In 2001, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould explained why they always refuse to debate creationists. Their reasoning was that the creationists were simply seeking to to be allowed to share a platform with a real scientist, and thereby create a public impression that the two sides were more or less equal.
14 December 2001
Dear Editor
Like any flourishing science, the study of evolution has its internal controversies, as we both know. But no qualified scientist doubts that evolution is a fact, in the ordinarily accepted sense in which it is a fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. It is a fact that human beings are cousins to monkeys, kangaroos, jellyfish and bacteria. No reputable biologist doubts this. Nor do reputable theologians, from the Pope on. Unfortunately, many lay Americans do, including some frighteningly influential, powerful and, above all, well-financed ones.
We are continually invited to engage in public debates against creationists, including latter-day creationists disguised under the euphemism ‘Intelligent Design Theorists’. We always refuse, for one overriding reason. If we may be allowed to spell this reason out publicly, we hope our letter may be helpful to other evolutionary scientists plagued by similar invitations.....
https://voxday.net/2026/10/14/there-will-be-no-debate/
....I don’t have any problem with the evolutionist preference to avoid debate. I don’t seek to debate any evolutionist or any scientist. I don’t seek a platform with any of them. I certainly don’t wish to publish in their journals; I only submitted a few papers at the start to fulfill what I felt was an intellectual responsibility. Nature screwed up my plans to make MITTENS Appendix A in the first edition by holding onto it for weeks since I’d assumed they’d reject it on sight. But now that Nature and one of the genetics journals have confirmed what I always assumed would be their lack of interest, I’m free to continue ignoring them. It’s all good....
......Darwin doesn’t survive this. Kimura doesn’t survive. Ohta is next; in completing the genomic matrix I will, in passing, be able to determine the empirical truth or falsehood of her Nearly Neutral theory.
In their fear and loathing of AI, they’ve failed to understand what a powerful intellectual weapon it can be in sufficiently disinterested hands. They don’t understand that the entire corpus of their science and the entire published literature of their fields has already been scanned into the machines, and is there be analyzed at a level of detail that has never before been possible, at a speed that has never before been imaginable. There isn’t an argument they can cite that I don’t already know. There isn’t a model they can summon that I haven’t already analyzed......