Turns out that Paul Nelson has written on his blog about his visit to UMM.
I continue to be amazed at how damned pleasant he is about all this. The guy looked pretty exhausted to me at the end, and while I love a good intellectual tussle as much as the next ego-laden academic, it all takes energy and motivation to tilt at windmills like this with nothing more than Proof By Insufficient Imagination as backup.
It was also disappointing that he nicely listed many of the key concerns raised (minor issues like “How can intelligent design be tested?”) yet didn’t respond to any of them, or even provide pointers to other writings that address these questions. Not a terribly effective way to convince what he acknowledges is a highly skeptical scientific community. Sigh.
I’ll take this opportunity to comment on one particular weakness which wasn’t addressed in Q&A (I had my hand up, but time ran out) or Pharyngula’s nice summary. Toward the end, Nelson argued that “there wasn’t anything magical about time”, and that simply having eons of it wasn’t enough to make cool and remarkable things happen. He then wandered into a bizarre demonstration of attempting to balance a pen on its tip, arguing that he could try this for millions of years and never get it to balance. The great thing, though, was that in doing so he totally undercut his own point, noting that eventually the tip might wear flat or the table might develop a divot, making it easier to balance.
Sure, in deep space time doesn’t buy you a whole lot because, well, there’s not a lot happening. (Although I’m sure that folks that know far more about deep space than I could point out lots of cool things that are happening there.) But we’re not talking deep space. We’re talking a highly variable environment over both large amounts of time and significant regions of space. Given variability and competition (both of which exist in abundance), time buys you more than my small mind can possibly imagine. Time (with variation) is everything. Nelson needs to spend some time at the Grand Canyon (or any of a zillion other similar features) to really appreciate the power of time.
I’m not inclined to justify Nelson’s blog with the link (which probably isn’t entirely fair, but life is complex). I’ll happily point at one of our students who has the link, though :-). Not surprisingly, I discovered all this via Pharyngula.
One Comment
I had a similar perception about those nicely bulleted and then unanswered questions. After all, time should have been no problem when he did the web posting (-: Was hoping someone who had been there would weigh in, as you have.
Your time question would also have been nice to have been addressed.
I does appear that Nelson and his ilk simply refuse to see rather obvious alternate explanations for things that they see as the Holy Grail (apologies to Monty Python).