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Stephen Meyer: The Return of the God Hypothesis

Robertinfremont

Robertinfremont

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Let's all chew on this one for a time. Stephen Meyer makes outstanding proofs.

 
Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! Some people with creationist leanings or little understanding of paleontology might find this long-winded, confusingly written book convincing, but anyone with a decent background in paleontology can easily see through his distortions and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Even though Amazon.com persists in listing this book in their "Paleontology" subsection, I've seen a number of bookstores already which have it properly placed in their "Religion" section--or even more appropriately, in "Fiction."

The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets. Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn't occur--when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism. He repeats many of the other classic creationist myths, all long debunked, including the post hoc argument from probability (you can't make the argument that something is unlikely after the fact), knowing that his math-phobic audience is easily bamboozled by the misuse of big numbers. He wastes a full chapter on the empty concept of "information" as the ID creationists define it. He butchers the subject of systematic biology, using the normal debate between competing hypotheses to argue that scientists can't make up their minds--when that is the ordinary way in which scientific questions are argued until consensus has been reached. He confuses crown-groups with stem-groups, botches the arguments about recognition of ancestors in the fossil record, and can't tell a cladogram from a family tree. He blunders through the fields of epigenetics and evo-devo and genetic drift as if they completely falsified Neo-Darwinism, rather than as scientists view them, as supplements to our understanding of it.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2HNOHERF138DU
 
That is your copy and paste review.

This is a top rated review.

Comment on “Darwin’s Doubt,” by Stephen C. Meyer

I highly recommend reading this book. it isn't an easy read, but very interesting and well worth reading with an open mind.

When Darwin wrote his famous 1859 treatise on the Origin of Species, there were two issues he glossed over: 1.) The origin of the first living cell, and 2.) The so-called Cambrian, or Silurian, explosion of complex animals. At the time, he, and scientists in general, knew nothing about the details of the functioning of a biological cell, but believed that life somehow originated in the chemical soup that supposedly existed early in the earth’s history. He also acknowledged that the sudden emergence of the Cambrian era animals cast great doubt on his theory of evolution through random mutations and natural selection over long periods of time. However, he expected that later discoveries of fossils would show ancestors of the Cambrian animals in earlier geological strata.

Since Crick and Watson deduced the structure of DNA in 1953, based on then-recent work of many biological scientists, science has come to understand that the work of DNA, RNA, and other molecular structures in a living cell is based on highly complex functionally specific code. In his earlier book, “The Signature in the Cell,” Dr. Meyer, citing the work of many modern biological scientists, mathematicians and others, showed that for such complexity to have arisen by chance arrangement of the nucleotide building blocks of life would have required many times the number of available chances in the life of the universe. The post log to the latest edition addresses the criticisms that have been written on that earlier work.

In this book Dr. Meyer addresses Darwin’s Cambrian doubt and builds on his earlier book by pointing out the even greater complexity (by many orders of magnitude) of the specified information required to arrange cells into complex animal body plans, such as the 20 or so new phyla found in the Cambrian layers. Even with deep sea drilling, deep drilling on land and in other forms of exploration, scientists have yet to discover any significant fossils of the supposed ancestors of the Cambrian animals. Dr. J.Y. Chen, a Chinese paleontologist and an expert on the Cambrian era fossil deposits discovered in China, was once asked when presenting his findings at the University of Washington if he wasn’t worried about contradicting Darwin, quipped, “in China we can criticize Darwin, but we can’t criticize the government. In the United States, you can criticize the government, but you can’t criticize Darwin.”

As Dr. Meyer points out in this book, “Scientists attempting to explain the origin of life must explain how both information-rich molecules and the cell’s information-processing system arose.” As he further notes, “Whenever we find functional information—Whether embedded in a radio signal, carved in a stone monument such as the Rosetta Stone, etched on a disk, or produced by an origin-of-life scientist attempting to engineer a self-replicating molecule — and we trace that information back to its ultimate source, invariably we come to a mind, not merely a material process.”

