Yep, thanks for posting – I hadn’t seen it yet.
Jeanson seems extraordinarily angry. He can’t believe that we have read his work and still don’t agree with him.
He writes:
“Recall that MacMillan and colleagues quoted the YEC literature to (erroneously) claim that we agreed with their objections. Now that I’ve documented their misrepresentation of our position, MacMillan suddenly reverses course and says that I don’t grasp the essence of any of their objections.”
Now who’s misrepresenting? We never claimed that Jeanson and Lisle agreed with our objections. We pointed out, using their own words, that they were at least tangentially aware of the problem with their model. “Jeanson and Lisle (2016) recognize yet another challenge to the postcreationist paradigm.” We couldn’t very well claim they agreed with the objections in a 2020 paper when we were citing a 2016 paper.
It’s amusing that, rather than engaging with the substance of our criticisms, Jeanson repeatedly focuses on this one tiny issue. If it’s easier for him to make ad hominem attacks than to defend his model, maybe he should take a closer look at his model.
One of the central points in our paper is how the YEC speciation model has expanded over time. For example, YECs once claimed giraffes couldn’t have evolved from a short-necked ancestor, but now promote common giraffid-okapi ancestry. Jeanson attempts to refute this by quoting Linnaeus in the 1700s, who speculated that foxes and wolves could share a common ancestor…as if one example from before Darwin means there has been absolutely no change in the YEC position. “[I]n light of this evidence from Linnaeus, it is factually inaccurate to say that modern creationism is the ‘the culmination of a long creationist march toward accepting broader and broader evolutionary change.’” Spare me.
He also trumpets what he clearly thinks is a huge “gotcha”:
Right after saying that my predictions weren’t testable, he immediately goes on to claim that my position has been scientifically refuted. In other words, MacMillan’s argument assumes that my claims are scientifically testable (which is a prerequisite for claiming that my proposals have been scientifically refuted). Which is it? Does he think my claims are not scientific because they are not scientifically testable? Or are they scientifically testable, and have been refuted?
CHECKMATE ATHEISTS!
This is silliness. There are any number of nonsensical views which can be easily and readily disproven, yet ALSO lack falsifiable, verifiable, testable predictions. I regularly team up with one of Jeanson’s colleagues, Danny Faulkner, in poking fun at flat earthers in a debate group. Flat earthers love to claim (for unclear reasons) that there are no meteorite impact craters and all craters are simply volcanic domes. When asked if they can provide evidence of this or make any testable prediction, they will hem and haw or spout more nonsense. The fact that their claim lacks any testable predictions doesn’t stop us from pointing out the numerous reasons why impact craters are decidedly NOT volcanic domes. In the same way, Jeanson’s failure to produce any verifiable, testable predictions to validate his model does not preclude someone like @evograd from pointing out all the ways Jeanson’s model fails.
Jeanson continues:
[W]hen I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, a philosophy professor from UW–Madison came to campus to give a lecture on the creation/evolution issue. He cited the two main objections to creationism—that (1) creationism wasn’t science because it wasn’t scientifically testable, and that (2) creationism had been tested and scientifically refuted. The professor chided his colleagues for this logically contradictory position, pointing out that both claims cannot be true at the same time. He concluded his lecture by adopting the first position—claiming that creationism isn’t science because it isn’t testable.
Guess what – it can be both! YEC is ultimately untestable because it is based on faith and commitment to ideology, not on evidence. Yet we can show with ease that any number of the models proposed by YEC fail miserably.
You’ll notice that he doesn’t even attempt to address our fundamental objection:
MacMillan then concludes his article…
[…] Creationists have drawn similar conclusions about ancestry — first insisting that each species was a unique creation, then arguing that all species within each genus constitute a single kind, then raising “kind” to the level of the family or even the order. Why stop there? If they can accept that cattle, sheep, giraffes, and deer all evolved from a common ancestor, why not include horses, pigs, and rhinoceroses as well? What is stopping them from proposing a “caniform kind” including dogs, bears, badgers, and seals, or from simply proposing a “carnivoran kind” that adds cats, hyenas, and mongooses?
The YEC answers to his questions have, of course, been published in the paper that MacMillan has repeatedly misrepresented.
No, they were not. Their “answer” is to simply claim: “the major fraction of the potential for each ‘kind’ to speciate was hard-wired into each ‘kind’ from the start, implying that changing one ‘kind’ into another would require dramatic genotypic rewiring of a creature.” This still misses the point (I will not be so discourteous as to speculate on whether the point has been missed inadvertently or deliberately). The question is not “Why can’t one ‘kind’ change into another?” but rather “Why can’t any possible grouping be part of the same ‘kind’ in the first place?” This is the question Jeanson either fails to answer or fails to grasp.