Vincent Torley’s Disappearing Book Review

I guess many folks here are familiar with Dr (of philosophy) Vincent Torley as a contributor of many posts at Uncommon Descent now operated by one Barry Arrington.

Vincent strikes me as a genuinely nice guy whose views are very different from mine on many issues. Possibly one of his most remarked-upon idiosyncracies is his tendency to publish exceedingly long posts at Uncommon Descent but (leaving Joseph of Cupertino in the air for a moment) lately Vincent has become a little more reflective on the merits of “Intelligent Design” as some sort of alternative or rival to mainstream biology. His latest post at Uncommon Descent came to my attention after it mysteriously (in the sense of so far without explanation) disappeared from the blog. Hat-tips to Seversky and REC at AtBC for spotting it before it disappeared. I then happened to see Vincent’s response to a question, providing a link to his Angelfire site and his article, before that comment too disappeared.

Vincent’s post, entitled Undeniable packs a powerful punch, but doesn’t land a knockout is a review of Douglas Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed published earlier this year. I have to say, I missed the event and have only just read the excerpt provided by Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. The snippet did not enthuse me to buy the book, so I can’t say if Vincent’s review is a fair one. It is certainly comprehensive (OK it’s long!).

He starts with fulsome praise:

When I first read Undeniable, I was greatly impressed by its limpid prose, the clarity of its exposition, and the passion with which the author makes his case. Seldom have I seen such an elegantly written book, which people from all walks of life can appreciate. I have no doubt that it will sell well for many years to come, and I have to say that it makes the best case for Intelligent Design at the popular level of any book I’ve ever seen.

But then has some forthright criticism to make:

Nevertheless – and I have to say this – the book contains numerous mathematical, scientific and philosophical blunders, which a sharp-eyed critic could easily spot.

then proceeds to specific points in some detail.

I find it refreshing and a little surprising that Vincent was so forthright in his public criticism and I find it not at all surprising that Barry Arrington has deleted the article at UD and all references to the original that appeared subsequently. There are two related issues here; Axe’s book, Undeniable – its merits and Vincent’s review – and the suppression of Vincent’s article by Barry Arrington but perhaps this thread will suffice to accommodate discussion on both. I’ll email Vincent to let him know about this thread as he may like to join in.

[This post was a bit rushed as I was short of time. Please point out errors and ommissions as needed]

323 thoughts on “Vincent Torley’s Disappearing Book Review

  1. Mung: Why on earth would you point him to EC, a much broader field than GA’s? Do GA’s just fail at building functional coherence?

    That is so weird, Mung. Why on earth would you not start with the general? Furthermore, there’s long been no distinction between evolutionary algorithms and genetic algorithms. The preservation of the latter term was primarily turf protection by the students of John Holland. Neither the Germans associated with evolution strategies nor the Americans associated with evolutionary programming did anything comparable.

  2. Mung: Axe’s book costs 13.00 on Kindle. Meanwhile, Design by Evolution: Advances in Evolutionary Design costs 179.00. That’s more than 13 x 13. So you’ll get no sympathy from me on that score Tom.

    It’s not the cost. It’s the cause.

    (Did you actually buy the entire book? Last time I looked, you could buy individual chapters from Springer. You do know, don’t you, that authors often share “preprints” with people who request them? I haven’t looked at my copy in ages. But it probably wouldn’t have taken long to dig it up, if you’d asked for it.)

  3. Mung,

    To be perfectly clear… The review is much more about Vincent Torley’s present thinking than about Douglas Axe’s book. I’m interested in what’s going on with Vincent. I don’t trust him to relate biological and mathematical claims correctly, irrespective of the source.

    By the way, when I read Dembski’s last book, I needed an independent and accurate account of Mind and Cosmos, which I have not read. I went through a half-dozen reviews before I found one I trusted. The most important thing about Sober’s review was that he laid out Nagel’s (rather strange, but coherent) argument clearly. There’s nothing comparable in Vincent’s review of Axe. (Vincent, don’t take offense. You can learn from this.)

