Yet another rehash of debunked ID arguments? Why "Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique" won't be worth buying.

In part 2 of my series commenting on “Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique”, the latest book-length attack on evolution from conservative Protestant Christianity, I reflected on the differences between how scientific and special creationist consensus are achieved, and commented on the special creationist obsession with credentials. As I noted, higher degrees do not magically convert nonsense into facts.

Having said that, given that the advertising blurb for the book touted the authors as ‘highly credentialed’, it is entirely fair to use this claim to evaluate them. Of the fourteen contributors, six aren’t even scientists, while of the eight who possess a PhD in a science-related discipline, only four of those could be termed ‘highly credentialed’ if we define that as holding an academic position at a major university or museum of natural history. Of those four, only one – the palaeontologist Günter Bechly – has a background in a discipline directly related to evolution – and he has now left the scholarly mainstream and is working at the Biologic Institute, a ‘research laboratory’ attached to the Discovery Institute, an intelligent science think tank.

The credibility of the collection is badly compromise by the fact that eight of the fourteen either work for or are affiliated with the Discovery Institute, notorious for its aggressive advocacy of the pseudoscience of intelligent design. In particular, many of these authors have previously written on the same subject that feature in the titles of their contributions to TE: SPTC, and have had the arguments in those books comprehensively refuted by mainstream scientific reviewers. Given this, unless the arguments are new and revolutionary – and the absence of anything in the scientific literature from the authors that is accepted by the scientific community as showing evolution is a ‘theory in crisis - it is entirely reasonable to conclude that the scientific-themed posts will have nothing substantive to offer.

A suspiciously high concentration of ID apologists

The promotional blurb for TE:SPTC asserts that the book has contributions from “two dozen highly credentialed scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Europe and North America”. That raises the question of what ‘highly credentialed’ means in the context of science. A PhD alone does not mean one is ‘highly credentialed’, particularly if you have not worked as a professional scientist since graduating. Certainly, Freeman Dyson’s lack of a PhD did not hinder him from becoming one of the leading physicists of the 20th century, while the ID advocate Jonathan Wells, who unlike Dyson has PhDs in religious studies and molecular biology has no serious scientific career at all. Creationist credentialism taken to its extreme would rank Wells as more ‘highly credentialed’ due to his possession of two terminal degrees. Being ‘highly credentialed’ is not what makes one an influential scientist, but rather whether one follows the scientific method, and has a track record of greatly contributing to the body of scientific knowledge.

Most of the fourteen authors are heavily involved the Discovery Institute:

1. Douglas Axe – molecular biologist, director of Biologic Institute, the intelligent design ‘research laboratory’ and founding editor of BIO-Complexity, the intelligent design ‘scientific journal.
2. Günter Bechly is a German invertebrate paleontologist who was the curator of insects at the State Museum of Natural History at Stuttgart, but is now a ‘research scientist’ at the Biologic Institute.
3. Winston Ewert is a software engineer and a ‘senior researcher’ at the Biologic Institute and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, also another intelligent design ‘research laboratory’.
4. Ann K. Gauger is a zoologist and a ‘research scientist’ at the Biologic Institute.
5. Casey Luskin is a lawyer with a geology degree who prior to working for the Discovery Institute, an ID think tank had an undistinguished career in geology.
6. Stephen C. Meyer has a PhD in the philosophy of science and an undergraduate degree in geophysics. He directs the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.
7. Paul A. Nelson likewise has a PhD in the philosophy of science and is a fellow of the Discovery Institute, as well as an adjunct professor for Biola University’s MA program in Science and Religion.
8. Jonathan Wells has a PhD in cell and molecular biology, and is a fellow at the discovery institute.

Only half of the eight ID-associated contributing authors are scientists or have a terminal degree in science. Meyer and Nelson are philosophers of science. Luskin is a lawyer (currently enrolled in a PhD program), while Ewert is a software engineer. Of the other four, Wells obtained his PhD not to pursue a research career but to attack science (he is a member of the Unification Church of the United States, informally known as the Moonies), and has no significant credible research career.

That leaves Gauger, Axe, and Bechly as the only contributors of the overtly ID-affiliated group both with relevant scientific qualifications and a scientific research career, though the careers of Axe and Gauger prior to joining the ID movement were hardly stellar. It hardly needs to be stressed that their scientific work pre-ID while competent did not cause the scientific community to abandon evolution, so it is yet again another argument from irrelevant authority for special creationists to appeal to the fact that some of their appropriately-qualified advocates have published in the scientific literature.

