If you think that I am suggesting that these two paragraphs of continuous and outrageous lies contain errors, you are mistaken. There’s no error here – only deliberate lying. Surely you do not think Wells is so incompetent as to actually believe this!
You were looking for “good points,” though, so here’s another:
It’s often said that one of the things creationists don’t understand is the value of consilience – of the convergence of multiple lines of evidence supporting evolutionary theory. I think that it’s very clear, in reading The Design of Life, that Dembski and Wells DO understand consilience. They’ve realized that simply lying about one topic isn’t enough, because topics within evolutionary biology interrrelate.
So, take the mammalian jaw business. Alone, this would be an outrageous lie, but it would lack consilience. So Dembski and Wells, understanding the value of consilience, lie about related topics. So, for example, there is a wholly outrageous treatment of evo-devo, the subject which would best help explain how genetic changes accounting for the differential development of the jaw in mammals and in reptiles (and in stem mammals) can have done the work. After a thorough hatchet job, Dembski and Wells ask the question:
Why, then does the view that genetic programs control development continue to be so popular?
Um…because they do? Is that a good answer? Not for Dembski and Wells, of course. But you can see here that they DO, contrary to many accusations, understand consilience. Lying about how the mammalian jaw evolved should depend not merely upon lies about the fossil record and about comparative anatomy, but also upon lies about evo-devo, and Dembski and Wells are fully up to the task.
But, as K-Tel famously said, “wait, there’s more.” Consilience shouldn’t stop with just a pair, so if you buy those lies, we’ll throw in a third lie for a small handling charge.
Even without evo-devo, homology’s a huge problem for ID Creationism. So, among other dishonest assaults upon the subject of homology, Dembski and Wells turn to another old creationist saw: Haeckel’s embryos. Knowing that, in the unlikely event that one of their readers should pick up an actual science book, that reader is likely to learn that the detachment of the ossicles in our stem-mammal ancestors is recapitulated in development of a mammalian embryo, Dembski and Wells pretend that our entire understanding of embryology is dependent upon Haeckel’s drawings and that recapitulation in the real, observed sense is the same as recapitulation in the “biogenic law” sense:
In summary, although biologists have known for over a century that recapitulation doesn’t fit the evidence and although it was supposedly discarded in the 1920s, to this day recapitulation distorts our perceptions of embryos. Furthermore, although biologists have known for over a century that Haeckel’s drawings are fakes and that the earliest stages in vertebrate development are not hte most similar, textbooks continue to use those drawings (or carefully selected but misleading photos) to argue that Darwin’s theory rests on embryological evidence. Recapitulation forces the evidence of embryology into the mold of Darwinian evolutionary theory. In so doing, recapitulation distorts our understanding of both embryology and evolution.
Consilience. E.O. Wilson wrote about it. Biologists have, again and again, pointed to the convergence of multiple lines of evidence for evolution. And Dembski and Wells, to their credit, got the memo. They realized that it was not enough to be dishonest in one area – this type of snake-oil sale requires dishonesty that is comprehensive and multidisciplinary.