  4. Tom English: Did you actually buy the entire book?

    I did. Pictures available on request, lol.

    Thankfully the book can be purchased for less from other vendors. But I was interested in the subject of the book as a whole rather than just the content of one chapter. If evolution can mimic design I want to know how it is able to do so.

    We are told that evolution can mimic design, right?

  5. Tom English: Am I a materialist, as Barry asserts?

    I did not read his post in which he made that claim. Mea Culpa.

    Tom English: You know from recent interaction that I am not (though you don’t know what I am).

    I do not know that you are not a materialist. I did not read your post in which you made that claim. Mea Culpa.

    Tom English: So where’s your comment at UD, setting him straight?

    Provide me a link to Barry’s claim and a link to your claim and I will post a comment at UD linking to your stated position.

  6. Petrushka, this is a fundamental misconception pinball wizards make.

    There is nothing un-designed about a trial and error process.

    The driving force behind trial and error is an unrelenting desire to solve a problem without having any deep insights into how the problem could be solved with a particular approach. So the entity (whether human or bacteria) utilizes the trial and error process, selects tools and materials from random, mixes and matches them, and repeats the process over and over until a solution is found.

    The key here is not the manner in which the target is aprehended but that there is in fact a target.

    That is how bacteria evolve resistance. They purposefully replicate with speed, going through their random mutation generator playbook and continue until a match is found. If bacteria were not designed, or did not exhibit any design capabilities, they would not react to a pathogen in the least. They would simply be consumed or destroyed.

    The fact this they do survive anti-biotic attacks is in fact evidence for their designed nature, not non-teleological evolution. So the only way to defeat bacteria is to understand their design, rather than trying to deny it.

    Good scientist needs to keep reminding themselves that they are dealing with designed objects regardless of the fact that they have never shook hands with a designer.

    🙂

    petrushka: I would think the most straightforward test of ID would be to demonstrate that useful sequences can be designed without trial and error. Useful as in having some benefit to a population.

  7. From the OP:

    I have to say, I missed the event and have only just read the excerpt provided by Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. The snippet did not enthuse me to buy the book, so I can’t say if Vincent’s review is a fair one. It is certainly comprehensive (OK it’s long!).

    The review is long, therefore it is comprehensive. But if you haven’t read the book you can’t say the review is fair. Indeed. But other “skeptics” disagree on that.

  8. Mung: We are told that evolution can mimic design, right?

    Is it too late to return the book? It’s not a polemic. It’s not advancing any particular thesis. With the exception of the first chapter, it’s loosely — very loosely — about designs arising in evolutionary processes. (Yes, I know that you can look up design in a dictionary, and highlight an element of the definition indicating that designs arise by design. Guess what. I’m probably the only one of the authors paying attention to the dictionary.) I’m sure that most of the authors regard adaptation, not just evolutionary adaptation, as intelligent.

    Although I’m not a biologist, I know a thing or two or three about how people go wrong in their thinking about evolution. I’m sure that people go less wrong thinking that adaptive evolution is like learning than thinking that it is like search/optimization. I’m sure also that analogy is something to let go, as you come to a better understanding of differential reproduction, not something to hang onto forever.

  9. Tom English: Is it too late to return the book?

    Forget about the book.

    If evolution cannot mimic design then the Darwinian hypothesis is false.

    If GA’s cannot mimic design then they offer no support for the Darwinian hypothesis.

  10. Mung: If GA’s cannot mimic design then they offer no support for the Darwinian hypothesis.

    This is getting so very old, Mung.

    You know that computational evolution has yielded designs that have been awarded patents (meaning that patent examiners judged them to be nonobvious to “practitioners of the art”). You presumably believe, as do most ID proponents, that the designs that emerged were designed into the evolutionary processes by humans. Now isn’t that a remarkable thing, to be surprised by a novel design, even though you programmed it yourself? Obviously the researchers are liars.

  11. Mung:

    If evolution can mimic design I want to know how it is able to do so.