You can always scrape up a scientist to defend any fringe idea

The six remaining contributors who are not directly affiliated with the Intelligent Design community are:

1. Ola Hössjer, professor of mathematical statistics at Stockholm University
2. Matti Leisola, currently professor emeritus of bioprocess engineering at Aalto University.
3. Colin R. Reeves, statistician, emeritus professor of operational research at Coventry University in the UK, with an interest in evolutionary algorithms.
4. Christopher Shaw, molecular endocrinologist and professor of drug discovery in the School of Pharmacy, Queen’s University.
5. James M. Tour, synthetic organic chemist and professor of chemistry, professor of computer science, and professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, Texas.
6. Sheena Tyler, zoologist and research director of the John Ray Research Field Station.

With the exception of Tyler, whose scientific career appears to be competent but hardly prestigious, the contributors not directly associated with the ID community are far more likely to be described as ‘highly credentialed’, with Tour arguably the most prestigious of these. Three points however need to be considered:

• No matter how "well-credentialed" a scientist is, that will not make pseudoscientific arguments they advance credible. Nobel laureates Brian Josephson (physics) and Kary Mullis (chemistry) are notorious for advocating pseudoscientific ideas. Josephson has long defended parapsychologic phenomena, while Mullis denies both global warming and the link between HIV and aids, and believes in astrology. The fact that one can find a few “well-credentialed” scientists who deny evolution likewise does not make special creationism true.
•  Outside their fields of expertise, the opinion of a scientist carries no more weight than that of any other educated layperson. While Tour’s reputation in nanotechnology and organic chemistry is well-deserved, that does not make him an authority on evolution (or even abiogenesis).
•  Evolution-denying scientists who hold doctorates in the life or earth sciences number well under 1% of the total number of scientists in these disciplines. [1] This is not an appeal to popularity [2], but rather a reminder that because the scientific evidence for evolution is so compelling, the overwhelming majority of professional life and earth scientists accept it as fact. One can be sure that the average YEC would reject geocentrism, yet it is possible to find a supporter of geocentrism with a PhD in astronomy. [3] There is no little inconsistency in the special creationist with no expertise in science selectively appealing to the majority in one area of science while denying it in another.

Weighed and Found Wanting

Prior to their contributions to TE: SPTC, most of the authors directly affiliated with the Discovery Institute had already written extensively on evolution. Those ideas have been savagely criticised by the mainstream scientific community, yet despite these corrections, the authors have continued to advance those debunked ideas. Given this track record, one is entitled to be highly suspicious that these same debunked ideas are being served up to an uncritical Christian audience.

Perhaps the most prolific and most criticised writer is Stephen Meyer [4] whose ID career has been marked by controversy. In 2002, along with Jonathan Wells, Meyer submitted to the Ohio Board of Education a list of supplemental resources with a misleading explanation. The National Center for Science Education noted:

As it was originally furnished to the Board, the Bibliography was prefaced with the following explanation:

The publications represent dissenting viewpoints that challenge one or another aspect of neo-Darwinism (the prevailing theory of evolution taught in biology textbooks), discuss problems that evolutionary theory faces, or suggest important new lines of evidence that biology must consider when explaining origins.

Because the representatives of the Discovery Institute who appeared at the March 11 meeting — Jonathan Wells and Stephen C. Meyer — were widely touted as promoters of "intelligent design," it would have been reasonable for the Board to assume that among the "dissenting viewpoints" included in the Bibliography was "intelligent design." But it isn't.

NCSE sent a questionnaire to the authors of every publication listed in the Bibliography, asking them whether they considered their work to provide scientific evidence for "intelligent design." None of the 26 respondents (representing 34 of the 44 publications in the Bibliography) did; many were indignant at the suggestion. For example, Douglas H. Erwin...answered, "Of course not — [intelligent design] is a non sequitur, nothing but a fundamentally flawed attempt to promote creationism under a different guise. Nothing in this paper or any of my other work provides the slightest scintilla of support for 'intelligent design'. To argue that it does requires a deliberate and pernicious misreading of the papers." Several respondents even went so far as to say that their work constituted scientific evidence against "intelligent design." [5]

