Jerry Coyne represents himself as the epitome of science, reason and critical thinking. But “Dr. Reason” or shall we say “Dr. EvolutionIsTrue” often ends up as the butt of jokes and sarcasm in the ID community.
He got hoodwinked recently. He was pranked into believing a particular internet account was real and then started quoting from it to support his arguments. Turned out his evidence was from a faked source. Finally someone intervened to stop Coyne from making anymore a joke of himself. Coyne was forced to make a retraction:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/more-twier-hilarity/
But more seriously, Coyne might not make retractions when fellow scientists discover serious flaws in his own work. First I point out physicists have overturned his claims that the “backward” wiring of the human retina is a design flaw. In fact because the wiring acts as light channel, the wiring acts serves an important photon segregating function. He totally embarrassed himself:
(Phys.org) —Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly.
Hear that? Coyne’s ideas are called folly.
But that’s not all, he got called on the carpet by nuclear chemist Jay Wile who pointed out Coyne didn’t even bother consulting basic embryology textbooks. Coyne claims lanugo hair has no function and uses his false claim as evidence evolution is true. Wile point out Coyne’s error:
From about the third month lanugo hair (Latin, lana = wool) hair is initially formed and it has a role in binding vernix to skin.
Indeed, this is such a well-known fact that review materials for the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam discuss it. For example, Philip R. Brauer in his review book, Human embryology: the ultimate USMLE step 1 review says:
Vernix caseosa is a culmination of sebaceous gland secretions and dead epidermal cells, and the lanugo hair helps retain it on the outer skin surface.
I do credit Coyne with getting one thing right
In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to [the pseudoscience of] phrenology than to physics.
ERRATA:
Correction: ORCs apply to chromosomes, not genes.
Oh, so you’re of the silly USAmerican school that purports every believing Muslim, Christian, Jew and Baha’i is (i.e. simply must be) a ‘creationist’ by definition? Thus, for you, ‘belief in God’ automatically equates with ‘creationism’? Well, then you and Sal should enjoy a hoodwinked and duped ‘creationists of the world unite!’ dance together 😉
YECism is associated with GOD. It’s a distinction without a difference.
Is the “Intelligent Designer” one and the same as your GOD then? As that’s the really interesting question.
Why are you like this, sal?
Do you think your antics are impressive? That they somehow will draw converts to your side?
Do you not think that people can, as has been implied, simply google to see how many times you have made a fool of yourself, how you embellish the credentials and relevance of your heroes, etc.?
Give it a rest.
Sal writes:
Nuclear chemist. Jay wile writes books for Christian home schoolers. Why did you not mention that?
I was once in a conversation with George Howe, Jerry Bergman’s co-author on the book about how all vestigial organs have function (and thus cannot be vestigial). I explained to Howe that the auricularis muscles in humans have no discernible function, that most people have no control over them and so forth. Howe smugly claimed that he had just used them to adjust his glasses, therefore, they were functional. This is what i see here. Unlike Wile, I have a background in biology – in fact, I have taught embryology for over a decade at the college level.
If Wile thinks that because lanugo ‘helps to hold sloughed skin cells and sebum’ onto the surface of a fetus and that this is a “function” of lanugo and therefore Coyne is all washed up, all we have here is that classic nit-picking, hyper-parsing nonsense that desperate creationists are known for, NOT some sort of meaningful take down of Coyne.
A wrench can also be used as a hammer, but a ‘function’ of a wrench is not to hammer nails.
This is pretty pathetic, even by your standards.
I disagree.
1. because I’m a jerk
2. if I get under your skin or that of specialist, you might help provide free-of-charge peer-review for some teaching materials I’m writing
So, now that you displayed your hand as a college level professor of biology, what say you of the “backward” retinal wiring. Are the physicists correct or is Coyne correct?
Sal, in your own words, tell us how an optimized backward wired retina is better than an optimized forward wired retina.
Petrushka,
The wiring acts as an optical segregator. It doesn’t get in the way, it’s part of the optical processing cascade. That’s what the physics paper was about. That’s why the article I cited from Phys.org called Coyne (and other’s view), “folly”.
No one has challenged it.
This isn’t a criticism of the common descent hypothesis, it criticizing is the claim of “bad design”.
Finally, are Rube Goldberg machines “bad design”? That’s exactly the problem with biologists arbitrarily deciding something is “bad design” therefore there is no Intelligent Designer. Life is one of the most incredible rube Goldberg mechanisms in existence. That’s why the Rube Goldberg role of the peacock’s tail made Darwin sick. Natural Selection should not make such Rube Goldberg contraptions.
Sal
How does Intelligent Design explain the Peacock’s tail?
That’s nonsense. Of course it gets in the way. The fact that evolution optimized a crippled system doesn’t argue that that an optimized non-crippled system couldn’t be better.
There are all kinds of optimizations, real and possible.
So you have no basis for assuming that an eye with inverted receptors is better than the cephalopod design, just because evolution has found ways to compensate for bad design. An optimized good design will generally be better than an optimized bad design.
The vertebrate blind spot is not trivial. Brains fill in missing information with likely stuff, but not real stuff. I was nearly blind in one eye for several years. I did not perceive myself as blind in one eye. The world looked normal. But I was constantly bumping into things or spilling things, because my brain filled in the blurred area with stuff. But the fill in failed to warn me when there was something important.
Anyway, if one eye is better then the other why did the designer use both Sal?
And why, in the same environment and similar viewing needs, are cephalopods exclusively using one “design” and vertebrates quite another? I could possibly see how one might be better in a certain context, and another in a different context, but context explains nothing while heredity explains it very well indeed.
Well, that’s evolution, unless it’s coincidence, stupidity, or the gets-away-with-anything “designer.” Creationists of every stripe stick with the latter, because explaining life matters not at all to them, while concluding “designer” simply is what matters.
Glen Davidson
That’s really where creationism goes brain-dead stupid.
How’s that working out for you?
Yes. Sorry. Glad you’re doing better now.
It makes for good cake.
I can’t say enough good things about cataract surgery.
Pleased everything turned out well for you. I’m waiting for artificial retinal implants to become routine. 😉
Regarding human vs cephalopod eye. Many species of Cephalopoda occupy niches that have very low light levels compared to the African savannah. Good or better is more meaningful when a sensory system is considered in the context of its niche.
Well, at least that was finally made public.
If you know ID is so vacuous, why are you a supporter? Do you think the Peacock tail was designed Mung?