Gilder: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content"
The Boston Globe has just published a puff-piece on George Gilder. The article is called, “The evolution of George Gilder.” Anyway, the piece mostly just lets Gilder spout unchallenged about how evolution can’t explain genetic “information”, although it does start off OK by mentioning Pharyngula’s 2004 fisking of a Gilder essay in Wired. For some reason, though, the reporter couldn’t bring himself to make one tiny little phone call to a biologist (I’m sure PZ Myers was ready and willing) to learn how evolution actually can produce new genes with new functions (handy free pdf). Gilder is saying something that is the equivalent of saying “scientists don’t know how volcanos form.” Saying that the origin of new genetic information requires divine intervention is just wrong, anyone who believes it is badly uninformed, and anyone who promotes the idea to the innocent public is a deluded pseudoscientist.
To end on a positive note, Gilder does manage to get one thing right:
“What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”