Meyer’s 2004 article “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories” which was smuggled into a peer-reviewed journal by a creationist sympathiser without proper peer-review [6] was criticised by palaeontologist Alan Gishlick, evolutionary biologist Nick Matzke, and marine biologist Wesley R. Elsberry who noted how Meyer “merely construct[ed] a rhetorical edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down strawmen, and tendentious interpretations.” [7]

Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell in which he alleged that biological information and life could not have developed naturally likewise failed to set the scientific world on fire. Biologist and former BioLogos president Darrel Falk in his review noted that

“[t]here is no question that large amounts information have been created by materialistic forces over the past several hundred million years. Meyer dismisses this without discussing it. What about at the very beginning, 3.5 billion years ago? Everyone doing the science, Meyer notwithstanding, would say the jury is still out. There are some very elegant feasibility experiments going on at the present time. However, it is far too early for a philosopher to jump into the fray and declare no further progress will be made and that this science is now dead. If the object of the book is to show that the Intelligent Design movement is a scientific movement, it has not succeeded. In fact, what it has succeeded in showing is that it is a popular movement grounded primarily in the hopes and dreams of those in philosophy, in religion, and especially those in the general public.” [8]

Developmental biologist Steve Matheson’s extensive review noted elementary errors, such as confusing bacteria with viruses:

A person who would make that mistake – and leave it in his awesome, groundbreaking treatise on 21st-century biological science – is a person who doesn't think very much about viruses or bacteria. A person who would make that mistake is a non-specialist. A layperson. And of course, Stephen Meyer is a layperson. He's clearly not a biologist, or even a person who's particularly knowledgeable about biology. (That paper in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington became infamous due to political disputes; I thought it was most notable for being lame.) This is obvious from my reading of this book and his other work, and the mistake on page 66 just serves to remind me that despite the thunderous praise from fans on the dustjacket and in the ID-osphere, Meyer just isn't all that impressive as a scientific thinker. Call me a jerk, but I expect a hell of a lot more from someone who wants to rewrite science (and its history). [9]

Geneticist Dennis Venema likewise found Meyer’s arguments underwhelming:

“Signature in the Cell represents a layman’s attempt to overturn an entire field of research based on a surface-level understanding (and, at times, significant misunderstanding or ignorance) of the relevant science, published in a form that bypasses review by qualified peers, and that is marketed directly to a nonspecialist audience. This is not good science, nor science in any meaningful sense.” [10]

Meyer’s follow-up book Darwin’s Doubt, which alleged that the Cambrian explosion was problematic for evolution likewise was received poorly. Nick Matzke’s review noted Meyer’s failure to grasp that the Cambrian ‘explosion’, which took place over around 30 million years could hardly be called sudden, his ignorance of phylogenetics and modern taxonomy, his tendency to quote mine, and in his conclusion noted:

“Even without addressing all of these other issues in depth, I think the above shows that Meyer’s book is already holed beneath the waterline on the key issues of Cambrian paleontology, phylogenetics, and the information argument. I’m not sure it deserves much more of anyone’s time.” [11]

Vertebrate palaeontologist Donald Prothero, likewise was scathing:

“Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he’s just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. [12]

Palaeontologist Charles Marshall, whose field of expertise is the Cambrian era - the subject of Meyer’s book - likewise points out the deeply flawed nature of Meyer’s book:

“Despite its readability and a plethora of scholarly references, however, there are substantial omissions and misrepresentations. For example, Meyer completely omits mention of the Early Cambrian small shelly fossils and misunderstands the nuances of molecular phylogenetics, both of which cause him to exaggerate the apparent suddenness of the Cambrian explosion.” 

“As Meyer points out, he is not a biologist; so perhaps he could be excused for basing his scientific arguments on an outdated understanding of morphogenesis. But my disappointment runs deeper than that. It stems from Meyer's systematic failure of scholarship. For instance, while I was flattered to find him quote one of my own review papers (2)—although the quote is actually a chimera drawn from two very different parts of my review—he fails to even mention the review's (and many other papers') central point: that new genes did not drive the Cambrian explosion. His scholarship, where it matters most, is highly selective.” [13]

The last paragraph is damning, as it points out how Meyer deliberately quote mined Marshall. The last sentence “his scholarship, where it matters most, is highly selective”, coming from an expert in the field whose work Meyer quote mined is enough to destroy Meyer’s credibility completely.