    Well, since evolution preceded design by some billions of years, you would seem to have the question ass backwards. It seems intuitively obvious that the concept of design just mimics the results of evolution. The natural thing is to combine design and manufacture in a single ongoing process, a la evolution. Breaking out design as a separate concept is just an aberration of human cognition.

  12. Tom English,

    “Computer, find the most aerodynamic shape for the front of a 2017 Corvette, by testing any shape you can create and seeing which is best in a wind tunnel. Here is the shape of the bracket it must attach to. Go for it.”

    Wow, it did it all by itself! Evolution is amazing!

  13. Mung: God forbid, Tom, that anyone actually read the book when they have a review of it they can read. I wonder why I don’t just spend all my time on Amazon reading reviews.

    It’s touching to see how people who were never going to read the book in the first place now find a reason in VJT’s review of it to not read it anyways.

    I guess that all it takes to be uncritically accepted here at TSZ is to be critical of ID.

    You, on the other hand, are a sucker for books about evolution.

    Wait a minute…

  14. Mung:
    Anyone here other than Vincent actually read Axe’s latest book? Anyone?

    I didn’t even know he wrote one until I heard of this review. But since I’ve read his actual published scientific work (unlike you), in bio-complexity and elsewhere, I know that his conclusions are not supported by his data.

    This is like the Darwin’s Doubt farce all over again. You read the book (end like to spend so much time pointing this out) but none of the papers it cites, so you just sit there blissfully unaware that none of the conclusions the book offer are supported by the research. Remember the whole “lots of new protein folds required during the cambrian explosion” debacle? A couple of references given (remarkably few), all of which argued the diametrically opposite. Funny that.

    I’ve read Axe’s papers. I see what he claims in various videoclips and articles. I see IDproponents citing his numbers. I read what Stephen Meyer claims in Darwin’s Doubt that Axe proved with his experimental work, and it’s all wrong and I have demonstrated this multiple times.

    Now I read a review of Axe’s book that basically show Axe is still making the same claims. I have what is needed to understand that Axe’s conclusions do not hold up to scrutiny.

  15. Mung: There is something fundamentally wrong with how anti-ID “skeptics” use probabilities.

    Give an example. I quoted one, now you’re just regurgitating the claim inverted, but without giving an example. That’s not going to fly.

    Mung: There is no physical law which prevents complex functional arrangements of parts coming together to form a functional whole as if by magic. Even Boltzmann knew this.

    I agree, which is why it was always clear to me IDcreationists were fundamentally mistaken about, for example, the origin of life. Life is just another one among lots of unlikely but not impossible thermodynamic microstates. If there’s a physical law that says that on average, very very rarely, such an unlikely microstate will arise, what role do IDcreationists even see for their god in the origin of life? Statistically speaking, it’s inevitable that mere physical forces will give rise to life.

    This is what you meant right? Otherwise I submit you don’t understand Boltzmann either.

  16. Mung: Let me remind everyone that I created an OP here at TSZ to discuss a topic and that OP was closed to comments by Elizabeth because it (allegedly) violated the rules.

    I see you’ve also made a comment in the “moderation issues” thread and I’ve responded there. I’ll remind all members that that thread is always available to any member to complain, discuss, suggest changes etc. regarding how this blog operates.

    And yet here we have Alan, a moderator who supported Elizabeth’s decision…

    …accepted, not agreed with but take that up in “moderation issues”.

    …starting an OP to discuss the goings on at UD.

    The thread was opened as comments about Axe’s book, Vincent’s review published at UD and Barry Arrington’s action in censoring a regular contributor had begun in various other threads. If you think I violated some rule or aim by starting the OP, I’m willing to discuss and defend my action in the “moderation issues” thread.

    So I don’t feel obligated to say squat to Barry or about Barry just to please people here. What people choose to infer from that is out of my control.

    You shouldn’t feel obligated. Participation here is voluntary. You’re welcome to comment or not, publish an OP or not within the not-very-onerous rules – as is anyone here who wishes to and can also keep to the rules.

