The gang has been examining Conservapedia, “the conservative encyclopedia you can trust” (unlike Wikipedia). There’s much fun to be had, like the debate over: “Crusades ? Good or Bad?,” featuring Conservapedia creator Andrew Schlafly (son of Phyllis Schlafly) arguing:
I don’t see anything wrong with having a Christian holy war. Making Jerusalaem [sic] safe for defenseless pilgrims was a worthy goal. The Crusades were good.
You can also examine the revert war over HIV, in which Schlafly removed the statement that “Its main effect is to destroy T-cells, which causes a decreased resistance to infections such as pneumonia.” His objection? It is an “unsupported claim.”
More interesting to me is its entry for ecology:
The study of relationships among organisms in ecosystems. The term comes from the German “oekologie.”
This is, of course, wrong.
The one reference, predictably, goes to a creationist tome which argues that humans and dinosaurs lived together.
They did manage to get the etymology of the term right, though they didn’t mention that Ernst Haeckel invented the word.
Ecology is not the study of interactions between organisms. It is the study of interactions between organisms and their environment. Other organisms would be part of the environment, of course, but so are nonliving things like soil or water. Understanding how organisms deal with temperature variation, to changes in water salinity or pH, light availability, nutrient concentrations, etc. are all vital parts of ecology which this right-wing definition would ignore.