CeilingCat
Posts: 2363 Joined: Dec. 2007
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Having looked at VJ's latest screed (on a PC, not an iPad), I have to note approvingly that it has pictures of a butterfly, an artist's impression of the multiverse (or the Jovian system four and a half billion years ago - it's so hard to tell), a protein, a Scrabble™ board, a highly idealized picture of a flagellum, a highly idealized picture of a type III secretion system, a highly idealized to the point where it's completely blank picture of Ron Numbers, a fossil trilobite, a highly idealized drawing of whale evolution (attributed to "Johnathan M. and Uncommon Descent" with no clue to where he stole it from), a beaver shot (SFW), a humpbacked whale breaching (possibly from the sheer joy of being a highly evolved product of evolution), a Least Weasel along with a semi-latched reprint from a Douglas Axe article attacking a real scientist's paper, a panda that is either eating a piece of bamboo or possibly playing it like a flute (you laugh, but with God, all things are possible) and a fossil "Maiacetus, a whale in the Protocetid family."
And then another 4,056 further words of text. Don't try to tell me this is not a Major ID Article!
One thing does bother me a little bit. In the Doug Axe / Weasel quote, Axe refers to Dawkins' old Weasel program and notes that it is searching for this:
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Then he says that Dawkins claims that this:
WDLMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCOP
"is somehow manifestly more fit than this:"
WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCOP
"but I can’t imagine why it would be, unless the selector (like Dawkins) knows exactly where he wants to go with it. If he does… well, that’s called intelligent design."
Dr. Axe here continues the long ID/YEC tradition of not reading the parts of a paper that make their objections moot. In this case, Dawkins clearly states that he is illustrating the incredible speed advantage of cumulative selection vis-a-vis Creationist style "One fell swoop" selection. He further states that in order to clearly illustrate the difference, he's provided a fixed target so his demonstration can avoid chasing the shifting target of actual evolution.
Following a long ID/UD tradition, Dr. Torley does not get this either.
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