What’s the biggest failure of the critics who tried to knock down the argument Steve Meyer makes in Darwin’s Doubt — Matzke, Prothero, Cook in The New Yorker, Farrell in National Review, etc., with the important exception of Marshall in Science? As Meyer says above, it’s the failure to wrestle with or really even to properly acknowledge the book’s main argument. That is, the problem of where all the new genetic and epigenetic information needed to build the Cambrian animals came from.
With the passage of exactly a year today (June 18) since the book came out in hardback, that’s still true. In fact, at Panda’s Thumb, Nick Matzke has posted a response to the new Epilogue in Darwin’s Doubt (“Meyer’s Hopeless Monster, Part III“). The Epilogue answers the main arguments that the critics did make. Matzke, once you look past the bluster, insults, horn-tooting and obfuscating technical talk, is still offering the excuse that due to cladistic analyses he doesn’t have to answer the book’s primary contention.
It’s like the note from the doctor or your mom that gets you out of school on the day of the big test. You may be home watching reruns on TV, but meanwhile in the classroom the test goes on. The questions it asks still matter, and eventually you’ll be called on to answer them.
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