  17. Mung: dazz: Just a question for you. Are Torley’s quotes of the book accurate/verbatim? If they are, that’s all I need to know and you need to STFU

    Let me see if I can’t channel hotshoe_ here …

    Why didn’t you answer the question? Do you have the book? Does Axe in fact reference his own work in his arguments about protein and protein fold evolution? Are Torleys quotes accurate?

  18. dazz: I think it’s time to ignore Mung too. FFS, get a grip

    Nah, I can forgive a little meltdown once in a while. At least you can some times actually have a conversation with Mung.

    Right now he’s clearly just very emotionally affected by what he sees is happening to his dear, disintegrating ID movement and feels a need to act on it.

  19. CharlieM,

    How do you know this? How do you know that galaxies are not part of conscious beings?

    How do you know they are? I don’t see the point of this line of argumentation. Consciousness is (as far as one can tell) a property of certain animals. One may as well postulate fish in the sun. How do you know there aren’t any?

    We cannot directly perceive consciousness so how would you know?

    I can perceive consciousness – mine. I am not so arrogant as to consider that the possession of consciousness by me and my clade-mates indicates any kind of general principle in the universe.

    With the puny human consciousness that you have in common with the rest of us, are you competent to make that judgement?

    Yes I am. There’s nothing puny about my consciousness, thank you very much. It is very robust. But I see no more reason to suppose that the universe has consciousness (which must be like ours in some respect to be worthy of the name), than to suppose it has feet.

  20. Mung: If evolution can mimic design I want to know how it is able to do so.

    We are told that evolution can mimic design, right?

    Yes. The evolutionary process of randomly generated variations in traits filtered through natural selection, is in some respects analogous to how a designer operating by trial and error works.
    The results of that process can also often look like something that was designed, for the obvious reason that the process is very similar.

    So there you go.

  21. stcordova,

    Allan Miller’s view that just because it has a positive selection coefficient implies it will fix into a population. Kimura realized even if something has a positive selection coefficient, it may not lead to fixation in a population.

    There is nothing in Kimura that contradicts my position, if by ‘implies’ one is not accusing me of a deterministic view. I said ‘more likely’. Fixed alleles will be a strongly skewed distribution compared to those produced, in favour of those with positive selection coefficients and against those with negative ones, the more so in large populations.

    I am well aware that no single allele is sure to fix. But many alleles leads to a more certain trend, because of the LLN.

  22. Rumraket: The evolutionary process of randomly generated variations in traits filtered through natural selection, is in some respects analogous to how a designer operating by trial and error works.

    And especially in plant and animal husbandry (Darwin’s “artificial selection”) where the breeder is a crucial aspect of the niche environment.

  23. Rumraket: Give an example.

    Yes, I’d also be interested in seeing one of Mung’s claims regarding evolution supported by actual evidence. At least William provided studies for his claims of PSI, poor as they were. Here we have Mung making a claim that can unambiguously be shown to be true or not.

  24. So I don’t feel obligated to say squat to Barry or about Barry just to please people here.

    “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private. . . . If he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you. . . . If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church” (Matthew 18:15–17). This is the responsibility of every Christian (cf. 1 Timothy 5:1, 20; 2 Timothy 4:2; Titus 1:13; 2:15).

  25. Hi everyone,

    I just want to make it clear that I do not want my review used as an excuse for people not to buy Doug Axe’s book. That would be a grave mistake, for three reasons.

    First, the book will sell well for years to come, and will be used by believers in both Biblical creationism and Intelligent Design as their main “go-to” resource when countering standard evolutionary arguments. Axe did an excellent job of pitching his book at a level which ordinary readers who have no special expertise in science could readily understand. (Steve Meyer’s books are somewhat more academic in tone.) Axe is a master communicator, and in any debate, communication is 90% of the battle. If you don’t read the book, you won’t really be able to appreciate where evolution critics who cite Axe’s book are coming from. And believe me, Axe makes a very powerful case, from the perspective of the lay reader.

