In which I actually begin to feel sympathy for the folks at Uncommon Descent February 17, 2009
Posted by Evil Bender in Origins, Religion, Science, wingnuts.trackback
Over at UD (I’m still not linking to that thoroughly dishonest blog) the latest post is by Walter ReMine, entitled “Message Theory–Testable Alternative to Darwinism–Part 1.” He’s been promoted by ID supporters before, but his (self-published) popular, never peer-reviewed book that’s more than 15 years old still hasn’t received the critical attention he would like, so he’s back and making waves about how evolutionists won’t take his work seriously.
For those of you in the know, creationists describe “Message Theory” as proposing that “Life was reasonably designed for survival and for communicating a message that tells where life came from. The biotic message says, ‘Life is the product of a single designer – life was intentionally designed to resist all other explanations’.”
And it probably won’t surprise you to find that ReMine doesn’t have any real background in biology, but rather is an engineer (why are so many engineers cranks, anyway?).
Neither will it surprise you that, after spending 12 paragraphs talking about how great and testable “Message Theory” is, ReMine neglects to explain anything about it, instead promising that in a future post.
And that is why I feel bad for UD: they just accidentally admitted the whole arc of creationist “thought”! The pattern is:
1) publish a “theory” without peer review;
2) pout that no one takes your easily refuted crackpot theory seriously;
3) promise a serious, testable alternative to “Darwinism” and/or a serious research-based program;
4) GOTO 2.
In extreme cases, this should be readjusted to GOTO 1. I wonder how many times ReMine has completed this grand pattern. Probably about as many consecutive years as we’ve seen promises like these from the creationist camp.
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