Is there any merit to the idea he mentioned ?

No. It smelled of someone thinking that Bill and other IDers wouldn’t see it as fraudulent.

If there are high mutation rates in observed living organisms yet high survival rates, an IDer would presume error correction first, not some sort of intelligent intervention at every step of the way.

What was proposed was a mockery of ID theory. I posits intelligence is intervening in each step of life. Pretty insulting.

I am impressed by the high-tech expertise employed in tracing the origin of this tale.

For those of us who cannot reliably debug their own computers, there is another system that works reasonably well and can be used in a pinch:

“Never believe anyone who gives you no real information to validate.”

Their story may be true or false, … but who knows? You have nothing to go on.

ALWAYS red flag a story where all the relevant information has conveniently disappeared. Doesn’t matter how or why. There is no non-fiction story! That’s all you need to know.

Compare this distressing tale with, say, Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, Bill Dembski, John Davison, and such, who can point to actual people, correspondence, attacks in the media, et cetera, that peg a narrative to verifiable events to a timebound reality.

Interpretations may differ, but the fact that SOMETHING happened is not in dispute.

We don’t have that here, so let’s turn to other, verifiable matters.

Is there any merit to the idea he mentioned ? Even if the guy is a troll and the whole thing is a stunt, perhaps there is something to the idea being advanced.

He claims:

What’s interesting here is that, despite not being able to confirm anything in the e-mail, Dembski posts it, albeit with the name of the university and professor removed.

So?

While he cant prove anything specific, Dembski obviously feels that hints of bad actions by “scientific materialists” are useful for the cause. On the other hand, if the e-mail is a fake and a setup to get Dembski in trouble, it’s also a plot by the “scientific materialists”!

Well, it’s either one or the other.

The shills at echo chamber that is Uncommon Descent seem to think it’s real and are engaging in some amateur detective work. Dembski is unsure.

Actually the consensus here is that it is likely a setup albeit nobody’s claiming certain knowledge. Maybe that’s the difference between us and the Darwinists. When we don’t know something we don’t pretend we do.

http://scienceblogs.com/strang.....scists.php

Best regards,
apollo230

If he is a coder then it’s hard to believe that the whole project is done in just one PC. I don’t believe this guy does not own a PC at home. When a coder is busy with a sophisticated job it’s very likley for him to continue the work at home overnight. With USB disks making a backup is extremely easy and since he’s telling that he has moved his work from his lab to professor’s PC, there must an external media like a USB flash disk that he used to carry the source code. Even if you delete files from a HDD, there are some tools to partially or fully recover the deleted files. Moreover, he doesn’t say anything about the programming tool or the computer language he used to code his model.

Will the Tor network even route a packet through a different continent?

I don’t know of any reason it wouldn’t. There are no continents on the internet — only IP addresses.