So, let’s recapitulate, as Haeckel would say.
I asked, back in message 28 whether anyone could say that this statement by Axe was consistent with competence and honesty:
“The current stance is that evolution was so successful that it perfected life to the point where modern forms no longer evolve, making the whole process even further removed from the category of observable phenomena.”
This statement is so absurd that when I had first given the quote, without cite, @swamidass reacted by asking for the citation and asking whether he’d really said it. It does have the feel of being some sort of hideous mischaracterization of Axe, mounted for the mere purpose of slander; but he really did say it.
To my astonishment, Giltil took up the challenge, and then Paul Nelson jumped in. The sum total of their efforts:
(1) Pierre-Paul Grasse, now dead 35 years, did not believe this, but did think evolution had slowed down.
(2) Some biologists have remarked that evolutionary rates can vary over time.
How many biologists claim that evolution has stopped? Zero. Not Tawfik, the only person whose work Axe cites on the point; not anyone at all. Not Grasse, not any of those cited by Nelson (including Gould, who actually was saying that some observed rates in modern creatures were FASTER than past rates).
Now, it might be possible – perhaps by draining the water from the biology department at Liberty University and seeing what jumps out – to find some relict creature somewhere which would make this claim. But that isn’t what Axe is claiming. Axe is claiming that this is “the current stance” of evolutionary biologists. This is obviously not only untrue, but flagrantly so.
Now, where does that leave Axe? He has attributed absurd views to his critics. He has published these misstatements to a popular audience that he knows will be unfamiliar with the biological consensus. He has, in the course of the same book, advised that audience that it need not trouble itself with technical details, because just “knowing” things like this and relying upon a religiously-driven intuition is enough to decide the issue.
We speak in law of the badges of fraud: one cannot usually prove dishonesty directly, because the only direct testimony to dishonesty is the admission of the fraudster himself. Here we have a false statement. It is not plausible that Axe thought it was true. Indeed, in the other occurrence of a similar version of the statement, he purports to be specifically characterizing the views of his critics, and names one such critic. He cannot be unaware that this statement is completely false as characterizing his critics, as characterizing the one critic he names, and as characterizing the stance of evolutionary biologists in general.
So, we have Axe’s actual knowledge of falsity. Any suggestion that Axe is not sufficiently competent in the English language to have fallen under the impresion that the statement is true is not credible.
We have knowledge of his audience. He knows his audience to be science-illiterate. He encourages this, the whole thesis of his book being that reliance upon unschooled intuition is better than book-larnin’. He knows that his audience does not know what the scientific consensus looks like, and that the one paper he cites, which is exactly against him, is paywalled so that even the rare ID reader who seeks to look it up will need to go to a university library to find it.
We have motivation. Axe is struggling to make ID appear to have scientific credibility. Showing that scientists have supposedly adopted absurd views in response to his supposedly compelling research would enhance Axe’s reputation among this audience while harming the reputation of the scientific community as a whole.
When every last pointer points to Axe’s dishonesty, what is left?