much ado about

At long last, PZ Myers gets the chance to see, firsthand, a bold new Intelligent Design research paradigm. And here it is:















PZ's comments are worth quoting:

I do have to commend Nelson for having the guts to expose the hollow vacuum at the heart of anti-evolutionary thinking to the critical eyes of a swarm of practicing scientists, but there is another troubling problem here. This presentation is going to go on a list at the Discovery Institute of Intelligent Design forays into mainstream scientific venues. You know it's going to be presented to some school board or court someday, with the disingenuous claim that "See? We really are doing real science, really!" It isn't. It's non-science. It's bad science....

Nothing will follow from Nelson's presentation. There won't be any research done as a consequence of his poster--there's none that can be done. He may be a nice guy, but niceness doesn't count in science. And the absence of substance is what has to be emphasized to school boards and courtrooms where this kind of work will get cited.

Oh, and while we're at it: evolutionary processes can create prime number sequences; so much for Dembski's Contact analogy--that discovering a prime number sequence is proof of intelligent design.