Like Meyer,  Jonathan Wells has published a number of highly misleading books on evolution which have also been heavily criticised by evolutionary biologists. Wells' most (in)famous book is "Icons of Evolution" [14] which alleges that the general public has been mislead on evolution, and uses several iconic examples such as Darwin's Finches, Archaeopteryx, the Miller-Urey experiment, and the Tree of Life which he claims do not provide support for evolution. Evolutionary biologist Nick Matzke's comprehensive refutation examines each of Wells' examples, and concludes:

Has Wells succeeded in making the case which would justify his harsh judgements? Let us recall what Wells's argument was supposed to be:

"Some biologists are aware of difficulties with a particular icon because it distorts the evidence in their own field. When they read the scientific literature in their specialty, they can see that the icon is misleading or downright false. But they may feel that this is just an isolated problem, especially when they are assured that Darwin's theory is supported by overwhelming evidence from other fields. If they believe in the fundamental correctness of Darwinian evolution, they may set aside their misgivings about the particular icon they know something about." (Icons, pp. 7-8)

But as we have seen, in every single case, the actual biological experts in their specific fields of expertise in fact agree that the actual evidence in their field supports modern evolutionary theory. Furthermore, many of these scientists have felt sufficiently strongly about this that they have published critiques of creationist misinterpretations of their work. Many of these scientists have felt sufficiently victimized by Wells to write specific rebuttals of him.

Wells might try to argue that he was talking about the "icons" rather than the general evidence in the field, but still his argument fails. In the cases of the Miller-Urey experiment, Darwin's tree of life, vertebrate limb homology, Archaeopteryx, peppered moths, and Darwin's finches, a fair investigation of the literature has revealed that Wells has no case, and that these "Icons" are fully deserving of inclusion in biology textbooks. In the cases of the four-winged fruit fly, fossil horses, and fossil hominids, we discover that Wells has not even included these cases in his textbook "evaluation" criteria -- perhaps inclusion of these in the criteria would have raised the textbook grades too much. In any case it is evident that Wells's problems with the four-winged fruit fly, fossil horses, and fossil hominids are not really with textbooks, but with extraneous issues -- the real issues in these cases are Wells's bizarre views about the relationship between genes and development, and his paranoia that biology textbooks are pushing the view that life is meaningless and purposeless. [15]

Another book by Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA fared no better when critically reviewed. Biochemist Lawrence Moran, who maintains a strong professional interest in genomics, reviewed Wells' book in a multi-part blog series and concluded

Wells never defines "junk DNA" correctly. The correct definition of "junk" is DNA that has no known function. Wells pretends that the original definition of junk DNA was "noncoding" DNA. Thus, all those bits of noncoding DNA that have a function are evidence that refutes the notion of junk DNA.

The truth is that no knowledgeable scientist ever suggested that regulatory regions, origins of replication, centromeres, telomeres, genes that produce functional RNA molecules, and chromatin organizing regions were ever classified as junk DNA. They all knew that there was lots of noncoding DNA that had a well-defined function. Right from the beginning of his book, Wells is attacking a strawman and misleading his readers.

That's not the only example of deception. Wells also claims that the existence of large amounts of junk DNA was a prediction of Darwinism and is promoted as proof of Darwinian evolution. This is a lie. Junk DNA actually represents a serious problem for Darwinism (evolution by natural selection) and it certainly was never "predicted" by adaptationists. Having set up this second strawman he proceeds to knock it down (in his mind) thus challenging the very idea of evolution.

[...]

There are many scientists who don't believe that most of our genome is junk. I think it's fair to say that the consensus is swinging against them. More and more scientists are starting to accept the idea that junk DNA is supported by evidence and, more importantly, consistent with modern evolutionary theory. Wells gives the opposite impression in his book and he goes out of his way to discredit the reputations of scientists who disagree with him.

