Darwinists frequently employ the debating device that I call “Desperate Distractions.” This occurs when the Darwinist has lost the debate beyond any hope, and instead of admitting they have lost, the Darwinist continues to throw mud at the wall to see if anything will stick. Apparently, their determination never to cede a micro-millimeter impels them to continue to post even the most outrageous foolishness rather than be seen as ceding the field. I suppose they believe that as long as they continue to respond nobody will notice they have lost. Our example of this debating device is drawn from a comment posted by a Darwinist defending Jeffrey Shallit, who ran a string of gibberish through a compression program and then Read More ›

Over at The “Skeptical” Zone they continue to be skeptical about literally everything; everything that is except the unquestioned verities of the scientific and cultural establishment. As I periodically do, I made a run though their last few months’ of postings. The denizens of the Zone are if nothing else impressive in their consistency. As usual, I was unable to find a single word in a single post that would make the occupants of the average faculty lounge mildly uncomfortable. Far less did I find anything even remotely “skeptical” of or a challenge to conventional wisdom or established ideas. Could it be that the folks over at the Zone don’t know what the word “skeptical” actually means? A perusal of Read More ›

One of the Darwinists’ favorite tricks is known as “moving the goalpost.” The essence of this trick is deflecting away from having been defeated in a debate by pretending the debate was about something else. Thus, if the ID proponent meets a Darwinist’s challenge with respect to issue X, the Darwinist will pretend the issue was something else and say “Ah hah, you utterly failed to address issue Y,” thereby deflecting from the fact that the Darwinist has just lost with respect to issue X. In the following example, a Darwinist insisted that “survival of the fittest” was not central to Darwinian theory. The ID proponent cited a prominent Darwinist (Stephen Jay Gould) for the proposition that “survival of the Read More ›

As so often is the case, one of Eric Anderson’s comments got me to thinking. Here it is: in those extremely rare cases when we know what actually caused the differential survival, we can point to the actual cause without ever invoking a label of “natural selection” to help explain the process. And in those cases in which we don’t know what actually caused the differential survival, attaching a label of “natural selection” does not help us get any closer to an explanation. Indeed, more often than not it obscures. I decided to test this. As Michael Behe discussed extensively in The Edge of Evolution, we know what causes Plasmodium to develop antibiotic resistance. Chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium is due Read More ›

We’ve all laughed at the naive “turtles all the way down” story. What follows is all Eric Anderson’s “randomness all the way down” story: [WD writes:] I’m saying the non-random survival . . . It is pretty much randomness all the way down. How did the particular particle interact with the copying mechanism to cause a mutation? How did that particular mutation end up interacting in the organism to produce an effect? What result did that have in that particular organism, as opposed to another? How did that particular mutation get spread in the population? What environmental factor happened to come along after the mutation that resulted in it making a difference? Which organism happened to be on a high Read More ›