    Second, as Tom English correctly stated above, I didn’t provide a chapter-by-chapter summary of Axe’s argument, so you’ll need to read the book to get that. I could have done so, as I actually made notes on each chapter, but that would have made my review even longer, as well as more boring to read. Instead, I focused on the chapters which I felt constituted the nub of Axe’s case (especially chapters 9-11 and 13), in presenting Axe’s argument at the beginning of my review. I didn’t spend a lot of time covering what he wrote on instructions and digital photographs, because I thought the analogy between these things and living organisms wasn’t a good one. The chapter on CUNA targets was pretty obvious to anyone with a mathematical background, so I skipped that, too. I did discuss chapter 7, where Axe questions the efficacy of natural selection, later in my review.

    Third, Axe’s book is a passionately argued case for the view that science should not be left in the hands of an elite priesthood of scientists, who have all been trained to think in the “right” way. Axe makes a strong case that ordinary people do science on an everyday basis in chapter 5 of his book, which you’ll have to read for yourself.

    So here’s my advice: go and buy Doug’s book, and read it with an open mind. See how you would respond to his arguments, and whether they would sway you. That’s all I wanted to say.

    By the way, someone sent me a message, but I’m not too sure how to open my messages. Any advice? Thank you.

  26. vjtorley: By the way, someone sent me a message, but I’m not too sure how to open my messages. Any advice? Thank you.

    Click on “Messages” header button on the main page. Scroll down and click the link you should then see.

  27. vjtorley: If you don’t read the book, you won’t really be able to appreciate where evolution critics who cite Axe’s book are coming from

    I got the impression from your review that there’s nothing new in Axe’s book. The same old analogies (origami crane = Paley’s watch), the same old useless concepts (Functional Coherence = FSCI/O), the same arguments from ignorance and appeal to emotion.

    I assume you would have commented on it if there was something new. Why should anyone bother read the same arguments IDists have been putting forth since forever? And by anyone I also mean IDists. It boggles the mind

  28. dazz: I got the impression from your review that there’s nothing new in Axe’s book. The same old analogies (origami crane = Paley’s watch), the same old useless concepts (Functional Coherence = FSCI/O), the same arguments from ignorance and appeal to emotion. The same conspiranoic attacks on the “scientific establishment”…

    I assume you would have commented on it if there was something new. Why should anyone bother read the same arguments IDists have been putting forth since forever? And by anyone I also mean IDists. It boggles the mind

  29. vjtorley: Third, Axe’s book is a passionately argued case for the view that science should not be left in the hands of an elite priesthood of scientists, who have all been trained to think in the “right” way. Axe makes a strong case that ordinary people do science on an everyday basis in chapter 5 of his book, which you’ll have to read for yourself.

    Science has never been in the hands of a priesthood. It was invented over several centuries by amateurs, one of whom was Darwin.

    Darwin, Wallace, Mendel — all non-priests.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts#Scientists.2C_historians.2C_and_educators

    Benjamin Franklin
    Oliver Heaviside
    Buckminster Fuller
    Leeuwenhoek
    Leibniz
    Ramanujan

    Among many. All non-priests.

    The problem with ID is not that it is wrong, and it is not that its proponents don’t belong to the priesthood.

    The problem with DI is sterility. It suggests no useful or productive lines of research.In the 200 years since Paley, ID hasn’t devised a research program, hasn’t attempted to elucidate any route to biological design that does not emulate evolution. It hasn’t produced any evidence that biological design — in the sense of architecture or engineering — is even possible. There is no catalog of materials and properties and methods.

  30. vjtorley: Axe makes a strong case that ordinary people do science on an everyday basis…

    And I’d agree with that. Whilst not everyone can have their own large hadron collider, there is plenty of science one can do at home and in the field; astronomy, biology, geology for instance and we can all make and confirm observations. Scientific theories are all subject to revision in the light of new observations.

    Which brings me to “Intelligent Design”. Does Axe manage to propose a theory of ID that could be tested or falsified by observation or experiment? That would be something new. If you can tell me that Douglas Axe tackles that issue, it would be a reason to read his book.

