It's Not Simple, Stupid.
As many of the Sciencebloggers have already mentioned, Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute is up to his usual stupidity. In this particular instance, he’s attempting, in a typically inept fashion, to fisk Carl Zimmer’s recent article in National Geographic. So far, I haven’t chimed in, mostly because everyone else has done such a good job that there wasn’t much to add.
Today, though, Karmen pointed out a passage that I’d somehow missed the first time I read Luskin’s piece. In the first part of his “rebuttal,” Luskin wrote:
The article called evolution a “simple” process. In our experience, does a “simple” process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?
Karmen and PZ have both already pointed out the silliness of claiming that simple processes can’t lead to complex results. I’m going to talk about something different, but every bit as silly: the idea that evolution is a simple process.