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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While criticizing someone who does not understand the difference between artificial and natural selection--something I've successfully communicated to high school students and undergraduates--is like picking on the slow kid, his repeated nitpicking of ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford's post about the…
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Orac bravely dives deeper into the Discovery Institute's creationist drivel, and reports on the continuing ignorant idiocy of Michael Egnor. I don't…
It's Christmas Eve.
I know, I know, it's all supposed to be Peace On Earth, Good Will Towards Men (and Women), and all that jazz. Really, that's exactly what I had intended for today and tomorrow. Indeed, my plan was to do nothing more than a quickie post today and a maybe a couple of brief (and…
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.
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.
We're ALL distant cousins, Bill. But we can say he changed his name for marriage if it will make you feel better.
Makes me wish there were some way to vet neurosurgeons for stupidity before they were allowed to "open up the hood".
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?
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/
From the silver lining department....
I will be using Egnor in my class 'Introduction to Science and Bioscientifici Terminology' as an example of pseudoauthority...
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.