Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/durstons_devious_distortions.php

> OK, that's pretty impressive.

> How is it possible to stand up in public and emit outright provable 
> *lies* like this? Seriously... is there actually no law against 
> deliberately trying to mislead people?

  I must admit I didn't really understand that article at scienceblogs.

  What I understood from that long text was, basically:

1) "He uses a value of N which is way too small, thus he is misusing the
entire equation and he is a pseudoscientist." While the article notes that
since N is a divisor and not a factor, using a value of N which is too
small actually favors the evolutionary side rather than the creationist
side, but that still matters: He is using the equation wrong, and thus
everything he says is BS.

  I don't really get it. He is using a divisor which is too small,
making the overall result way larger than it should be, making his point
*weaker* rather than stronger, and he *still* gets diminishingly small
probabilities for the evolutionary processes. I suppose that if he had
used the correct value of N, the result would have been even worse from
the evolutionary point of view. Yet this article makes it a bit point
that he is using a value which is too small.

2) "He ignores the value M(Ex) and replaces it with something else." Then
I fail to see how the article explains what would have been the correct
value for M(Ex) and why it was wrong. The article just says it's wrong,
without really saying why, or what it should be.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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