Wes Elsberry Responds to Joe Carter

As a follow-up to the previous post concerning Joe Carter's response to PZ Myers on the subject of Stephen Meyer's misleading citation of the scientific literature, Wes Elsberry has written a brief response to Carter's criticisms on his message board. He points out the quite obvious concerning Meyer's citation of Brocks' 1999 article. Meyer cites Brocks to support this claim:

For over three billion years, the biological realm included little more than bacteria and algae.

PZ had already pointed out one problem with this citation, which is that it only dealt with trace evidence of bacterial life, it did not deal at all with the question of whether any other forms of life existed on the earth. Wes points out another problem - the Brocks article deals only with the Archean, which is before 2.5 billion years ago. Clearly, this is not a valid citation to support the claim Meyer was making. It should also be said that Meyer's claim is essentially true, that from 3.8 billion years ago, for about 3 billion years after that, we find no evidence of anything but bacterial or algal life on earth. He could certainly find many articles that deal with that question and reach that conclusion. But the article he cites does not, and that's the sort of thing that a competent reviewer should have caught.

Wes also points out some other problems in Carter's critique, particularly as it regards Meyer's use of "specified complexity" and "complex specified information". That is probably a more important critique of Meyer than the citation problem. Meyer was playing very fast and loose with his usage of CSI in trying to apply it to fossil evidence. Even if CSI was a real, measurable quantity in the natural world (and I'm certainly not conceding that), how on earth do you tell how much "complex specified information" was present in an organism that is known only from fossils? Meyer is using a very casual definition when he says that the Cambrian explosion represented a "remarkable jump in the specified complexity or "complex specified information" (CSI) of the biological world". What he really means is "wow, things got more complex", not that there was an actual measurable increase in CSI. The former claim is defensible, the latter claim would require a lot more than an eyeballing of fossil pictures to establish. He cites Dembski's work on a technical definition of CSI, but doesn't use that definition, or even attempt to apply the means that Dembski proposes for determining the presence of CSI to the fossil evidence. Just another inaccuracy in Meyer's article, among the many others already shown.