The Many Faces of Sal Cordova

The IDiots are getting all excited about Nick Matzke because he dared to criticize Darwin's Doubt, a book about evolution written by a philosopher.

The latest post is by Salvador Cordova (scordova) on Uncommon Descent [Two-faced Nick Matzke].

I don't think I can do full justice to the stupidity in this post, you have to read it yourself. Here's the gist ...

Matzke said, quite correctly, that phylogenetic methods can only detect sister groups, not ancestors. This is pretty obvious in the case of sequences because, in most cases, we don't have access to DNA or proteins from extinct ancestors.

Salvador Cordova thinks he was the first one to realize this ...

Not much difference between what Matzke said and I said! I’ve been telling him that since 2006, and now he finally acknowledges it publicly.

Now that's good for a laugh at the expense of IDiots but it gets even funnier. The IDiots think that the absence of living ancestors proves that god(s) created modern species.

I’ve said that it was creationists (like Linnaeus) before Darwin’s time who lumped humans along with the primates, and the primates along with the mammals, etc. The creationists perceived the “sister groups” with no physical ancestor (which suggests the “parent” was an idea in the mind of God, not a physical common ancestor).

The reason Darwinists have all these phylogenetic conflicts is that the ancestors which would resolve all the conflicts are the very ones they will not admit a priori because those ancestors are conceptual, not physical, and conceptual ancestors are anathema to Darwinsits because conceptual ancestors imply ID.

Like I said, you have to read the whole thing ... if you can stomach it.

I wonder why we call them IDiots?

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Posted in: Rationalism v Superstition