Stephen
> Here is an article in World Magazine discussing the ID movement with
biographical details
> about some of its leaders.
>
> I like this bit:
>
> "Once evolutionists read his book, they were eager to sink their teeth
into Mr. Johnson, whom
> they saw as a middle-aged, Harvard-educated dilettante sticking his
unscientific nose where it
> didn't belong. Critics lined up to debate him. But once engaged, his
adversaries found him to
> be both ruthlessly intelligent and maddeningly congenial."
Chris
For all I know, he may be maddeningly congenial, but if he's ruthlessly
intelligent, then he's far more dishonest than I would have thought. From
his books I'd say he's dishonest, but not extremely so, and that his
intelligence is greatly overrated by the author of the article Stephen
quotes. If he's so intelligent, why does he persist in committing the
grossest of logical errors, over and over and over, repeatedly and
redundantly? Why, for instance, does he claim that genetic variation cannot
produce new information, when even a person with an impoverished education
concerning genetics such as his would almost certainly have to know that
this is simply not true, that genetic variation *does* (and *is* the
production of new information, in at least two senses), *regardless* of his
position on evolution (or "macroevolution," which the ID folks have *still*
not been able to *objectively* distinguish from repeated microevolution).
If he were "ruthlessly" intelligent, he'd have educated himself about his
topic enough not to make incredible, empirically falsifiable claims of such
egregious idiocy -- *unless* he knows all of this and deliberately lies
about it.
Keep in mind this one simple fact when considering claims such as that no
new genetic information can be created by genetic variation:
Genetic variation *is* the creation of new information.
This is true, in evolution, even in those cases where the genetic variation
consists *solely* of the removal of genetic information, because the
resulting genome and organism are therefore *new*, at least relative to the
parent genome(s) and in that exact environment. Thus, the *only* way for
Johnson's claim to be true would be for there *never* to be organisms that
have *any* genetic difference from their parent(s). This is almost *never*
true in the case of sexually-reproducing organisms, and noticeably often not
true even of bacteria and viruses.
How can someone who is "ruthlessly intelligent" keep himself so grotesquely
ignorant of the very same topic he pretends to *specialize* in?
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