The really sad thing about this book is that it could have discussed a real scientific controversy and presented both sides of the scientific case, for and against junk DNA. It's the same problem that we saw in Wells' first book, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?. Instead of discussing genuine scientific controversies, Wells chooses to misrepresent science in order to discredit evolution and impugn the reputations of "Darwinists." [17]

Another critically savagted anti-evolution book by the ID-affiliated contributing authors is "Science and Human Origins", co-authored by Casey Luskin, Ann Gauger, and Douglas Axe, who argue that "undirected natural selection is capable of building a human being, critically assess fossil and genetic evidence that human beings share a common ancestor with apes, and debunk recent claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple." [18] The fact that such a radical claim was not advanced in the primary scientific literature, and that none of the authors are experts in palaeoanthropology or human genetic, and that only two of them were scientists (Luskin was a lawyer when he co-wrote the book) alone is enough to cast considerable doubt on its credibility. Evolutionary biologist Paul McBride, in a multi-part review shows that the book's arguments are frankly risible:
At the heart of this chapter, after the scene is set for why we should care, is an argument that positive, natural selection--that is, Darwinian selection--is incapable of producing biological novelties. Here, Axe reiterates the work that Gauger already discussed in the first chapter. Interestingly, Axe is interested in whether selection can cause one protein with a given function to evolve into another protein with a different, target function. While Axe claims that he and Gauger "bent over backwards" to make the task relatively easy, they did not bend over backwards to make the task realistic: evolution does not focus on single genes in isolation. Indeed, puny natural selection was not up to the task--it would take trillions of years, for the change Axe and Gauger had asked of selection.

If Gauger and Axe couldn't get a single protein to evolve a novel function of their choosing then surely massive evolutionary changes are impossible. Actually, no. Gauger and Axe's experiment is a profound misunderstanding of evolution. The real question is not "Can X be turned into Y?" because that sense of direction requires preordination, which is not theorised to be a part of evolution. If we remove this preordination, the question becomes "Can X turn into something else?". We have great, contemporary examples of real biological evolution of substantial novelty that Axe omits from his chapter, yet such examples might have given a hint of some of the possibilities within evolution. Bacteria that degrade nyon for their energy have evolved in the natural environment in the short time since humans invented nylon. Also, Richard Lenski's lab has evolved a strain of E. coli that metabolises citrate as its sole energy source. These are two examples of evolution in real species where new metabolic pathways have formed. That Gauger and Axe can't get protein X to turn into protein Y (and in fact the specific change they test for never occurred in nature) becomes of diminished relevance.

Axe goes on to discuss fitness landscapes, but he does so without mentioning genetic drift. It's all local fitness peaks and positive selection causing dead ends. I might mention at this point, his chapter has references to only a Richard Dawkins book, a 1960s book challenging neoDarwinism, two papers first-authored by Gauger, and only two peer reviewed journal articles from the mainstream literature. As such, Axe is writing with almost no engagement with real arguments from the contemporary evolutionary biology literature. [19]


So much for the credibility of Axe and Gauger. Luskin fares little better:

Even though Luskin complains of a poor hominin fossil record--and of course there are stretches where it is poor--there are multiple H. erectus fossils, and substantial evidence of greatly increasing cranial capacity over time. In fact, this is a key part of why some workers split some of the later H. erectus specimens into a different species, H.heidelbergensis. Whether we accept this or if we prefer to lump them as one species, it is clear that there is important variation in cranial capacity from early to late H. erectus. Early H. erectus have consistently smaller cranial volumes than those dated to the last couple hundred thousand years. Luskin argues for an average cranial capacity greater than 1000cc in H. erectus but such averages are only true for the most recent fossils at the exclusion of earlier ones, and are in fact several hundred cc above the averages of those early fossils. The average cranial volume of early Georgian H. erectus, dating to about 1.7 Mya, is 700cc (see Anton, 2003). Luskin's source does not even acknowledge such small sizes, giving the lower bound for H. erectus as 850cc.

For reference, modern humans have a cranial capacity averaging close to twice the average Georgian specimen. This certainly leaves substantial ground to infer vast differences between us and early Homo in the one area most precious to Luskin. The problem for Luskin is there is no discontinuity in the fossil record between us and early Homo. Hence, we must conclude --contra Luskin -- that there is no evidence of discontinuity in the fossil at the point where humans are singularly most likely to have acquired our truly modern humanness. See the update below for some additional detail.

Luskin concludes by saying:

There are many gaps and virtually no plausible transitional fossils that are generally accepted, even by evolutionists, to be direct human ancestors. Thus, public claims of evolutionists to the contrary, the appearance of humans in the fossil record appears to be been anything but a gradual Darwinian evolutionary process. The Darwinian belief that humans evolved from apelike species requires inferences that go beyond the evidence and is not supported by the fossil record.

