Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Progress notes: Larry Moran won’t noview Steve Meyer’s book …

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Darwin's Doubt

… he just won’t review it. Well, that’s an improvement on the practice of others, for sure. That is, he has read it but won’t review it, rather than reviewing what he hasn’t read (a practice we here call noviewing).

Interestingly, he notes,

I’ve drawn a little red circle around the part of this tree that Stephen Meyer discusses in Darwin’s Doubt. It’s the evolution of animals and, in particular the early fossil evidence of multicellular animals. Most of these appear rather suddenly in the fossil record during the Cambrian (about 530 million years ago). Scientists have long been puzzled about this rapid evolution of complex animals and there are many hypotheses that attempt to account for it. In fact, there’s a recent book by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine that summarizes the science behind The Cambrian Explosion. It all seems quite reasonable to me.1 I don’t know exactly why complex animals evolved so rapidly but I don’t see any reason to doubt the facts of evolution and I don’t see any reason to propose that God must have been responsible for this little bit of the tree of life.

Laurence A. MoranMoran’s regular readers will doubtless fall for this fallacy: It’s only a little bit, so it doesn’t matter. In reality, the “little bit” of a problem is typically the key to what’s wrong with the big picture. I (O’Leary for News) haven’t read Meyer’s book yet, so I don’t know if Meyer drags God into it, but really, he hardly needs to in order to demonstrate that the Cambrian is an even bigger problem now for conventional Darwinian evolution now than it was when Darwin first worried about it, ironically blaming the incomplete fossil record. .

Comments
btw, Joe F. is the author of "Inferring Phylogenies." One wonders whether Alan has read that either. My bet is no, he hasn't.Mung
September 8, 2013
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Alan Fox:
No I haven’t read it. But shall we discuss the phylogenetics?
Alan would do well to emulate Joe Felsenstein, who thought it better to not discuss something he had not read. It's pretty darned amazing how few "skeptics" at "The Skeptical Zone" have read the book, or even intend to read the book. Which sort of "skeptic" are you Alan?Mung
September 8, 2013
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Here is a rather unique review of Darwin's Doubt by someone who actually read it and understood the problems it presents for Darwinian 'just so' explanations: Darwin's Doubt: Spoken Word - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywPJmFqrqhMbornagain77
September 7, 2013
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Larry Moran says this about they way Douglas Erwin and James Valentine summarize the science behind The Cambrian Explosion in their recent book. "It all seems quite reasonable to me."
So there you have his unbiased opinion! And with that simple statement, he avoids having to interact with Meyer's whole book.tjguy
September 7, 2013
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Cantor, I think you are exactly right, but at least Ptolemaic astronomy was relatively rigorous and could make predictions. Darwinism can't do that.Collin
September 6, 2013
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At last! The Elephant in the room. Let's hear it for "Darwin's Doubt"! No I haven't read it. But shall we discuss the phylogenetics?Alan Fox
September 6, 2013
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In reality, the “little bit” of a problem is typically the key to what’s wrong with the big picture.
The following come to mind It's only a "little bit" of precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit. The coincidence counts in a Bell experiment differ only a "little bit" from the prediction of classical physics.cantor
September 6, 2013
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