With enemies like Coyne, who needs friends?
| June 16, 2007 | Posted by scordova under Humor, Intelligent Design |
The attempted refutation of Behe’s work by the Darwinists has been so anemic that even the prominent names in the Darwinist blogsphere are beginning to lament the lackluster performance of their All-Stars against Michael Behe.
For example, Jason Rosenhouse, one of the most brilliant authors at PandasThumb, has decided to break ranks and openly criticize world-renowned Darwinist Jerry Coyne.
In Coyne Lays an Egg, Rosenhouse writes:
[Coyne's] review of [Behe's Edge of Evolution] EoE is a terrible piece of work. It’s all snideness and ridicule with very little in the way of good arguments. It really infuriates me when someone like Coyne is given such a terrific platform, several thousand words in a classy magazine like The New Republic, and then writes as if the whole project is beneath him.
….
Behe will have a good time lambasting Coyne for not reading very carefully.
In contrast, the NCSE is naively promoting Coyne’s terrible review here. Because Coyne’s review is so bad, can we be certain Coyne wasn’t the victim of copying one of the Sokal-type hoaxes which Bill Dembski is offering $200 prizes for? And has world-renowned Darwinist Sean Carroll already fallen prey to such a hoax (well, I not so seriously speculate on the possibility here anyway)?
But let’s not scold Rosenhouse for being too critical of his own Darwinist establishment. Recall Coyne himself has said here:
In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics
and here
if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits
and last but not least, when Coyne offered criticism of the evolutionary icon of peppered moths, he lamented here:
My own reaction [to the myth of the peppered moth icon] resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.
With enemies like Coyne, who needs friends?
17 Responses to With enemies like Coyne, who needs friends?
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Rosenhouse complains of Coyne:
Yet here is Rosenhouse’s commentary here and here:
I think Coyne’s fault is he’s been reading too much from the gang at PandasThumb lately…..
Coyne is clearly one of our agents. It’s a shame he’s now exposed.
The comments section there is a hoot. I especially love “Behe has insulted every scientist on the planet” – and the general calls to be as obnoxious and insulting as possible when dealing with ID proponents. In the name of reason and science, I’m sure.
Rosenhouse is a funny guy. He’s still trotting out the TTSS as a functional precursor for the flagellum long after it was pointed out that most scientists believe the TTSS appeared AFTER the flagellum, not before it. I wonder if Rosenhouse believes his grandmother descended from his mother? Maybe he watched “Terminator” too many times and believes living things can travel back in time to before they were born… good stuff!
Ironically,
Behe uses a Coyne quote in The Edge of Evolution in building his case against evo-devo, specifically against Sean Carroll’s book. Here is the quote Behe uses:
#4 DaveScott
Dave, and what about Rosenhouse’s articles against probabily arguments in ID?
http://www.csicop.org/intellig.....y-one.html
http://www.csicop.org/intellig.....y-one.html
It’s a long sequence of repetitions of the same flawed objections that every ID supporter has heard, and easily falsified, more and more times.
I have always been restrained in my criticisms of Rosenhouse because of his kindness and civility toward the IDEA club at JMU and his kind words of me (sometimes).
He attendended an joint IDEA/Campus Crusade event which I organized in 2004. He wrote of me:
He does make humorous comments. I recall onetime at his school when I was appraising him of my activities, he said, “Well, good luck”. But then, upon realizing his mistake in wishing me well he corrected himself and said, “but not too much luck.” We both laughed.
I think what you are seeing is the different way people behave in the blogosphere from the way they behave face-to-face. Something similar happens with mobile phones. You must have heard people in the street screaming things down their phone they would never say to someone in front of them.
This effect appears to happen whatever the beliefs or prestige of the protagonists. It is by now means confined to the ID debate. On the pro-ID side I note:
* Drawing funny faces of your opponents to make them look like comic book characters
* Adding fart noises to pictures of your opponents
* Publishing and promoting unsourced e-mails implying that a senior academic is a racist
I am sure I don’t need to help you find the examples on the anti-ID side.
#7
Let us remember this passage Salvador … “some modicum of respect”. Your arguments, your attitude to discuss fairly; all this would be nothing. Very instructive indeed.
It’s very laughable that such a statement come from one of the PT crew.
I don’t think Rosenhouse matters one way or the other; I would rather like to see this forum respond to the criticism of Behe we find at some of the links given at PT. It seems to me the case is not as clear cut as Bill or Sal are saying. Personally, I do not think Behe’s idea about ‘front loading’ holds water, a little thought on the subject ought to show that it just could not work. Behe has not shown any mechanism for preserving unused, useless DNA for untold millions of years.
Dizzy
Behe has not shown any mechanism for preserving unused, useless DNA for untold millions of years.
Maybe we’d know the mechanism if someone would look for it. We know now that that such a mechanism exists because we found thousands of sequences with no detectable biologic activity in non-coding DNA that were so well conserved for a hundred million years they can’t be told apart from functional sequences by any method other than deleting the sequences and seeing if the GM animal suffers any ill effects from the deletion.
I refer to the knockout experiment in mice which I blogged just yesterday here and six months ago here. Maybe if you kept up with the articles we post here you’d know about this.
Dizzy what if J Brown heard you talking like that?
Kairos said: “It’s very laughable that such a statement come from one of the PT crew.”
Such a statement is laughable coming from either the Pandas Thumb crew or the Uncommon Descent crew. Both sides (although definitely not all individuals on either sides) are frequently guilty of juvenile behavior.
#14
It’s a matter of % and PT scores are more and more higher …
For future searchers who come across this page while out Googling, here is Behe’s response to Coyne (Ruse and Carroll as well):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/.....TP938HTSPI
[...] in the schools” lobby, National Center for Science Education and Catholic Darwinist Ken Miller (see here and [...]