Thoughts in a Haystack

Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority has noticed Casey Luskin, Gofer General of the Discovery Institute, quote mining a review article in Biochemical Journal by Kevin Padian and Nick Matzke. By all means, go to Mike's place to see the details. I'm interested in something a bit different; namely, another example of projection by a DI drone:

It's always amusing how evolutionists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of intelligent design (ID) (i.e. 'no really, this time ID actually is dead!'!).

Glenn Morton is a former creationist of the young-Earth variety who was a minor celebrity in their circles for having written a number of articles on "creation science" ... until he began working as a geologist for an oil company and realized that what he was seeing in the course of his work belied his own arguments. To explain his prior blindness to the evidence, he posited "Morton's Demon" as an explanation of creationist psychology. It's well worth the read, if you're interested in understanding creationism and other movements that ignore the plain evidence in front of their noses.

Another service that Glenn has performed is to gather examples of claims of "The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism." Here's where the projection comes in. If you look at the last ten entries in Glenn's list, eight of them are by DI stalwarts or their allies. A few examples:

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism -- the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level -- will be dead.

- William Dembski, Touchstone, 2004

Darwinian evolution is little more than a historical footnote in biology textbooks.

- Jonathan Wells. World, 2004

It's almost not worth deciding what to do about Darwinism, because it is on the way out anyway.

- Denise O'Leary, Theology Web, 2006

The Darwinist/materialist hegemony over our culture has definitely peaked, and we are privileged to watch the initial tremors that are shaking the Darwinist house of cards.

- Barry Arrington, webmaster at William Dembski's blog, Uncommon Descent, 2008

And, of course, that is merely the tip of the iceberg. Glenn's list goes back to even before Darwin published the Origin. Casey's proclamation would be more honestly recast as follows:

It's always amusing how creationists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of evolution (i.e. 'no really, this time evolution actually is dead!'!).

Wrong again!
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