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Behe’s Critics in Cahoots?
Michael Behe has a new blog series up responding to Nick Matzke’s review of his book in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in three parts: Part 1Part 2Part 3 As Behe notes, this review of Edge of Evolution is a real doozy, “a tediously disdainful review of The Edge of Evolution which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones.” It’s only when we get to Part 3 of his response that Behe reveals the identity of the reviewer to be none other than Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE. Behe thinks this is worth mentioning:
Rebuttal to Paul Gross’ Review of The Edge of Evolution – Error #2: Failing to Stay Positive
[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] In Paul Gross’ review of The Edge of Evolution he wrongly claims Behe’s argument for design is merely a negative argument against evolution. Gross asserts that Behe argues for ID by “offer[ing] some claim that Darwinism is wrong, with the (unwarranted) conclusion that life is therefore the work of an intelligent agent.” (emphasis in original) This misrepresents Behe’s argument. Behe does not say that because Darwinian evolution has flaws, therefore intelligent design is proven correct. As Behe writes in the afterward to the new edition of Darwin’s Black Box: [I]rreducibly complex systems such as mousetraps and flagella serve both as Read More ›
Of Course Bruce Chapman Is Right
Former editor of Seattle Weekly Knute Berger saw the merit in Bruce Chapman’s recent blog post, Thank You, Dr. Watson, though, as he put it, I don’t agree with Chapman often, but he’s absolutely right that such thinking continues in scientific (and I would add corporate) circles. Despite our collective horror about the Holocaust — the extreme Nazi expression of eugenics — there is a general unwillingness to own up to the sorry legacy of eugenics in America and Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly sterilized, lobotomized, and institutionalized to “sanitize” society of the poor, disabled, gay, mentally ill, etc. A general sense of amnesia or an attitude that nothing we did was as bad as what Read More ›
The Cuckoo Ones Over Flew’s Nest
The New York Times has not covered any news that might damage Darwinism, at least not since a writer on its Science page a few years back acknowledged that some of the standard textbook proofs employed to bolster Darwin’s theory are false. (That reporter is now in Iraq.) Instead, The Times seeks out ways to anticipate and undermine any reports that could hurt the Darwinist cause. The New York Times, in truth, is in the news making business. Accordingly, Mark Oppenheimer apparently was dispatched by The Times magazine to debunk the new book co-authored by Antony Flew, the famous backsliding English atheist who has decided that there is a god, after all–some kind of god, anyhow, an “Aristotelian god” of Read More ›
Rebuttal to Paul Gross’s Review of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution – Error #1: A Calculation Is not “A Mere Guess”
[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] In 2005, Michael Behe published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Design for Living. Paul Gross has now reviewed Michael Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution in The New Criterion, using exactly the same title as Behe’s 2005 New York Times op-ed, accusing Behe of making so many mistakes that “it would need a book longer than The Edge to restate the model together with its already noticed (in print and online) errors and omissions.” Yet as I will recount in this four-part response, Dr. Gross’s review has many mistakes, and many of his key criticisms of Behe Read More ›