it's no wonder that Quinn's seeming decision to cut in on her step-granddaughter's big day garnered plenty of coverage. ("We've all experienced a Bridezilla or six in our day," snarked the Herald's "Inside Track." "But when did it become stylish for the step-grandmother of the bride to behave badly?")