Sep 10, 2004

under the knife

Anyone who's been following the flap over Meyer's bogusly "peer-reviewed" pro-Intelligent Design paper should read this close reading by PZ Myers, a developmental biologist. His summation: Meyer gets a lot wrong, and ignores major evidence that contradicts his thesis.

Now you might be able to see what a qualified reviewer would see when reading the Meyer paper. It's full of these peculiar disconnects from the reality of the scientific literature—he's constantly citing little fragments of papers while ignoring the bulk of the work. It's a more rarefied version of more typical creationist quote mining, made slightly more sophisticated and much more difficult to check, and designed to wow the rubes rather than persuade anyone knowledgeable in the subject.

Remarkably, PZ shows three or four major errors or omissions in just one paragraph of Meyer's hack work. If Intelligent Design proponents want credibility and respect, they could at least start by getting research right.

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