Nah, I haven't bothered to listen to the Luskin/Egnor podcast from the Discovery Institute—I trust Orac's summary enough that I know it's a load of the same arrogant, clueless BS he was spinning here a while back.
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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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« What word should they have used? | Main | Darwin's God and the problem of Civil War reenactments »
More articles by PZ Myers can be found on Freethoughtblogs at the new Pharyngula!
Neurosurgeon and creationist Michael Egnor podcasts his ignorance
Category: Creationism
Posted on: March 8, 2007 2:33 PM, by PZ Myers
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Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | March 8, 2007 2:53 PM
Look at it this way: if Egnor is the best thing the IDers have going for them now, they're even further toward credibility freefall than we took them for.
Posted by: Bill Egnor | March 8, 2007 3:20 PM
You know, this guy kills me. Not so much that he is an ID idot, but because we have the same last name. It is not a very common name, so the odds are good that this dork is actually a distant cousin. Ewwwwww.
Posted by: Mike Haubrich | March 8, 2007 5:42 PM
We're ALL distant cousins, Bill. But we can say he changed his name for marriage if it will make you feel better.
Posted by: Caledonian | March 8, 2007 6:32 PM
Makes me wish there were some way to vet neurosurgeons for stupidity before they were allowed to "open up the hood".
Posted by: Ichthyic | March 9, 2007 1:32 AM
what really puzzles me is why nobody from the excellent ecology and evolutionary bio. dept. and stonybrook has bothered to stand up and toss a few eggs at Egnor.
Hell, Futuyma himself resides in that dept.
why are they letting him get away with this idiocy?
Posted by: Ichthyic | March 9, 2007 1:34 AM
AT Stony Brook, not AND.
damn clumsy ass fingers.
anyway, for those who don't know, there are several famous evolutionary biologists in that dept.:
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/
Posted by: slpage | March 9, 2007 8:15 AM
From the silver lining department....
I will be using Egnor in my class 'Introduction to Science and Bioscientifici Terminology' as an example of pseudoauthority...
Posted by: saurabh | March 9, 2007 3:03 PM
Woah, George Williams AND Futuyama in that tiny department? Pretty good.
As to the good doctor's argument: I feel there's a bit too much defensive bluster going on. We ought to loosen up and admit that he's right: the genetic code is an open question. We don't know how it developed. There are several *good ideas*, but nothing really definitive. Similarly the ribosome, and a lot of other fundamentals of life.
That said, these are features that are common to all living things. The difficult conundrum of how they developed has NO bearing on the subsequent evolution of that system, which is quite clear.
Especially with regards to information content. I was a bit disappointed that PZ didn't make this clearer, but as far as the Doc's original point goes, Shannon information is EXACTLY the correct way to look at things. That's why it's called "information theory". Mutation represents new information, period. The subsequent decision about whether that's USEFUL information with respect to life is one that's made by selection. It's all quite straightforward. Mutation proposes, selection disposes. Come on. Give us something new.