Is “The Imminent Demise of Evolution” still imminent?

Ten years ago, in 2006, intelligent design creationist William Dembski predicted that in a decade evolution would be toast:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won’t matter in a decade.

By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be “dead.”

Yeah, well…

Meanwhile I stumbled upon this today (dated 11-17-2016) from young Earth creationist Richard William Nelson:

Despite a flood of challenges since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 by Charles Darwin and more than 150 years of unprecedented scientific efforts in the history of mankind to prove otherwise, the evidence examined in nature tooled with unprecedented technology continues to be compatible with the Genesis record written by Moses…

…Evolution, once a theory in crisis, is now in crisis without even a cohesive unifying theory.

Biological evolution exists only as a philosophy, not a science.

For a long list of creationists predicting the death of evolution see this following:

The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism by Glen Morton

4 thoughts on “Is “The Imminent Demise of Evolution” still imminent?”

Reblogged this on Primate's Progress and commented:
The demise of evolution, and of the geology necessary to support it, has been imminent since 1825. I hear and tremble.

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Ah! That’ll be the William Dembski who, on page 212 ( an easy to remember number if it make your blood boil) of his book “No Free Lunch” wrote:

“The significance of the No Free Lunch Theorems is that if an evolutionary algorithm actually proves successful at locating a complex specified target, the algorithm has to exploit a carefully chosen fitness function.This means that any complex specified information in the target had first to reside in the fitness function….

… The No Free Lunch Theorems show that evolutionary algorithms , apart from careful fine-tuning by a programmer are no better than blind search and thus no better than pure chance. Consequently, these theorems cast doubt on the power of the Darwinian mechanism to account for all biological complexity. ”

Darwinian Natural Selection is a process in which information is extracted from the fitness function relating to the environment in which a population of reproducers reproduce. That is why: birds can fly, fish can live under water, spiders can spin webs and polar bears are white.

It follows that William’s caveat “apart from careful fine-tuning by a programmer” , has a non-ID parallel of relevance in the natural world which renders his argument self-demolishing.

Sadly, William is way to smart to not have been fully aware of that when he wrote those words.

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