That said, The Daily Show is probably the best skeptical TV news there is right now. It thrives on pointing out inconsistencies and logical fallacies in what public figures say and do, and (metaphorical) heaven help the fool who tries to retort with ad hominem, as they always do. When Stewart criticized CNBC for its poor economic coverage and they (especially Jim Kramer) tried to fight back, Jon reduced the man to tears - by contradicting his claims and backing it up with archived footage. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need more of in the news.

Hes Jewish. They make a lot of jokes about that on the Daily Show.

Doesn't he defend evolution?

You know I dont remember him ever defending OR attacking evolution.

One interesting property of Intelligent Design is that it is a "big tent." They don't even like to talk about such things as the age of the earth.

I like PZ's take:

During the course of the hearings, the lawyer on the side of science, Pedro Irigonegaray, asked several of the witnesses for Intelligent Design creationism what they thought the age of the earth was.... The Intelligent Design creationists found it difficult. Some answers were ludicrous, such as Daniel Ely's and John Sanford's assertion that the earth was between 10 and 100 thousand years old. Others were evasive: Stephen Meyer and Angus Menuge refused to answer. Some of these "qualified witnesses" were embarrassingly ignorant: William Harris could only say, "I don't know. I think it's probably really old.". All of this is in line with the intellectually flaccid position of the godfather of the Intelligent Design movement, Phillip Johnson, who has bravely announced that "I have consistently said that I take no position on the age of the earth".

Reginald has a very good point: the IDers' fumbling refusal to take a stance on the age of the earth is a strong sign that their movement is political and not scientific in nature. It makes perfect sense for a political movement trying not to lose the support of creationists of all varieties - but what genuinely scientific movement flat-out refuses to confront such an obvious and important question?

Your mileage will vary. One interesting property of Intelligent Design is that it is a "big tent." They don't even like to talk about such things as the age of the earth. This is more evidence that ID is a political posture to circumvent existing court precedents on the teaching of Creationism, and not a true scientific position. A few of the ID leaders (Behe, Minnich) will acknowledge that evolution happened, but God steps in from time to time to poof some magic like a flagellum or an immune system. Others (Paul Nelson, Dean Kenyon, William Dembski) are good old-fashioned Creationists who deny common descent, particularly between humans and other apes.

Indeed. It might even be helpful to point out that leading ID proponents accept evolution up to a point, even acknowledging that speciation occurs (see here, for example). Their dispute, if taken at face value, is merely that natural selection can't explain everything. So their real argument is not whether evolution occurs; it's to what extent.

I have used this same tactic in a different discipline to convince a climate change denier that anthropogenic global warming is real. Among climatologists, even the skeptics acknowledge that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to it.

It might be beneficial to cull quotes from the Discovery Institute and friends to show to what extent they don't even dispute evolution anymore.

As opposed to what other crowd? Bill O'Reilly's? Does the Daily Show crowd even watch Friends? I watch the Daily Show and I've never seen an episode of Friends in its entirety. I liked Seinfeld better. Isn't John Stewart an atheist? Doesn't he defend evolution? Sorry, I just don't understand this undercurrent of attacking people who watch TDS.

The Friends clip does show how these arguments usually play out. Pheobe claims that she is open minded but that Ross is an arrogant and pushy closed minded scientist. Then she slams Ross for being open minded when he admits that science can change over time. Pheobe's approach doesn't even touch on the scientific evidence in the briefcase, it's just Pheobe making contradictory personal accusations against Ross and otherwise being impossible for Ross to talk to. Pheobe is the arrogant, closed minded fool while Ross is the well intentioned man who wants to share knowledge with her to the extent of bringing 200 million year old fossils for her to personally examine. Which she refuses to do so. She won, alright, the same way that blowhards like Bill O'Reilly "win" and most theists "win" in arguments. They get the other side to get fed up with them.

Good clip, I liked it.

The trouble with the scientific method is that it's slow, and labour intensive, probably moreso than any other truth-determining mechanism yet invented (especially more than fundamentalist religion, whose chief attraction for a great many people seems to be its ability to generate simple, all-encompassing answers from minimal to non-existent mental or physical exertion, that can be comprehended, usually, with a similar lack of any effort) - and the amount of scientific knowledge generated by humanity has long since exceeded the point where one person could fully satisfy himself, by rigorously scientific means, i.e. taking absolutely nothing on authority and performing repeatable tests on all of it. And, sadly, for all we may loudly declare "of course it's valid, it works!", we've not actually performed the necessary repeatable tests to prove that it works (and neither will our audience have the time, resources or often even the inclination to do so), we've simply been informed that it works by various other media, which is, strictly speaking, mere argument from authority. The reason, I think, that this doesn't put those of us who have faith in the scientific method at the same level as the religious fundamentalists is what I think is classed as a proof by induction: we can, in short, apply the scientific method to itself. The scientific method can be repeatably demonstrated to work (ironically, the constant generation of new scientific data that makes total individual verification and proof impossible is, at the same time, a continuous supply of experimental data supporting the validity of the scientific method itself); even factoring in those times it apparently fails due to human error or whatever, statistically it still overwhelmingly does come up with useful, right answers, under the right experimental conditions (proper scientific training of sufficient of its practitioners, intellectual honesty of peer reviewers, etc), which can in turn be scientifically tested and shown to exist in the population of scientists, thus providing the necessary conditions for science to work properly and be relied upon.

The religious method of answering the world's questions can also be applied to itself, of course, and very frequently is ("The bible is true and god, its author, exists because he says so in it," etc) - while one could make the case that both this and the scientific method are circular logic when applied to themselves in this manner, the difference, it seems to me, is that the religious method of bald assertions of truth leaves some or all stages of the circle of support entirely disconnected from observable reality (and thus free to drift away from it), whereas recursively using the scientific method to support itself keeps you tethered at every stage to the reference frame of the observable universe by the repeatable observations the method needs in order to work.

"8,234,004 (for example) scientists accept evolution.

154 (for example) do not.

There is no controversy."