There is an amusing exchange in the Boston Review between biologist Allen Orr and Discovery [sic] Institute propagandist William Dembski. (The debate begins with Orr's demolition of Dembski's latest book here.) Orr, who is a good writer as well as smart, delivers this scathing and apt conclusion to the exchange:
"Dembski, Behe and associates may in the end prove a thorn in the side of not only biologists but also the devout. By promising devastating objections to evolution but delivering half-baked technobabble that disintegrates upon close inspection, they subject certain religious persons to unnecessary and traumatic cycles of expectation and dashed hope. The point is that all skirmishes involve risk of friendly fire and the faithful will, sooner or later, have to ask who poses the greater actual danger: those who merely suggest that life evolves or those who routinely announce “proofs” of the handiwork of an interventionist Designer—proofs that have, so far, been fantastically flawed, noisily imploding almost immediately after their much publicized debuts."
Readers of the New York Review of Books will know Allen Orr as the biologist who also wiped the floor with Steven Pinker's nonsense in The Blank Slate, an entertaining but fanciful bit of polemics on behalf of evolutionary psychology. At least the evolutionary psychologists don't want their stuff taught in high schools.
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