Evidence for the integrity of the Discovery Institute

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

No, not false. In the March 2019 discussion I did not say that a ribozyme was a protein.

I didn’t claim you did. You literally described Meyer’s blatant falsehood, easily concealing Nobel-winning evidence from incurious marks like you, as an “alleged error.” That’s clearly arguing about it.

It’s obvious even in Wikipedia:

Peptidyl transferase is an enzyme that catalyzes the addition of an amino acid residue in order to grow the polypeptide chain in protein synthesis.[3] It is located in the large ribosomal subunit, where it catalyzes the peptide bond formation.[4] It is composed entirely of RNA.

@Eddie

You claimed that I argued that a ribozyme was a protein for “months”, but I never did.

Nope. You argued about this particular falsehood for months, without the slightest attempt to verify it. That says everything about your commitment to scholarship. You danced around it for months before clearly restating Meyer’s lie.

@Eddie

You simply have the facts wrong.

Hilarious.

@Eddie

Either you are conflating two things (that I early on questioned your rejection of Meyer’s entire book based on an error on one page of it,

That’s false. You wrote,

@Eddie

…war whoops over Meyer’s alleged error on one page of a 500-page book…

Calling it “alleged” is clearly arguing about it. You also ignored all of the other misleading passages, on other pages, that reinforced it.

And another point regarding the DI’s lack of integrity: why have none of your idols corrected these blatantly false statements they’ve made in their books, as real, ethical scholars do?

Note that real scholarly corrections need to appear in the books or journals themselves, not hidden away on some web page.

Again, I’ll close with @sfmatheson’s response to your silly attempts to tout Meyer as having anything significant to say about the RNA World hypothesis:

@sfmatheson

@Eddie

@Mercer

The current catalyst does precisely that. It is a ribozyme. Therefore, that “materialistic” route clearly exists.

Only a limited catalytic capacity has been demonstrated for RNA. It’s a long, long way from being established that RNA catalysis explains origins. But then, speculation beyond the data has been evolutionary theory’s stock-in-trade since Darwin, who didn’t even know what the insides of a cell looked like or how inheritance worked, but was certain of his conclusions.

This is crudely and disgracefully dishonest. @Mercer is offering you the opportunity to learn about the RNA World, after showing you that you were deliberately and systematically misled. You have an opportunity to recover some integrity after yours was eroded, perhaps by your own weakness but maybe because you made the understandable mistake of trusting some like-minded scholars who you assumed would try to deserve that trust.

I think you have failed here, and I think you should reconsider your stance. You admitted to being mistaken, which should earn you praise and respect, that I will offer unconditionally right now. The next step should have been something like “okay, let me find out where I went wrong.” And ideally the next step would have been “I look forward to learning more.” You opted for a pitiful redirection and a blanket insult, aimed at science. Disgraceful. Reconsider.

@Art had already explained this to you months before, but you continued to dig. It’s the perfect case study for illustrating the DI’s (and its aggressively ignorant cheerleaders’) lack of integrity.