Us Darwin lobbyists try to solve the mystery of Uncommon Descent

Over at UD, the ever-amazing Denyse O’Leary (writing as “News”) has gone after me.

I am apparently a “Darwin lobbyist” whose salary is “paid for under protest by people who don’t believe it”. (Of course UD News posts never_insult people, do they?)_

First she quotes the paleontologist T. Berra as saying that cars, like fossils, show “descent with modification”. Then she puts words in Berra’s mouth, implying that Berra has said that cars have genes and offspring, and that Berra has called automotive engineers liars.

Then she quotes some paragraphs by me about the mysterious “digital information” that ID types like Stephen Meyer are always announcing has been found in the genome. I made the point that it is nothing very new – actually it’s just the presence of protein-coding genes, RNA genes, and regulatory sequences, which we already knew were there. (I have heard Meyer speak on this issue and he did not explain what the mysterious “digital information” was – leaving his audience to infer that it was some mysterious new pattern previously unknown to science, but which could only have arisen by Intelligent Design).

She introduces the quote from me by misdescribing it as being

O’Leary:

on why genetic information requires no intelligence.

It of course wasn’t about that. It was reacting to Meyer’s mesmerizing phrase “digital information” and his statement that

Stephen Meyer:

the discovery of digital information in DNA provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a causal role in its origin.

I was pointing out that Meyer wasn’t describing some new pattern that, by itself, proved intelligent design.

O’Leary has misunderstood
my 2007 paper and which parts argue what. It is later in the paper that I take on William Dembski’s arguments for his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information and his No Free Lunch argument, and show (by arguments invented by others and some invented by me) that they don’t work. And of course those arguments in my paper are against Dembski’s alleged proof of Intelligent Design. They don’t prove that ID is impossible, just that Dembski has no proof that it is necessary.

I recommend that article to O’Leary.