Stupidity amok
I’ve never seen a train wreck. At least not outside of news reports and movies like The Fugitive. So I can’t be certain if reading the commentary at Billy Dembski’s blog is exactly like watching a train wreck, or if the right analogy is less bloody and more entertaining.
Today, PaV asks How Random is Random Mutation?, because he came across a study in which four different strains of yeast evolved the same solution to a resource shortage. Somehow, he spends a thousand words pondering this problem without using the only word that matters: selection (though he does dismiss “selective pressure” for no apparent reason).
Four strains, when given only galactose to feed on, developed mutations that broke the DNA that represses the galactose processing pathway, and this is alleged to be some challenge to standard evolutionary biology? Really? Because it seems to suggest that “information” can evolve without “intelligent designers” being involved at all. Which various and sundry IDolators would deny ’til their faces turned blue.
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It might be fair if ID proponents look for signs of design in biological data.
However, if they do so they have to make sure that there arguments are at least plausible in terms of biology. Obviously, PaV has some problems in this respect:
In another thread http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1538 he interprets different inversion frequencies in Drosophila subobscura at different geographic lattitudes as sequence changes that recently occurred. At the same time he denies mutation and suggests that
As an alternative to RM and NS he is
Other ID commentators (e.g. johnnyb) have the same problem. They envision mechanisms not observed in experimental biology or only in experimental systems that do not have anything to do with the subject discussed.
Projected to the human population genetics they would have to interpret allele frequencies as mutation rates or, in agreement with their arguments, rather as completely non-random changes that recently arose by
mechanisms.
Several comments pointed to the misunderstanding but were completely ignored. ID commentators just continued yarning.
The impressive lack of knowledge in posts like those of PaV explains why it takes several years to get a degree in biology. In addition post like this make the moderation imbalance at UD apparent: While a strict moderation of commenting is applied at UD seemingly nobody cares about the quality of posts. Thus, the UD blog owners are either not interested in quality or are incompetent themselves.