Barnes: The Arguments for Creationism and the Arguments for Evolution

Joshua, the webpages at the URLs you provided would not have met the criterion for inclusion in our study. We were looking for webpages that had as a primary goal listing reasons for the truth of either evolution, ID, or creationism.

The first web page you listed was dedicated mainly to providing hyper links to content on other pages. The second web page you listed was primarily dedicated to addressing a narrow issue regarding something you had written and the topic chloroquine resistance. The third web page you listed is narrowly focused on the topic proteins. The fourth page you listed was primarily dedicated to criticizing some choices made by Coyne.

Our criterion for including web pages in our sample is spelled out in some detail in the original journal article. We had an algorithm for including/excluding web pages, and we stuck to it. You can argue that our algorithm was terrible, but I am at least happy that we stuck to the algorithm we chose, and we accurately described that algorithm in the original paper.

You wrote: “It would be interesting to do a study that samples some articles from ENV. I’ve been thinking of doing my own textual analysis of their work too. If that is interesting to you, I could use a sociologist collaborator on it.”

Alas, this type of textual analysis is quite time consuming and I don’t plan on starting any new content analysis studies. I have a number of additional content analysis studies that I have completed (only one of which has anything to do with origins). Once I get those published, I hope to leave content analysis behind. General human reasoning will, I hope, become the focus of my research over the next decade. I do wish you luck if you jump into that field. If you need some tips on methodology books or you need copies of my coding rubrics, I will be happy to provide them.

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Curtis, the urls I used are not included in the article. Due to link rot, quite a few of those urls might not work any longer. I do have a copy of the text (and urls) of all 72 web documents in 3 largish pdf files. If you want these, I would be happy to send them to you.

Joshua, I just emailed you the text of all our source websites.

Thanks. I appreciate your clarifications here. I did not mean to criticize your work. I was just trying to understand your scope and the coding you used.

If it isn’t too much trouble, I would be quite interested in the pdf files. I’ll send my email in a private message.