  31. Another way in which ID is vacuous is it’s lack of entailments.

    It says nothing at all about the history of live. ID proponents can be YEC, OEC, young life, old life, deists, interventionists, unfoldingists.

    In fact, anyone who is a strict determinist could be called an IDist, because strict determinism means that there are no possible alternatives to what has happened.

    Who knows if this is the one true interpretation of existence?

    My thought is that even if this is the case, it is vacuous. Science seeks reliable knowledge of the past because it is useful in managing the future. Science looks for regularities because regularities imply things about the future.

    It strikes me as important to medicine to know whether the Lenski experiment says something about how diseases evolve drug resistance. As opposed to them being tweaked in real time by an invisible demiurge. Who has a motive and purpose in creating diseases.

  32. Alan Fox: vjtorley: Axe makes a strong case that ordinary people do science on an everyday basis…

    Ordinary people mostly do bad science.
    They accept bad statistical arguments, they buy lottery tickets, they gamble badly, they accept bad science in commercials, they fail to understand probabilities of being affected by diseases or the probabilities of being helped by medicines, they deny causes, they form superstitious beliefs about cause and effect.

    Isn’t there a difference between expertise and authority?

  33. Mung: The review is long, therefore it is comprehensive. But if you haven’t read the book you can’t say the review is fair. Indeed. But other “skeptics” disagree on that.

    This is correct of course, but considering the vast number of books and periodicals published every day, the review helps us determine whether to even bother reading this book. No one has time to read everything, not even if they limited their reading to this topic; there’s just tooooo much.

    So based on what I’ve heard here, there seems there’s no compelling need to spend my limited time on this book. I need no further justification for that choice.

    Now, vjtorley made a good argument for reading the book; to be better informed about how the book will cause harm. Others however, notice some contradiction in his position. In any event, Torley does not give a good reason for buying it. Like others, I don’t want to contribute to the ID cause; so I’ll wait until a local University library gets a copy, they will anyway.

    sean s.

  34. It ought to be possible, in a few hundred words, to make a case that Axe has something important to say. Perhaps Mung could point to a favorable review that makes such a case.

    I didn’t see any ar Amazon, even though most reviews are favorable.

    Also, I’ve read Axe’s papers at Biologos and didn’t seen any evidence that he has anything interesting or important to say.

  35. Let’s try another approach. I think everyone on both sides can agree that Axe is taking on the Establishment.

    I assert (and expect some dissent) that when you take on the establishment, you have to demonstrate that you know and understand the establishment position.

    Darwin did this throughout The Origin. He gave excellent examples of the design argument. That is why he’s so easy to quotemine Darwin. He has great arguments for design.

    It is at this point that I think ID advocates, including Axe, fail. When you are in a debate, you have to be able to express your opponent’s position to their satisfaction before presenting your counterargument. The fact that so many creationists and ID advocates quote Darwin against himself — I think — demonstrates that he understood the design argument.

    I do not know anyone other than Behe on the design side who shows a clear understanding of evolution. I think it is worth pointing out that Behe doesn’t express any blanket opposition to evolution. He simply thinks there are some specific instances of events that did happen by chance. De novo proteins are not on that list, for example.

  36. vjtorley: Third, Axe’s book is a passionately argued case for the view that science should not be left in the hands of an elite priesthood of scientists, who have all been trained to think in the “right” way. Axe makes a strong case that ordinary people do science on an everyday basis in chapter 5 of his book, which you’ll have to read for yourself.

    People do science on an everyday basis, but of course they often do it badly. Notably, they’re prone to confirmation bias, and the “elite scientists” have been taught that to succumb to confirmation bias is not the “right” way. For good reason.

    What Axe is doing is not trying to get ordinary people to do good science, but to encourage them to engage in the sort of confirmation bias that he engages in–confirmation bias that basically is the means of “ID thinking.” Should we use our “intuition” to decide what happens on a quantum level, or to assume that gravity doesn’t affect light?