Luskin's case to reject common descent is thoroughly unconvincing, and he gives little cause to make an exception for humans. In addition, if the hominin fossil record is so definitively problematic there should be a testable alternative framework by which we can interpret what we do find. And what is this alternative? Luskin does not propose one. [20]

In an appendix to this post, McBride notes that Luskin's claims have been rebutted several times, yet six years after this, was still making the same debunked claims:

Richard Hoppe has kindly pointed me to several posts by Nick Matzke addressing hominin cranial evolution, also demonstrating the lack of discontinuity that Luskin has claimed.

The breathtaking thing is, Matzke's posts, here and here deal specifically with Luskin's claims back in 2006. As well as raw cranial capacity, he shows the temporal progression as a proportion of body mass. Yet, six years kater, Luskin's argument remains firm in the face of the evidence: he is still arguing in 2012 that there is a massive gap in the hominin fossil record - that modern humans arrived with effectively modern brain capacity as Homo erectus. [21]

The intellectual dishonesty is staggering. It also makes it impossible to take anything seriously written by Luskin.

Conclusion

Again, I stress that this is not a book review as at the time of writing the book had not been released. It is entirely possible that the anti-evolution arguments in the book will be so compelling that mainstream science will regard this book as a watershed moment in science when evolution was overturned. However, given that most of the ID-affiliated contributing authors have already advanced their ideas in print over the last few years, and had them savaged by the scientific mainstream, this possibility is remote at best. Given the burden of proof lies exclusively on the anti-evolutionists to make their case, something more substantive than a book published by a conservative Christian publishing house is required to meet that claim. I would trust that anyone who has been counseled to purchase this book as the ultimate evolution-killer would exercise critical thinking and caution before falling what looks like yet another chapter in the long, sad history of conservative Christian science denialism.


References

1. Historian of science Ronald Numbers, in commenting on the Discovery Institute’s notorious “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”, a list of ‘scientists who dissent from Darwin’ noted that “[a]ter more than a decade of effort the Discovery Institute proudly announced in 2007 that it had got some 700 doctoral-level scientists and engineers to sign “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” Though the number may strike some observers as rather large, it represented less than 0.023 percent of the world's scientists. On the scientific front of the much ballyhooed "Evolution Wars", the Darwinists were winning handily. The ideological struggle between (methodological) naturalism and supernaturalism continued largely in the fantasies of the faithful and the hyperbole of the press.” Alexander, Denis; Numbers, Ronald L. (2010). Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p 328

2. There is of course no little hypocrisy in the stance of the special creationist who dismisses any attempt to remind people of the overwhelming nature of scientific support for evolution as an appeal to numbers while simultaneously appealing to a few hundred names on a list as evidence that evolution is a ‘theory in crisis.’

3. Geocentrist Geradous Bouw obtained a PhD in astronomy from Case Western Reserve University in 1973. http://www.geocentricity.com/bibastron/bouw_bio.html

4. This section has been adapted from this previous post.

5. https://ncse.com/library-resource/analysis-discovery-institutes-bibliography

6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sternberg_peer_review_controversy

7. Gishlick A, Matzke N, Elsberry W.R. "Meyer's Hopeless Monster" Panda's Thumb Aug 24 2004

8. Falk D "Signature in the Cell" BioLogos Blog Dec 28 2009

9. Matheson S "Signature in the Cell: Chapter 3" Quintessence of Dust 6 Feb 2010

10. Venema D "Seeking a Signature" Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (2010) 62:276-283

11. Matzke N "Meyer's Hopeless Monster - Part II" Panda's Thumb June 19 2013

12. Prothero D "Stephen Meyer's Fumbling Bumbling Amateur Cambrian Follies" SkepticBlog Aug 28 2013

13. Marshall C.R. "When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship" Science (2013) 341:1344

14. Wells J "Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong" (2002: Regnery Publishing)

15. Matzke N "Icons of Obfuscation: Jonathan Wells's book Icons of Evolution and why most of what it teaches about evolution is wrong" TalkOrigins 23rd January 23 2004

16. Wells J "The Myth of Junk DNA" (2011: Discovery Institute Press)

17.  Moran L "The Myth of Junk DNA by Jonathan Wells" Sandwalk 24th October 2011

18. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Human-Origins-Ann-Gauger/dp/193659904X

19. http://apomorph.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/science-and-human-origins-chapter-2.html

20. http://apomorph.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/science-and-human-origins-chapter-3.html

21. ibid