Young Earth creationists are easy to lampoon (see G. Branch Nature 500, 149; 2013). However, using reasoned arguments might hold more sway with the US creationist movement.

PZ Myers, author of The Happy Atheist (which Branch reviewed), should remember that the majority of those who helped to establish the disciplines that we now practise as modern science were religious believers, including Nicolaus Copernicus, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus, Edward Jenner, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Joseph Lister, William Thomson and Arthur Stanley Eddington — to name but a few, and excluding a long list of contemporary names. Half of the 10 most influential scientists of the past 350 years chosen for the Royal Society's commemorative stamps in 2010 were religious believers.