The record is pretty clear on Wells and Meyer continuing to support false claims which have been brought to their attention. To call this lying might not capture all the nuances of what may be going on. But it is much closer to the truth, IMHO, than to say they honestly believe they are still right.
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Thatâs a fair point.
However, the reason for thinking an author (DI or otherwise) is not worth reading might have to do with their track record in peer-reviewed publications, or lack thereof.
I think âlack of professional publicationsâ needs to be added to the list you compiled.
Clearly, this reason would not apply to all DI authors.
Best,
Chris
It appears that I successfully made you offer yourself at the top of the list of:
Iâd agree with you where Denton is concerned. But there are certainly cases where it IS fine. An example I gave to Shedinger (which was then deleted, whether at his urging or not I do not know, from the blog) was that if I recommended a book criticizing Christian belief to you, and upon opening it you found that the principal argument in it was that Jesus could not possibly have parted the Red Sea, you would immediately realize that a person whose misconceptions of what the Bible said were this severe could not possibly be the author of a worthwhile critique.
Such examples abound. There are paragraphs from Eberlinâs book, for example, one of which I cite in my Amazon review, which alone demonstrate that the authorâs competence in biology renders anything he may say quite useless. There is the statement in Shedingerâs book:
âThose who argue that a Darwinian microevolutionary process can account for the origin of higher taxa base their view on imagined scenarios, not documented evidence, such as when we are told that the bones of the reptilian jaw evolved into the bones of the mammalian inner ear.â
Thatâs it; game, set, match for the possibility that the man has written anything that anyone must take seriously.
Now, to be clear, I do not think anyone should write a book review on the basis of such a conclusion. He should find a table leg that needs propping, and put the book to use. But it is quite right to dismiss an author on the basis of 1% of his work, if that 1% is bad enough. The list of ID authors of whom this is not true is quite short. I insist on reading them anyhow, but I cannot be sure it enriches my life much.
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Iâve read far less than 1% of Dentonâs writings, and since you seem to have read more than that, perhaps you could answer the questions I raised in this thread below. Itâs now been closed, but no one who participated there seemed able to answer, even those who claimed to have read all of his books. So if you could answer here, that would be much appreciated:
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Aha! Here it is. It seems to have been in response to Dentonâs write-up at Evolution: A Theory in Crisis Revisited (Part Two of Three) | Articles | Inference: International Review of Science
Unedited, as originally written in 2018 in the discussion thread following my review of Leisolaâs Heretic:
Wow, that Denton link is pretty bad. Pan-adaptationism wedded to denialism makes a strange soup.
Whatâs sort of funny is that Denton actually does lay out some of the facts one needs in order to understand how things happened. Sure, nobody has a compelling rationale for why Acanthostega had eight digits rather than, say, seven, but thatâs not a puzzle that needs solving, particularly. In a world where almost no pan-adaptationists are left, nobodyâs really obsessed with why it had to be eight instead of seven, and in a world where the role of contingency is not denied by anyone, itâs not much of a question. Denton manages to gloss over more meaningful interpretations, though, such as the fact that it DOES show that some of the regulatory mechanisms we now see in tetrapod limbs werenât there. So we have novelty, a period of relatively unconstrained âexperimentation,â and a period of elaboration of the developmental mechanisms and, in the end, canalization of development so that constraints such as the five-digit pattern appear that werenât there before; and then, of course, adaptive radiation within that canalized formula. He manages to make it sound as though this is some sort of all-or-nothing proposition, when in fact limbs that were used in the earliest tetrapodomorphs to walk in the water presumably neednât have been able to do a lot of the things modern limbs do. Indeed, for such walking they had no strong need for some of the later developments, such as the specialization of digits. Even now some tetrapods donât have these needs, though some of their ancestors likely did have them.
He cites things as problems that are pretty obviously not: the similarity of the basic layouts of the digits to one another is just what one should expect if they spring from a common developmental program, but to him itâs a ânightmareâ requiring some sort of specific âDarwinianâ explanation, because the more derived forms of these digits in modern creatures have this common structure modified in various ways in various digits seen in various creatures. Again: development of a common architecture, followed by developmental elaborations in particular lineages, is what we should EXPECT to see. If the different requirements of different animals were met by radically different solutions, this would support different hypotheses; but canalization of development, followed by elaboration within the broad limits of developmental programs, is just what we see in the 400-million-year run from generalized ur-tetrapod to specialized tetrapod lifestyles.
