The Discovery Institute Gets a New "Expert"

I have to admit, I find it amazing how desperate the Dishonesty Institute folks are. They're willing to join forces with almost any nonentity, no matter how irrelevant their "expertise", if they toe the "evolution is a hoax and Darwinism is Nazism" party line. I mean, how else can you explain their fascination with David Klinghoffer? Casey Luskin? James Barham? John West? Not exactly Nobel Prize winners there, if you see what I mean.

Of course, their big tent has its limits. Michael Egnor got in a few columns at News & Views, but he's been quiet since this one. Even the Discovery Institute, it appears, has limits on the kind of nonsense they're willing to put up with.

Now they've got a new "expert" on their team: Stephen A. Batzer. Batzer is, at least judging from his cv, the person I might turn to if I wanted someone to give me a "review of recent glazing literature". But the theory of evolution? Not so much.

Here is Batzer's analysis of Sims' famous evolutionary simulation of locomotion strategies: "This program is modeling a very simplistic random search algorithm to produce an output, like a radar searching for an aircraft, or a robo-call computer punching out all the numbers inside of one area code, looking for a mark. The information, process, and therefore success have all been pre-loaded." I mean, you have to really work at it to miss the mark this much.

Congrats, Dishonesty Institute! You and Prof. Batzer deserve each other.