Thread by @AdamRutherford

The '@RichardDawkins crowd'?
What does that even mean? Does he mean 'biologists'??
'too quick to close the books on selection'?
What does that even mean?

This is just gibberish. Unserious flapdoodle.

https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1165041795849342976

@RichardDawkins In the original article, he cites missing fossils, and the mathematical unlikelihood of proteins. These are standard old and tiresome canards of creationism and its bastard son ID.

@RichardDawkins These are proposals that are wilfully errant or based on misunderstandings of evolutionary science and evidence.

Gelernter may well say that, But I say that it's absolute shiny bollocks.

https://twitter.com/greatbiglizard/status/1165051083749756928

Here's an example from the original article (which is littered with factual errors about biology.

None of these things is true. Why must a mutation be early acting to 'help create a new form of organism'?
Many developmental pathways are deeply conserved in wildly different organisms.

'big body-plan changes required by macro-evolution, seem to be invariably fatal.'
And yet that is exactly what happens, both anatomically and in the genome, as demonstrated in ooh idk, the amphioxus genome quadrupling, or the fusion of great ape chromosomes to make Homsap Chr 2.

But there's a deeper 9Or possibly more shallow) error. Common sense arguments have little value in science. Science is the opposite of common sense, for it requires removing our perception from describing reality.

Here is the original article, which is not very good, and biologically illiterate from the second sentence: Darwin wasn't guessing, his theory was based on years of meticulous observation and experimentation.
bit.ly/2PbpxZQ

There are a berzillion books on evolution that amply deal with these canards, hell, I've written a few. My first, called Creation specifically deals with the mathematical improbability of protein evolution, and indeed mutation rates (not all point mutations are equally weighted).

This is maybe not well known in the popular science domain (where I primarily write) but is undergrad evolutionary theory/molecular biology.

Anyhoo, that was a grumpy thread, because I was enjoying the Marvel announcements and then this turd slipped its way into my timeline. Your homework is to read some books. Major Transitions by John Maynard Smith/Eörs Szathmáry is a good one, but academic.

Otherwise, try pretty much anything biological by actual @RichardDawkins, or anything by Nick Lane, me, @Evolutionistrue, the Red Queen by @mattwridley, jesus, there are literally dozens of books that do this job.

And so to bed. Nunnight.

My thread lacks specific details of why these arguments are crap, which is primarily because they are old canards that have been refuted a berzillion times, freely available via the Internet.

But also cos of @Painpoint’s 4th Law of Thermodynamics: The amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than required to create it.'

Update: the article is actually from May and @evolutionistrue has already killed it here whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/com…