Ugh

I turned on the TV this morning to try to distract myself from being sick, and what did I find but Michael Behe spouting his nonsense on C-SPAN's Washington Journal (the Nov. 21 program; clips should be online for a few weeks). I'll admit I was trying to find some bad TV to watch, but yeesh, I was trying to make my headache better, not worse.

Behe made many ridiculous statements during the program, but I'll focus on just one. In response to a question asking why there were no journal articles supporting intelligent design, Behe talked about Meyer (2004), an article published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (a peer reviewed journal that focuses on taxonomy). The Panda's Thumb has a huge set of links on the article, but suffice it to say that even the journal that published the article stated, in hindsight, that the paper should never have been published in the journal. Behe tried to make the incident appear as a though a smear campaign had occurred against the journal's editor; the truth of the matter is that the article contained awful science (if one can even call it science), and should never have been printed in a peer-reviewed journal in the first place.

Meyer, Stephen C. 2004. The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 117(2):213-239.