Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Creationism as Occupational Hazard

At Panda's Thumb, Nick Matzke responds to some critiques of his article.

Article at Evo. Edu Outreach:

Part 1: Luskin claims I only “sneer” at the information argument:
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It was explicitly not an attempt to give detailed rebuttal to ID arguments. Instead, I referred readers to numerous other works. As I did in the very passage Luskin partially quotes as being a sneer:
An especially good example of silliness is the ID assertion that natural processes cannot create new genetic information. ID advocates have recently been pushing this line heavily as of late (Meyer 2009), even in the science standards of some states (see Matzke and Gross 2006, for discussion and refutation of the information argument)
Whoops! Just read the next line, Luskin!
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Part 3: Luskin cites a bunch of popular-science books by the likes of Sagan and Hawking making metaphysical-ish statements in their concluding pages. He then accuses me of using a double standard. Apparently I was supposed to review the history of everything anyone had ever said that was vaguely connected to science or evolution. But no, my article had a specific topic: creationists. If you want to learn something about creationists and why they think and act like they do, despite the scientific dubiousness of their arguments (which, as I said, I just assume for the purposes of this article; see my other articles for why creationist arguments are scientifically silly), then read my article. If you want to learn about evolutionists, read something else.

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