Over at Evolution News & Views, David Berlinski comments on Nick Matzke, suspected noviewer of Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt:
Nick Matzke has written a critique of Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt. Having for years defended Darwin’s theory as an employee of the National Center for Scientific Education, he has determined to learn something about the theory as a graduate student at the University of California, an undertaking in the right spirit but the wrong order. Would that he had done things the other way around. His animadversions are written with all of the ebullience of a man sure enough of his conclusions not to worry overmuch about his arguments. They are wrong in the small, wrong in the large, and wrong all around. A pity. The Darwinian establishment is hardly without resources of its own, and had Matzke devoted more thought to his critique, he might have spared us the embarrassment of improving his arguments before rejecting his conclusions. More.
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham at The Battlefield
Well, Matzke never has been one to let the actual facts stand in his way. He studiously avoids the actual arguments of those with whom he disagrees and, as Berlinski so cleverly points out, he does the same with the actual arguments of those with whom he supposedly agrees. Kinda makes you wonder…
Who’s Nick Matzke?
KRock:
I’m sure that your excellent question is one that would be asked by about 80% of the biologists in the USA and about 98% of biologists worldwide.
Ah, Berlinski! 🙂
Who’s Nick Matzke? A precious source of inspiration for Berlinski, of course!
It’s no small merit…
That was an elegantly written dismissal of Matzke’s review.
Matzke only admits to reading the first 6-7 chapters which primarily dealt with the fossil record and the various trees of life.
There is a lot of interesting stuff about how one develops a family tree that is in Meyer’s book and how the various ways conflicts with each other. We have not heard the last of this on just who is the most accurate way and whose analysis is most in sync with the published results or if it all comes down to whose opinion you want to accept.
The tree of life is squishy but the fossil record is not.
jerry
The fossil record is not squishy but its not moving either.
Its dead as a dodo in saying anything other then what it says.
It says nothing about relatives or innate ability/lack of it of biological changing.
Its people connecting it to relatives that tells a story HOWEVER the evidence of the relatives is entirely based on non biological sources. In short without the geology dead as a dodo.
I say if biology doesn’t establish the relatives then the dodo is still dead.