Top three in January (here), February here), March here.)
kairosfocus: Oldies but baddies — AF repeats NCSE’s eight challenges to ID (from ten years ago):
AF:
I note on points re your list of eight challenges.
This gets tiresomely repetitive, in a pattern of refusal to be answerable to adequate evidence, on the part of too many objectors to design theory:
>>1 Publish a mathematically rigorous definition of CSI>>
It has long since been shown, objections and censorship games notwithstanding, that reasonable quantitative metrics for FSCO/I and so for CSI, can be built and have been built. Indeed Durston et al have used such to provide a published list of values for 15 protein families.
No wonder some people were incensed when Durston got a degree in biophysics. Forty bluffs shot to Hull.
Barry Arrington: Posted without Commentary:
Update: When I saw the quote originally posted here, I researched it and found an attribution to a source. (The Birth Control Review of 1933-34). It turns out that attribution was mistaken. For posting an inaccurate quotation I apologize. That said, the general views expressed in the quotation were in fact held by Margaret Sanger. I replace the original post with this from Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”:
Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” …
The rest is pretty grim reading. I did an extended review of Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism a while back, which may be useful for context.
DennisJones: Michael Behe on the Witness Stand:
Those who reject ID Theory and dislike Michael Behe emphasize that since Behe is the one making the claim that the immune system is Irreducibly Complex, then Behe owns the burden to maintain a level of knowledge as what other scientists write on the subject. It should be noted that there indeed has been a wealth of research on the immune system and the collective whole of the papers published gives us a picture of how the immune system evolved. But, the point that Behe made was there is very little knowledge available, if any, as to how the immune system first arose.
The burden was on the ACLU attorneys representing Kitzmiller to cure the defects of foundation and relevance. But, they never did. But, somehow anti-ID antagonists spin this around to make it look like somehow Behe was in the wrong here, which is entirely unfounded.
Not sure it matters, actually. In the clash of competing wishful speculations around the immune system’s origin, “plausible” is the benchmark, and contradictory plausibilities are just fine.