He of course misuses sources, claiming, for example, that the paper by Yano and Tamura says that the disappearance of fin rays had to precede the development of the autopod, when Yano and Tamura in fact explicitly have the sequence the other way around. I havenât had time to look up all of his sources but would assume that itâs going to be more classic Denton.
Denton has formed a highly derived use, himself, of his own specialized appendages: he waves his arms and hollers how if we donât understand it all â why Acanthostega had eight digits, and exactly how each and every developmental novelty involved in the tetrapod limb occurred â then we understand nothing. It of course doesnât, and canât, work that way. Some questions are more obscure than others. Some questions are ill-suited to the particular forms of evidence we have access to. Some questions, such as exactly what the precise adaptive demand was that drove Acanthostega to eight digits, may actually just be lousy questions that carry invalid pan-adaptationist assumptions.
Itâs been thirty-two years, and now he has a followup book. But those thirty-two years of the evolutionary paradigm being âin crisisâ have led us to amazing insights some of which we could not have dreamed of having at the outset, and wave after wave of informative fossils. Dentonâs role, again presumably using his arms to make the âhaltâ gesture, is to attempt to stand athwart biology, yelling âstop!â
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Beyond that, however, looking to your earlier post: I havenât read a huge amount of Denton and havenât seen anything from him that made me think that not having read a huge amount of Denton is a bad thing. If he does think that there is some sort of way in which the environment so strongly urges organisms toward, for example, pentadactyly, that they wind up converging upon that solution despite having separate origins, despite other contingencies in their history and despite other pressures, I think thatâs pretty strange. Indeed, that actually sounds not so much âstructuralistâ to me as more like a really highly-deterministic version of evolution by natural selection: the environment WANTS you to have five digits, and it will get you there, by hook or by crook.
But any explanation along those lines that might have âkind ofâ worked in the pre-genetic era certainly falls apart today. Youâd see genomes with a high identity of function but low identity of sequence. Instead, we have a genomic picture which presents this verdict: that people trying to infer phylogeny from comparative morphology did a pretty doggoned good job.
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All the while, the mudskipper can easily count to 10 on just one limb. 
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Ha! Indeed. I will add this to my list of things to point out when someone claims that humans are the apex of the evolutionary process. How come we canât count to ten on one hand without going to binary encoding?
You canât speak for what I know. I know the ID people personally â I donât think you do, even if you have heard a few of them speaking live on occasion â and it is my judgment that on the whole they are not personally dishonest. They may have from time to time slipped into a bit of intellectual dishonesty in the heat of debate â but I have observed that in atheists, TEs, YECs, and everyone else in these debates as well, and more often in atheists than in ID proponents.
I donât excuse any proved cases of dishonesty. But I donât think they are as numerous as you think they are. You assume too often that no one could reasonably believe X, so if someone asserts X, they must have some dishonest motive. But of course in most cases the people we are talking about donât agree with you that it is unreasonable to believe X â they weigh the evidence differently, interpret data differently, reason differently.
If Meyer misreports a paper, I am not asking you to keep silent about this. If Meyer misinterprets what he reads in a paper, I am not asking you not to challenge his interpretation. But you should be very hesitant to impute dishonesty, as opposed to error or lack of understanding, to him â especially since, by the account you have given us, you are mostly an autodidact in science yourself, and not necessarily the best judge of Meyerâs understanding of scientific matters.
Would you like an example?
In the first, hardcover edition of Signature in the Cell, on page 107, Meyer had:
âSince information and improbability are inversely relatedâŚâ
He was informed by a reader of the book that he had made an error here. And if you look at the paperback edition of the book which came out a few months later, you will find, on page 107:
âSince information and probability are inversely relatedâŚâ
So Meyer is quite willing to correct factual errors akin to your dingo example.
Sure he may correct trivial mistakes and typos. He never corrects his brutal misunderstands and misrepresentations of actual scientific findings. There are dozens of websites documenting all the major scientific blunders Meyer made in Darwinâs Doubt. The fact he has never corrected a single one of those major screw-ups makes you think they werenât unintentional on Meyerâs part.
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Hee hee. Right. Puck canât judge Meyer because Puck is a scientific âautodidact.â
But Meyer writing book in which he denies the consensus findings of paleontologists and molecular biologists and developmetal biologists, among those of other scientific disciplines? âNo problem!â sez @Eddie.
Uh huh, right.