In “Darwin’s Doubt” Dr. Meyer examines the various theories that attempt to explain the geologically sudden emergence of so many new, fully formed animal body plans, and shows that each theory, however subtly, postulates pre-existing information-rich sources of data upon which their theory is based. For example, scientists have discovered entities called developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs) that play a key role in the development of a grown animal from an embryo. Studies have determined that simple random individual changes in the dGRN will destroy the organism. Any changes in one part must be coordinated with changes in the other parts, which again requires an enormous infusion of new information. After examining the many theories that scientists have proposed and demonstrating essentially the same flaw in each of them (i.e., the supposition of a pre-existing source of the complex information required), Dr. Meyer concludes that intelligent design is the only explanation that meets the necessary scientific criteria to truly explain the origin of life and the complex form in which all life exists today. In arriving at that conclusion, he uses the same scientific method used by Charles Darwin and most other scientists trying to understand historical events; that is, the abductive method of inference to the best explanation based on currently known processes. In this case, the known process is that complex, functionally specified information is, in our everyday experience, created only by an intelligent agent. Since no scientific theory has yet been proposed that shows any means other than design by an intelligent agent,
 
Rest of review above.

Dr. Meyer argues that intelligent design is the best, most scientific explanation available today. This is especially true since all of the other purportedly materialistic naturalistic theories that have been proposed start off by assuming the prior existence of the vast amounts of complex specified information necessary to the existence of any life form. They fail to explain where that information came from in the first place. Intelligent design, and only intelligent design, explains the origin of vast amounts of functionally specified information.
86 people found this helpful
 
Robertinfremont said:
Rest of review above.

Dr. Meyer argues that intelligent design is the best, most scientific explanation available today. This is especially true since all of the other purportedly materialistic naturalistic theories that have been proposed start off by assuming the prior existence of the vast amounts of complex specified information necessary to the existence of any life form. They fail to explain where that information came from in the first place. Intelligent design, and only intelligent design, explains the origin of vast amounts of functionally specified information.
86 people found this helpful
Click to expand...

Gosh, a cut and paste review, without a source after complaining about review links that , well are from scientiists. For example, the first one was from Donald Prothero - Wikipedia. His profession is paleontology. That gives him authority to speak on biology.. that is what his training and profession are.

Your 'top rated'?? We do not know who wrote it. You did not supply a link. David, at least, gave a link to a review where the person let his name be known, and it was from, well, an actual scientist.

I am sure you can't see the irony there.
 
zyzygy said:
Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! Some people with creationist leanings or little understanding of paleontology might find this long-winded, confusingly written book convincing, but anyone with a decent background in paleontology can easily see through his distortions and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Even though Amazon.com persists in listing this book in their "Paleontology" subsection, I've seen a number of bookstores already which have it properly placed in their "Religion" section--or even more appropriately, in "Fiction."

The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets. Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn't occur--when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism. He repeats many of the other classic creationist myths, all long debunked, including the post hoc argument from probability (you can't make the argument that something is unlikely after the fact), knowing that his math-phobic audience is easily bamboozled by the misuse of big numbers. He wastes a full chapter on the empty concept of "information" as the ID creationists define it. He butchers the subject of systematic biology, using the normal debate between competing hypotheses to argue that scientists can't make up their minds--when that is the ordinary way in which scientific questions are argued until consensus has been reached. He confuses crown-groups with stem-groups, botches the arguments about recognition of ancestors in the fossil record, and can't tell a cladogram from a family tree. He blunders through the fields of epigenetics and evo-devo and genetic drift as if they completely falsified Neo-Darwinism, rather than as scientists view them, as supplements to our understanding of it.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2HNOHERF138DU
Click to expand...

Thank you, zyzygy, you read the book so I don't have to.
 
Robertinfremont said:
Dr. Meyer argues that intelligent design is the best, most scientific explanation available today.
Click to expand...

Except that it isn't a scientific explanation at all--it's religious.

Intelligent design in a nutshell = "we don't understand, so therefore God did it."
 
Only if one believes in magic.
 
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