Epilogue on Dr. Meyer’s Texas Testimony: Stephen Meyer Demolishes Darwinist Personal Attacks

AUSTIN, TX–As I noted in my other blog post on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s testimony today before the Texas State Board of Education, you can always tell a strength of a person’s position based upon the arguments they make. In this regard, Texas Darwinists apparently scripted 2 questions for hostile Texas State Board of Education members to ask Dr. Meyer. Both questions were asked by Board Member Bob Craig and dealt with, you guessed it, personal attacks on Dr. Meyer. The first question the Texas Darwinists asked was whether Dr. Meyer has a Ph.D. in biology. No, Dr. Meyer answered, he merely holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and History of Science from Cambridge University that focused on the history of Read More ›

Texas Debate Update: Stephen Meyer Demolishes Eugenie Scott’s One Argument

I’m posting the following report for Casey Luskin, who is currently in Texas at the expert hearing before the Texas State Board of Education. AUSTIN, TX—The NCSE and their friends at the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) are here in Texas and they have one main argument. Or maybe two. The first argument basically says this: Don’t listen to any of these guys because they’re creationists. Creationists. Creationists. Creationists.Creationists. Did I mention that they’re just creationists? The logical fallacies and falsehoods in this short sound-byte argument are legion. They include: motive-mongering, false premise, the genetic fallacy, and perhaps most of all hypocrisy. As Meyer testified, he fully accepts a billions of years old earth. He doesn’t fit Eugenie Scott’s “creationist” mold. Read More ›

How Kenneth Miller Used Smoke-and-Mirrors to Misrepresent Michael Behe on the Irreducible Complexity of the Blood-Clotting Cascade (Part 3)

In Part 1, I showed how Ken Miller purported to refute Michael Behe’s arguments about the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade, but actually badly misrepresented Behe’s arguments to Judge Jones. In short, the purported knockout experiments (in the form comparative biochemistry) that Ken Miller cited to Judge Jones, where the blood-clotting cascade still worked in the absence of certain factors, dealt entirely with factors that Behe specifically did not claim were part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade. Behe explained this problem in Miller’s argument to Judge Jones, but apparently Behe’s testimony fell on deaf ears. In Part 2, I discussed how Miller might not have even refuted the more expansive arguments for irreducible complexity of Read More ›

Judge Jones and His Groupies

Earlier this month, the peer-reviewed science journal PloS Genetics published its latest earth-shaking contribution to the field of genetics: a personal interview with none other than Judge John Jones of Kitzmiller v. Dover fame. The interview was conducted by Jane Gitschier of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California San Francisco, who gushes over the Judge like a school-girl with a crush on her teacher. The non-scientist might be forgiven for thinking that a journal bearing a name like PLoS Genetics would restrict its articles to, well, genetics… or at least, to biology… or at the very least, to science. Not to worry! If the article extols Judge Jones, a lack of scientific content apparently is no Read More ›

Dover Plus Three: The More One Looks, the Less That’s There

Today marks the third anniversary of Judge John Jones’ attempt to ban science classroom discussions of intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. In the three years since Jones’ decision was announced, it has not worn well. Judge Jones’ supposedly devastating critique of intelligent design turned out to be cut and pasted (factual errors and all) from a document written by lawyers working with the ACLU. Law professors (including some who oppose intelligent design) have skewered Jones’ embarrassing judicial opinion as poorly argued and unpersuasive. And many of the alleged factual claims on which Judge Jones based his opinion have been refuted. In the meantime, public interest in intelligent design has continued to grow, as has support for academic Read More ›