More of Stephen Meyer's Bad History of Science

Last week I noted how much Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell is selling and wondered whether I should start refuting it. This almost instantly triggered a comment from Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, saying, please, please, do precisely that. Oh well, so much for that idea. If this is what DI wants, this is not what DI is going to get. There is not much to say about Meyer's "God of the Gaps" argument anyway, now applied to the origins of life just as it has previously been applied to the bacterial flagellum, the Cambrian explosion, and so on. Research is going on into the origins of life, but we have not yet solved the mystery. It just isn't scientifically fruitful to invoke "intelligent design" in this context, as if it solves a problem, rather than just raising another one (who designed the super-complex designer, and so ...