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Beating a dead horse (Darwin’s Doubt)

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Rumraket
First off I must apologize for doing another post on a subject that’s been done to death around here, but I’ve been meaning to make a post about this for a while but other stuff kept coming up. Anyway, things have quietened down at work where I now only have to maintain some cell cultures, so I have a bit of time duing the christmas holiday.

My post, which is a repost of something I also brought up in a thread on Larry Moran’s sandwalk blog, is about a chapter in Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt and what I can, if I’m being generous, only attribute to extremely shoddy scholarship.

Having read the book, a recurring phenomenon is that Meyer time and again makes claims without providing any references for them. Take for instance the claim that the Cambrian explosion requires lots of new protein folds, from Chapter 10 The Origin of Genes and Proteins: ...

I basically show that Meyer is making claims without supporting them, then finally produces a single reference that argues the opposite. Naturally what follows is a lot of denial, deflection, irrelevancies and moving the goalposts from the Supernaturalist brigade.

Eventually this seems to have caught the attention of well-known (in ID circles) ID blogger Vincent Torley, who writes the most ridiculously flailing post on the ID blog Uncommon Descent:

This is embarrassing: “Darwin’s Doubt” debunker is 14 years behind the times:
Over at The Skeptical Zone, Mikkel “Rumraket” Rasmussen has written a post critical of Dr. Stephen Meyer, titled, Beating a dead horse (Darwin’s Doubt), which is basically a rehash of comments he made on a thread on Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog last year. The author’s aim is to expose Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “extremely shoddy scholarship,” but as we’ll see, Rasmussen’s own research skills leave a lot to be desired.

Did Dr. Meyer fail to document his sources?
Rasmussen focuses his attack on chapter 10 of Dr. Meyer’s book, “Darwin’s Doubt.” He writes:
...

(N.B. For ease of readability, I have used square brackets to correct Rasmussen’s spelling and punctuation errors, and I have also inserted four extra words, without which his meaning would have been obscure to readers, in the preceding paragraph – VJT.)

It starts out ironic (nobody can understand what I write because of spelling and grammatical errors, which makes me wonder how VJT knew what I meant since he was able to correct it, but anyway..), then just ends up flailing around hysterically.

The very first response Torley recieves is from Nick Matzke, who nails it in the very first paragraph:

1 NickMatzke_UDDecember 25, 2015 at 7:54 pm
VJ Torley, your post is silly in several ways:

1. “New genes” and “new proteins” are not the same thing as “new protein folds”. You can have many different kinds of proteins that all draw from the same folds. You can’t quote sources talking about new genes/new proteins/new information and just blithely assume this automatically means new folds. Rasmussen gets this, Meyer misses this, you miss this.

...

I've responded to Torley's post here. Basically, despite all of VJT's references, these weren't the droids we were looking for.

Those donotlink links don't work on my phone. From what little I can make from what's posted here, it seems he's griping that you're 14 years out of date as if some new science has happened in the last 14 years which further supports ID.

Animavore wrote:Those donotlink links don't work on my phone. From what little I can make from what's posted here, it seems he's griping that you're 14 years out of date as if some new science has happened in the last 14 years which further supports ID.

Direct link.

Turns out those 14 years "out of date" are to the detriment of Stephen Meyer.

I used to feel a bit sorry for VJ Torley, seeing him as just someone out of his depth who unwisely put his trust in the pronouncements of creationists "scientists" in acknowledgment of his own scientific ignorance. But watching his pathetic flailings in that thread as he tries to avoid admitting the very simple and obvious points Matzke makes confirms that Torley's ignorance is completely willful. No one could be that dense unless he wanted to be.

I mean no disparagement by this, but I think it shows the depths to which the DI has descended that they will devote so much time and space to something you've written, even though you are not one of the major researchers in evolutionary biology. I mean, hell, they even posted an article responding something I wrote! The reason they have to do this is that more prominent figures are not even engaging the DI's rhetoric any more.

EDIT: I hasten to repeat that I mean no insult by the above. You wrote an excellent article, Rumraket.

BTW, "Donotlink" asked me to choose an adjective to describe the UD page. I picked "ridiculous."

Torley's comments there are all one big joke, but this one I found particularly funny (from #83)

I really think you’re being a bit rude to Dr. Meyer here. Take a look at his Acknowledgments page (p. 414), where he states: “I’d also like to acknowledge the two anonymous biologists and two paleontologists who gave such careful attention to improving the scientific rigor and accuracy of the manuscript during the peer-review process.” If there are any scientific mistakes in Meyer’s book, it’s these guys who should take the fall for it, not Meyer. He did, after all, do his level best to ensure that his book from free from mistakes. He is, as he states, “not a biologist, but a philosopher of biology.”

Shrunk wrote: I mean, hell, they even posted an article responding something I wrote! The reason they have to do this is that more prominent figures are not even engaging the DI's rhetoric any more.

EDIT: I hasten to repeat that I mean no insult by the above. You wrote an excellent article, Rumraket.

No worries I got your point, and I agree. ID is pretty much dead, what's left of it are the most deluded lunatics and die-hards who won't ever be convinced by anything. The wingnut fringe of the fringe.

Rumraket wrote:
No worries I got your point, and I agree. ID is pretty much dead, what's left of it are the most deluded lunatics and die-hards who won't ever be convinced by anything. The wingnut fringe of the fringe.

Now if only creationism would go with it. Unfortunately, they seem to be a bit more persistent

i wanted to bash my head on the keyboard when I saw that someone called Mung equated plant breeders doing Mendelian level crossbreeding of corn with sophisticated intragenomic gene therapy with the intent to manipulate ion channels which had yet to be discovered.

Shameless plug: there is an exciting new gene therapy for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. But its at the lab rat stage.