I’m not actually familiar with Lane’s writing. Perhaps @Eddie would care to summarize the exact processes and mechanisms to which Lane attributes common descent. Based on “Eddie’s” readings of Lane’s writing, of course.
Your claims are based on near-ignorance of Denton’s thought. And your interpretation of that moment in the video is forced, and I reject it.
Nothing is stopping you from reading him. Look at the title here: Denton’s argument “by himself” – not “mediated through Eddie”. If you really want to know what he thinks, you’ll read what he has written.
Someday Mercer may contribute something to these discussions beside pedantry, but I’m not holding my breath. (In the meantime, I notice that Mercer has no articles in the Encyclopedia.)
Eddie, the point is your lack of understanding of how academic publishing works.
I was busy with much higher-impact publications in 2002. You also might notice that Denton has no Cell papers featured on the cover.
That makes a lot of sense for the time; Denton was writing about protein folds from his Platonic perspective at that time. He co-published a “Concepts” piece in Nature in '01 and a similar paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in '02. I don’t think those Platonic perspectives had much (or any) impact but he was an obvious choice to write about protein folds wrt evolution in 2002.
I’m not so keen to join the rest of this conversation except to note FWIW I wrote about Nature’s Destiny many years ago. The book is a modern rehash of a much older book about fine tuning, and it’s of little scholarly value. But I reject the ad hominem nature of some of the comments about Denton in this thread. It is entirely fair IMO to criticize him for being affiliated with the DI but it’s not so reasonable to paint him as a kook, which he would have to be to doubt common descent.
3 Likes
So apparently Denton is such an incapable communicator that if one watches a 45 minute lecture in which he summarizes this thoughts, one nonetheless remains near-ignorant of his thoughts.
If that’s the case, why to you keep recommending we read books from this goof?
Do you also withdraw your earlier claim that this video provides a “a good summary of main themes in his recent books?” Or is this just another case where you will just stoop to making whatever insult comes to mind, even at the cost of contradicting your own thoughts on a matter?
2 Likes
Which Encyclopedia of Evolution, and which chapter did he write? Genuinely curious.
1 Like
Nothing is stopping you from giving an example of his problems. But as always you’re afraid to discuss the substance of any ID stuff. It’s always “read his book” but followed up by “but don’t ever talk to me about it”.
2 Likes
There are hundreds of entries in the volume(s) so this is probably just a few pages, but I can’t find a TOC anywhere.
Yeah, @Eddie connected me with his previous post talking about this entry (thanks, Eddie). It’s a couple of pages plus bibliography. For an article on protein folding, it spends very little time on, well, protein folding. The concluding paragraph:
1 Like
That edited volume doesn’t seem to have been edited.
3 Likes
Hoo boy, I wish that was surprising but Nature’s Destiny is similarly vapid. Oh well.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.