    In truth, animism is how humans ultimately “intuit” the world working. Axe doesn’t enjoin people to believe that rivers and groves are gods. No, they can do science, unless they don’t like evolutionary theory, which is not intuitive but is based on the evidence. I don’t know how truly intuitive ID/creationism is, but it’s certainly an ingrained bias in this culture, and Axe wants people to just stick to the biased beliefs, rather than to learn to get past their confirmation bias.

    Axe wants people to think badly, just like himself, although he doesn’t think of his confirmation bias as thinking badly (likely not recognizing that it is confirmation bias at all). But clearly, it is, as VJT’s review indicates regarding both Axe and those who “reviewed” his book. I’m really not going to blame the reviewers, however, since they’re just what ID wants, people who let bad thinking slide by. Axe is recommending that everyone should let IDist bad thinking slide by.

    Glen Davidson

  37. Acartia: Barry has banned you as well? Welcome to the club.

    If Barry has me banned why would I offer to post at UD that Barry is mistaken if he thinks Tom is a materialist? An offer I am perfectly willing to follow through on.

  38. Rumraket: You, on the other hand, are a sucker for books about evolution.

    Yep. I have an enviable library of books on evolution. You at least managed to get that right, Rumraket!

  39. Rumraket: Do you have the book?

    Yes I have the book and I’ve actually quoted from it right here at TSZ. I am under no obligation to you or anyone else here to compare Vincent’s quotes to the book itself.

    Frankly I’m somewhat amazed that everyone here isn’t off buying their own copy in hopes that they can find an excuse to accuse Vincent of quote-mining Axe.

    After all, isn’t it a given that ID’ists are inveterate quote-miners?

    Vincent quote-mining Axe quote-mining himself, lol. What more could a “skeptic” want?

  40. OMagain: Yes, I’d also be interested in seeing one of Mung’s claims regarding evolution supported by actual evidence.

    I take it you either passed right over Tom’s comment about Monod’s Chance and Necessity or didn’t understand it. Perhaps he will explain it to you.

  41. OMagain: “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private. . .

    All the more reason for me to ignore the calls for me to publicly denounce Barry.

    Thank you

  42. Mung: Rumraket: Do you have the book?

    Yes I have the book and I’ve actually quoted from it right here at TSZ. I am under no obligation to you or anyone else here to compare Vincent’s quotes to the book itself.

    Frankly I’m somewhat amazed that everyone here isn’t off buying their own copy in hopes that they can find an excuse to accuse Vincent of quote-mining Axe.

    After all, isn’t it a given that ID’ists are inveterate quote-miners?

    Vincent quote-mining Axe quote-mining himself, lol. What more could a “skeptic” want?

    I already told you I read Axe’s published scientific work, Torleys quotes are accurate representations of Axe’s conclusions from his papers. It would be strange if they’re quotemines of his book, because then it would seem to imply Axe has changed his conclusions between doing his scientific work and writing his book.

    Got any more excuses? It seems the only line you have going for you right now is an insinuation that you need to read the whole book to understand Axe’s point. Which is obviously ridiculous and patently inaccurate.

  43. vjtorley,

    Maybe someone can do better.

    Not really my specialist subject – Joe Felsenstein’s your man – but I think you are in danger of unjustifiable extrapolation of expectations from constant populations – and, in Haldane’s case, infinite ones! – to a growing one.

    An alternative approach is empirical investigation – for example, the ratio of synonymous to nonsynonymous substitutions can indicate, for coding regions at least, those that appear to be under selective constraint.

  44. Book reviews–these exist so that, once you have read the book–and you must read the book to have any meaningful opinion–you can judge these reviews by the book.

    What other possible reason could there be for a book review?

    Glen Davidson

  45. Mung: If Barry has me banned why would I offer to post at UD that Barry is mistaken if he thinks Tom is a materialist? An offer I am perfectly willing to follow through on.

    Sarcasm: the use of irony to mock or convey contempt.

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