Yes, that’s possible. Oddly, though it’s the subtitle of the book, I have yet to find a passage where he says, “yo, look, here are the three discoveries I’m talkin’ about.”
As it often is with this stuff, he dances around a lot. One minute it’s “where’d all this chemistry come from,” and the next it’s “yeah, well, but even if you DID explain where all this chemistry comes from, where’s the INFORMATION come from? Nyaaah, nyaah!” It’s the sort of argument that could only make sense to someone who was already a DI True Believer.
Well, at least Thinking about Evolution had a source for some (though not all) of their claims, even though the sources didn’t actually support the claims.
…and it would have been more in Meyer’s usual pattern of things to have produced a large number of citations, all buried in endnotes, none of which supported the claim but which would enable his supporters to enthusiastically declare how thoroughly all this is supported by citation to the scientific literature.
It seemed to me, in reading the book, that there were four, not three, subjects on which Meyer focused. But what I forgot was that since creationists always get abiogenesis mixed up with evolution, Meyer would do likewise, and so my third and fourth items were, from his point of view, one and the same.
It’s sort of funny, though. His argument about evolution is the naive Axe-based thing, but his argument against abiogenesis can’t bloody well be based on the non-availability of mutational opportunity in a DNA-based world, when the issue is how life got started in the first place.
“Information” is pretty much the ID Creationist’s version of “elan vital.” And that obsession of theirs has always seemed comical to me. When I first started to engage in discussion over this sort of thing, I was surprised, time and again, to run into ID Creationists who would introduce the topic by talking about the things Darwin couldn’t have known. If you’d asked me what I thought about “things Darwin couldn’t have known” I’d have said that it was astonishing what a good job he did of arriving at central insights in biological evolution without having access to a great deal of the data we now have that confirm it. But these people meant just the opposite: that “things Darwin couldn’t have known” spelled the death of evolutionary theory.
But, ask them what that is, and they’d say something painfully dim, usually along the lines that the discovery of DNA demonstrated that living things were full of “information” and that evolution couldn’t account for this.
After a number of unfortunate trips to the emergency room, I finally took the precaution of purchasing a forehead-slapping helmet, so that I could put it on before speaking to any ID creationists. I have cracked the front panel on a few of them, so violent is the force with which my palm reflexively flies up when they say things like this. The fact that these pseudo-arguments actually apparently get some traction with the world’s witless people really fills me with despair for humanity.
Alas, on the helmet. Though I have made the DI squeal a few times. I still laugh when I read the bizarre attempt by Jonathan Wells to rescue Marcos Eberlin after I pointed out that Eberlin didn’t know that homology and homoplasy weren’t synonyms.
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CLAVDIVS
(Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus)
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OK, you’re going to have to explain that one. Who is Marcos Eberlin, what did he say about homology/homoplasy, where did he say it, and what does Jonathan Wells have to do with it?
Marcos Eberlin, a chemist in Brazil, wrote a DI-published book called Foresight, in which he offered the low-rent version of Behe’s argument. My review of it is here:
In that review I commented on a few mind-roasting things said by Eberlin, including this:
“As Aaron Ellison and Nicholas Gotelli wrote, Charles Darwin pioneered the modern research of carnivorous plants with his 1875 work Insectivorous Plants. There Darwin applied his idea of homology (which modern evolutionary biologists call “homoplasy”)…”
I tried to find any way to construe this passage other than that Eberlin simply didn’t know the difference between homology and homoplasy. Couldn’t find one. Tried looking at the Ellison and Gotelli paper cited, to see if he’d misunderstood them. Tried looking at Darwin’s writings, likewise. But, no. Eberlin just couldn’t figure this out, evidently.
I think it annoys them that these reviews of mine keep rating so highly on Amazon. For Eberlin I have the “most helpful” rated review, and for Behe’s latest I am topped only by one highly credulous five-star review, so the doggoned things just keep getting seen by Amazon shoppers.
The intellectual and moral depravity of ID Creationism, I think, is best viewed by seeing this type of dreck: the lowest and worst garbage the DI is willing to put its name to. When the deficiencies of a Behe are being debated, it has to be remembered that, bad as that is, it’s absolutely the best and brightest of the ID literature and that the only answer to how low the DI will go is that it’s turtles all the way down.
This isn’t so cut-and-dried. “Homology” did once have a looser meaning, and “homoplasy” didn’t exist until Lankester defined it. Then again, I can find only two references to “homologous” in Insectivorous Plants, and both of them seem appropriate to the modern usage. Further, swim bladders in fish are generally considered homologous to lungs.
At the very least, Eberlin is guilty of bad writing, since Darwin’s idea of homology is not equivalent to homoplasy, though it might encompass homoplasy (but if it did, I would like to see evidence).
Well, I knew that, and that was precisely the sort of alternative understanding of what Eberlin was talking about that I was looking for. No usage of the word in Insectivorous Plants referred to homoplasy. I couldn’t square this with any view other than that Eberlin didn’t understand what these words mean.
And, bear in mind: this is the guy who wrote THIS passage, so knowledge of basic biology isn’t the sort of thing one should expect him to have:
“One might posit that cervix ripening was a selective advantage acquired over many generations of blind evolution, but notice the problem. If in the first-ever baby delivery, the cervix was not able to hold the baby in place and then open at the right time, this poor pioneer infant would have been expelled too early or been trapped inside the mother’s womb, leading to the death of both child and mother. No first baby, no chance for gradual evolution over many generations. Proper dilation at the right time of the cervix is a prerequisite for human reproduction.”
One of the odd things about Eberlin’s book was that it was, as I said, the low-rent version of Behe. Behe, despite his failings, does at least have a kind of coherent idea: that if we can find systems or structures for which no step-by-step process of evolution can be imagined, this poses a problem. Never mind how that doesn’t actually work out for Behe – the notion, at least, is based upon some intelligible reasoning. With Eberlin, the fact that any system contains interdependent elements is itself enough to settle the question. Don’t bother asking “could this have evolved in some fashion,” just fast-forward to “whooaaa! That’s waaaay too cool to have evolved! And, by the way, did you ever really LOOK at your hand? I mean, really LOOK at it?”
The result is that one cannot help but imagine someone reading this and thinking to himself, “gosh, if only there were some process – we could call it ‘evolution’ or something like that – by which things could change a bit over the history of living things, that would solve the problem.” That makes this some of the least-potent anti-evolution literature I think I have ever seen. Of course, since the object is only to convince the already-convinced, that may be good enough.