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I would think it would be embarrassing to you, however, to suggest that you do NOT know it. What I said was:
âYou would have me be dishonest; you would like me to hem and haw and say, well, when Meyer misstates Erwin thatâs just Meyerâs opinion, and another way of looking at it, donâcha know, when you and I both know that it is not.â
If you are not able to read that paper and understand that the statement by Meyer is not an opinion about whatâs in the paper and is not just another way of looking at it, well, thatâs too bad for you. I should not have presumed that you are capable of understanding that, and I do apologize profoundly for my overestimation of you.
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Ah, this always happens. Somebody insists that I should not point out when ID authors are being dishonest, and that the argument should be focused on the merits. I am sure that in the right circumstances he would also argue that the lofty credentials of those who think ID is hooey are irrelevant. But as soon as he figures out that somebodyâs knowledge of biology is not backed by a degree, heâs a big fan of qualifications and credentials.
Hereâs the thing. If you want to argue about merits, then argue about merits. But when it becomes evident that your side has been fudging the facts and â in this case â misrepresenting what the papers they cite actually say, DO expect that the honesty of people who both make misrepresentations and refuse to correct them will be put in question.
Patience is not an inexhaustible resource. After youâve been fooled by a con man, and he approaches you with a fresh rendition of the pigeon drop, you do not say, âwell, last time that ended badly. But the man does seem to have found a wallet, and Iâm going to see how this one turns out.â
When I turn to the primary scientific literature, I trust that literature. I trust Doug Erwin. If Doug Erwin cites a paper for a proposition, I expect that it supports the proposition for which it is cited. This trust is essential. Nobody can afford the time to look up every cite, and then look up every cite contained in those cites, and so on, drilling down through the entire corpus of the professional literature until the citations run out. Nobody should need to do so.
When men like Meyer make it absolutely clear that they stand outside of the ethical standards of science, thatâs fine â they can have the ethical standards that suit their character. But they cannot expect that, when they routinely misconstrue sources, they will be trusted the way Doug Erwin is trusted. It is absolutely astonishing what happens when one follows the citations in ID books. The misuse of sources is a consistent, reliable feature of this literature. Anyone can make a mistake. But when someone makes substantive, material âmistakesâ again and again and again, and never corrects them, in the service of views of the most questionable character, it becomes a bit ludicrous to think that any deference is owed to such a person.
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I agree with you that blunders of that sort would raise doubts about the competence of the author and might make it reasonable not to invest time reading his book. But it goes too far to say âcould not possiblyâŚâ because, while such blunders indicate that a whole book by such an author would probably be not very good, they donât establish that every single argument made in the book is invalid.
For example, Mercer here has made a big deal out of a vocabulary error supposedly made by Steve Meyer. Well, letâs say he made a vocabulary error, and letâs say itâs an important one that has consequences for the argument Meyer was making in that particular paragraph or even that particular chapters. Does that mean that every single argument in a 500-page book is automatically invalid? Does it even mean that the main thesis of the book is invalid? Neither of those things follows by any rule of logic. If Mercer believes that every conclusion Meyer draws in the book is false, he has to establish that, one by one; and if he believes that the entire argument of the book falls because of that one error, he has to show how the structure of the book depends on that statement. But Mercer has never done either of these. Heâs just griped â for 5 or 10 years now â about that one error, as if that error alone shows that Meyerâs entire book is wrong.
Anyhow, Iâm glad that you make the effort to read entire ID books before rejecting their arguments. That cannot be said of a good number of people who post here.
And the Miller example which was cited as a shining example of scientific honesty was a trivial mistake as well. The commenter was contrasting Meyer negatively with Miller and using the dingo example to illustrate the difference. But the example has no force, in the light of the information Iâve provided. Both men have corrected small scientific errors in their books in subsequent editions.
But only one of them would be willing to correct a large scientific error. Conclusion: the large errors in Meyer are not âerrorsâ in the sense in which honest people use the term.
By the way, is it fair to assume that you didnât even bother to look up the Erwin paper before declaring your faith that Meyer must have had a good reason for believing it said what it didnât? I would normally assume nobody would do something like that, but your rebuke at my suggesting that you understand the obvious has readjusted my assumptions.
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While Meyer has left his huge scientific blunders uncorrected. Like heâs more concerned with pushing his religious IDC position than he is with correctness or honesty.
Perhaps we should assume that he is profoundly incompetent, but that his incompetence just happens, by sheer bad luck, to always involve making pro-ID mistakes and to always involve not being able to figure out that heâs made them even when they are called specifically to his attention.
I do wonder, sometimes, however, whether this sort of supposition isnât more dishonouring than the accusation of dishonesty. At least dishonesty has some sort of craft to it; profound, all-encompassing incompetence on subjects on which one writes books is just sad for all concerned.