A big stink at The Big Think: supposed shortcomings of “Darwinism” by quasi-creationist "thinker"

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http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/a-big-stink-at-the-big-think-the-supposed-shortcomings-of-darwinism-touted-by-a-quasi-creationist-thinker/

So I read the article, ”The trouble with Darwin,” by Kas Thomas. It was dreadful—truly dreadful, carrying the implication that there’s something pretty wrong with modern evolutionary theory.

But modern evolutionary theory is not by any means “Darwin,” although he conflates that theory with what Darwin said in 1859. That’s not kosher because Darwin, while being right in the main, was wrong on several counts (genetics for one). And while there were problems with the theory Darwin adumbrated in 1859, advances in the last 155 years have resolved many of them. Yes, of course there are still things that evolutionary biologists don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with its basic framework.

Excerpt:

. . .

But first, who is Kas Thomas? I hadn’t heard of him, so I looked at his bio at Big Think. This is it:

Kas Thomas is a longtime cognitive dissident and menace to sacred-cow-kind. A graduate of the University of California at Irvine and Davis (with degrees in biology and microbiology) and a former University of California Regents Fellow, Thomas has taught biology, bacteriology, and laboratory physics at the college level. He was on the Inventions Committee at Novell, Inc. and is the holder of seven U.S. software patents. He has a long and varied background in technical writing (most recently serving as a Technology Evangelist for Adobe Systems) and is in love with the word heterodoxy.

Thomas almost certainly wrote that himself, and seems proud to be a contrarian. The problem is that when he applies his heterodoxy to evolution, he produces not a Big Think but a Big Fail.

What, exactly, are those shortcomings of evolution? It turns out that none of them are shortcomings. Some are areas where we already understand stuff (and where Thomas doesn’t seem to know the literature), and others are areas of active research. Further, the implication that evolution is impotent to explain gain of function, as noted in the “Big Idea of the Day,” is not even wrong.

. . . more

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/a-big-stink-at-the-big-think-the-supposed-shortcomings-of-darwinism-touted-by-a-quasi-creationist-thinker/