It’s entirely because of his defense of evolution in debates and pushing back against teaching creationism in schools alongside people like Dawkins (also a biologist by training and who rose to atheism fame in large part by dunking on creationists). This all happened in the 2000s especially under the Bush admin and by 2016 or so was in the rear-view mirror already so they’re reaching back for the old hated enemies.
And con-pedia in particular hates these types of people from the 2000s because those were their original enemies that drove them to create that thing. One of their original big fights with wikipedia and later the liberal rationalwiki was over evolution and pushing biblical literalism and there’s a lot of drama there.
