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Monday, March 24, 2008

Wells Takes a Rain Check on Apology

 
The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution.

Evolution News & Views
I challenged Jonathan Wells to agree to a simple statement that, I believe, might reflect his true beliefs about evolution [A Challenge to Jonathan Wells].

In one of the biggest surprises of the 21st century (not!) Wells has backed off [What’s in a Word?].
Darn. I guess I’ll have to take a rain check on that apology – because I don’t agree with this – and not just because Maurice et al. (2008) are cited incorrectly. Here’s why.

"Evolution" has many meanings. It can mean simply "change over time." The present is different from the past. The cosmos evolves. Technology evolves. No sane person denies evolution in this sense.
Biological evolution never means just change over time, but that's not the real problem with Wells' post. You're going to have to scoot on over to Evolution News & Views and read the whole thing.

I can't make head nor tail of it. I wonder if Wells actually thinks it makes sense?

John Pieret takes on the task of dissecting the Wells definition of evolution on Thoughts in a Haystack [Falling in the Wells]. He's a braver man that I.


6 comments :

Sigmund said...

I like the way he roundly defeats the notion of any new species developing in modern times by linking to his own book - which dishonestly states it has never happened!
Take that, materialists!
This encapsulates the entire matter.
We are dealing with two sides, one of which believes that it is OK to tell lies - for the greater good of discouraging people from straying off God's chosen path. The other side believes it is better to always tell the truth no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be.

John Pieret said...

I can't make head nor tail of it. I wonder if Wells actually thinks it makes sense?

He probably does ... in a "watch as I saw this woman in half" kind of way. He distracts his target audience's attention by pandering to the macroevolution / microevolution misunderstanding already instilled by "creation scientists," pulls a quote mine out of his hat, palms a petitio principii in the form of a "definition" of "Darwinism" that assumes his claim that science is just nasty philosophical materialism and, presto chango, the development of bacterial resistence to drugs is not evidence for evolution.

And his audience goes home amazed.

Doppelganger said...

Wells is pathetic.

Several years ago, he (or perhaps Paul Nelson) was participating via an intermediary on a discussion board I used to frequent. He trotted out the usual fluff about how phylogenetic trees could be rigged by an investigator to produce whatever they wanted them to. So, I offered a challenge - I would send him one of my datasets with the species' names removed, all gaps removed, their order in the dataset scrambled, etc., and he could produce an alignment and run an analysis and we could see if my trees matched his.

I sent the datafile, and he replied that he'd get to it if he had time.

That was about 5 years ago. I still have the list of species and the number code I gave them hanging on a bulletin board above my desk.

These charlatans are AFRAID to see if their claims have merit, because deep down, I think they know that they don't.

Anonymous said...

He's moving the goal posts. That was a very wordy way of saying, "But it's still a bacterium!"

anthony022071 said...

Larry said: < "Biological evolution never means just change over time, but that's not the real problem with Wells' post. You're going to have to scoot on over to Evolution News & Views and read the whole thing.

I can't make head nor tail of it. I wonder if Wells actually thinks it makes sense?" >

Did you ask him specifically for a definition of biological evolution or just evolution?

How can you not understand that the word evolution originally means change that takes place over time?

anthony022071 said...

Doppelganger said: < "Several years ago, he (or perhaps Paul Nelson) was participating via an intermediary on a discussion board I used to frequent. He trotted out the usual fluff about how phylogenetic trees could be rigged by an investigator to produce whatever they wanted them to. So, I offered a challenge - I would send him one of my datasets with the species' names removed, all gaps removed, their order in the dataset scrambled, etc., and he could produce an alignment and run an analysis and we could see if my trees matched his." >


How would this challenge have proven anything? He would have been working in ignorance of your own procedure or rigging process. How could anyone possibly match your results when you give them a dataset in a scrambled form and with information missing from it? They would have to be clairvoyant.