Here, Barry Arrington notes that MatthGrrl seems to think that specified complexity is a meaningful term if Leslie Orgel uses it to mean A, but not if Bill Dembski uses it to mean A.
This reminded me of something, couldn’t think what it was for a while, then remembered…
For a while, one heard the claim that ID advocates invented the Marx-Freud-Darwin triad of materialist influences evident in your Sunday Fishwrap.
That was an unlikely scenario in my experience because, in order to communicate with a broad audience from a minority position (which they apparently do if you believe the frantic screeds of the Darwin lobby), they must riff off an accepted cultural link.
Well, they did. Here it is, in a textbook written a person who, to the best of my knowledge was a thoroughgoing Darwin advocate at the time, Douglas J.Futuyma Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5:
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
So … it was okay when Futuyma said it, but not when some non-Darwinist did?
I wonder, will the Darwinists put out a dictionary specifying who may use what terminology? If so, will they attempt to incorporate it into enforced language laws? Perhaps that’s all they can do now.
(Not a joke. Never overlook the desperation of mediocrities, failing miserably, on the wrong side of history. And you think there is no such thing as language laws? Go here for rule by the language police.)