Published in December 2009 in the Post Register.
ROBERTS – Kathleen ate alligator meat.

Bold in many things, Kathleen is an epicurean coward, preferring to stick to what she knows. But inspired by the moss hanging from the trees and the sound of live Zydeco playing in the background, my wife took a bite of deep-fried alligator tail and pronounced that it tasted like chicken.

OK, there’s no moss in the trees in Roberts and there’s no live Zydeco for hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles. But the rest is true – Kathleen overcame her fear and had a taste of reptile. Then she ordered a steak.

I, on the other hand, ordered the Creole-style tomato-and-rice dish featuring crawfish tail meat. My special kind of cowardice was evidenced in my choice of heat – I requested a two on a scale of one to 10.

We are, of course, at BJ’s Bayou, the only place within a day’s drive to get authentic Louisiana-style cuisine created illogically out of a 117-year-old former brothel in a tiny town 15 minutes north of Idaho Falls. BJ Berlin and his wife, Cheril, are our hosts and cooks on a cold late-autumn evening.

They’ve been perfecting Cajun and Creole dishes inspired by Chef Paul Prudhomme since 1998. BJ Berlin moved to Idaho Falls from New Orleans with his family when he was high school and settled in Roberts after he married Cheril. They fell in love with the old two-story building on Roberts’ main drag and eventually made a home out of the top floor while opening a bar and restaurant downstairs.

“We had a kitchen in the bar, and we started serving Po Boys,” says BJ. Po Boys are a New Orleans-style sandwich. “Friday nights were Louisiana night. People started coming from all over the place, so by 1998 we became BJ’s Bayou.”

The Berlins pride themselves on fixing authentic southern Louisiana-style food, but they’ve made one concession – they ask diners the heat level they prefer, on a scale of one to 10. Five, Cheril says, is the average heat level for New Orleans. I’ve ordered the level five before and it exceeded my comfort level. So I asked for a two this time, and it was about right.

“Most of what we do is Creole,” says BJ. “Creole cooking is more sophisticated than Cajun.”

BJ started cooking in the Boy Scouts – “My patrol always won the cook-offs,” he says. He and Cheril will cook you a nice steak and baked potato, but it’s the Creole food that will bring you back. He tells of the story of a nice lady who once asked Cheril for some ketchup with her etouffe.

“Cheril told her she should order something else,” BJ says.

In the kitchen, BJ works on my crawfish tail meat Creole. He starts by sautéing the vegetable trinity of onions, celery and peppers; then comes the crawfish meat and a combination of black, white and cayenne pepper. Finally, he adds his own tomato concoction and simmers it before pouring it over rice.

There’s a fire crackling in the corner wood stove as we chat with the Berlins and their three kids and Cheril brings in some fresh hush puppies. Outside, it’s 12 degrees, but we swear we can see the moss swaying in the trees.

On a day when President Obama once again called for civility and unity I am reminded how difficult this is to achieve in the origins debate. Intellectual discussions with evolutionists are about as likely as intellectual discussions with the Wizard of Oz. Rarely have I been able to cajole an evolutionist into reasoned discussion of the scientific evidence. Instead the evolutionist mischaracterizes science and deploys metaphysical justifications while accusing the skeptic of all manner of misdeeds. This infinite loop was replayed again last week on an evolutionary blog when Nick Matzke criticized recent posts here, here and here on T-urf13. I explained that the de novo gene T-urf13 is unlikely to have blindly evolved. I concluded the chances of that occurring are substantially worse than one in ten million. In return I received several pages of bizarre and irrelevant vitriol which managed to avoid the science at hand.

This is a genre that evolutionists seemed to have honed, and I was quickly reminded of it in Matzke's opening where he labelled me as a "young-earth creationist." Not only am I not a young-earth creationist, I have never even written about the topic. But accuracy and truth are not prominent in this genre.

For evolutionists the "young-earth creationist" label carries immense rhetorical value which outweighs any loss of credibility that may result. After all, the evolutionist can always respond to correction with taunts of secrecy, denial, and so forth. Indeed, I am routinely labelled as a "closet young-earth creationist."

And if I am hiding a secret religious belief then, of course, whatever I have to say in response to such charges is nothing more than a tired cover-up to which no one should pay heed. The verdict has been rendered: The evolution skeptic is an unscientific, religious zealot and therefore evolution remains a scientific fact. As Matzke pronounces:

as with many creationists, Hunter thinks his ridiculous little trope is actually a silver bullet that can be used to effortlessly kill any evolutionary evidence, thus saving his tender innocent brain the trauma of actually having to come up with a better explanation than the evolutionary one.

So much for truth and accuracy. And of course the fact of evolution stands firm:

Well, how does Hunter react to this empirical evidence on the origin of a new gene? He simply ignores the overwhelming sequence evidence right in front of him, and instead claims, based on typical creationist “it must have come together all at once from completely random sequence” assumptions, that the natural origin of T-urf13 is too improbable to be believed.

Matzke misrepresents both the science and my points. Far from ignoring the sequence evidence, it is precisely that evidence that is problematic for evolution. Protein coding sequences are extremely unlikely but here we find a significant part of one in a non-coding region.

And Matzke's quote is a silly and fictitious strawman. Of course the de novo gene arose from the pre existing sequences rather than "all at once from completely random sequence." The problem is that evolutionists are now claiming from unclear evidence that evolution is clearly capable of producing de novo genes.

Yes, some sequences came together to form a new gene. But that does not automatically demonstrate evolution any more than would a population responding to an environmental shift. Sure we can imagine how these sequences came together, but the elephant in the room is "how do lengthy protein coding sequences arise in non coding regions?"

Evolution predicts this should not happen and does not explain it. We may find an answer to this question, but for now it is not immediately obvious. At best it appears that evolution will be left with the usual "new proteins arise from the cutting, copying and pasting of pre existing proteins, with a few mutations thrown in here or there." But that hardly makes a de novo gene, such as T-urf13, evidence that evolution creates new proteins.