ID ≠ YEC?
If you’ve been following the ID movement for any time, you know that the group they try to publicly distance themselves from the most, after Darwiniacs, are other creationists, especially young-earthers.
So you’ll understand my surprise when I saw this come in on the ID the Future podcast feed:
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin examines a new peer-reviewed paper that demolishes a very common and very fallacious objection to intelligent design. That objection? “Aren’t there vast eons of time for evolution?”
I haven’t listened to it, so it’s possible that the blurb is misleading (it wouldn’t be the first time a creationist wrote something misleading). But are they so starved for peer-reviewed papers that they’ll even take something that seems to support YECism?
I listened to it. Luskin doesn’t state the Earth is old or young he says “perhaps there are” to the question “aren’t there vast eons of time for evolution?” And the precedes to engage in typical creationist quote mining from a paper that had nothing to do with what he is talking about about “falsifiability of life origin scenarios.” I know that in historical journals referees will often object to tidbits which have been stated in such a way that they might be picked up by David Irving or someone and misrepresented to make a case for some counter-factual claim or another and asking that they be reworded. Perhaps the referees of science journals would be wise to consider a similar level of scrutiny to avoid creationist quote-mining.
There’s a couple of obvious problems with “peer reviewed” ID research…
skepticcat:
I listened to the episode just now, and was about to say what you did, so thanks for saving me the trouble of updating the post.
Yes, I was struck by the lack of direct quotations about ID in this supposedly pro-ID paper. And by the conflation of evolution with the origin of life.
And throughout, I kept remembering the Dover trial, where Behe talked about his paper that showed the impossibility of simultaneous beneficial mutations under extremely conservative conditions, and how the prosecution got him to admit that there are so many bacteria in a ton of soil that even under his highly-unfavorable conditions, the sorts of events that he talks about should occur every 20,000 years or so — an eyeblink to geologists.