Commentary on the so-called Creation/Evolution/Intelligent Design Debate and Right-Wing nuttery in general - and please ignore the typos (I make lots!)

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Walter ReMine, at it again

Out of internet discussion board 'retirement', the "you misrepresent me" kid is back, writing the same unsupported gibberish and continuing to pat himself ont he back...

Incredible...

3 comments:

FreezBee said...

Hmm ... interesting!

For a few days I have been working in the Wikipedia article about Haldane's Dilemma, and I have had the joy of Walter ReMine's help at this.

In the linked thread, ReMine writes:

In that thread I challenged evolutionists (or anyone else) to explain (via the evolutionary literature) the fundamentals of Haldane's Dilemma. How does it work? How does it limit the substitution rate?

Well, that was, what I was trying to do - trying to go all back to good ol' Haldane himself. I had to stop that to deal with ReMine's eagerness at informing the general public about his "recent clarification".

I wrote a paper clarifying the fundamentals of Haldane's Dilemma, and submitted it to three mainstream science journals, where it was reviewed by evolutionary geneticists. At the first two journals, it was rejected as incorrect. At the third journal, it was acknowledged as "correct" by evolutionists Warren Ewens and James Crow. Nonetheless, they rejected it from publication on the astonishing grounds that my paper is unnecessary because they and their associates already "knew" my material "in the 1970s".


Hmm, the only review I've seen published is Joe Felsenstein's. So unfortunately we only have ReMine's interpretation of the reviews.

What does "correct" mean? It's correct that 2+2=4, but hardly of much informative interest.

It looks to me, as if ReMine is trying to propel himself forward as an acknowledged scientist - but that may take more than having a paper rejected.

brerjohn said...

I appreciate ReMine's challenges. His suggestion that things have the appearance of supporting evolution until more closely examined because of the message things are neither made by multiple designers nor in the absence of a designer is a unique one. I think his theory should be further examined regardless whether he has some certain credentials. The question is... does he know how to play the "game" of science? If so, let him take on the big boys.

Doppelganger said...

His lack of credentials is irrelevant in terms of his arguments - his arguments fail because his lack of credentials (i.e., a relevant background knowledge and education) allow him let his religious dogma drive his "science."

His 'theory' is recognized only by himself and a handful of loyalists - even other creationists do not think much of his claims, and he has grown more popular with the ID crowd than the YEC crowd of late, despite the fact that he is a YEC.

ReMine's claims are moot. They were moot when he made them, but his gigantic ego will not allow him to even consider that he might be wrong. He insists that Haldane's 1957 population genetics model is absolutley true and accurate in all circumstances, despite the fact that many observations and experiments have shown that, while being an excellent null hypothesis and such, it is largely inapplicable in most circumstances.

Not so, says ReMinne, who has never done any relevant experiments or made any scientific observations. He relies on argument by quote, argument by assertion, and argument by force of confidence.

He can't play with the big boys, that is why he is an adjunct "instructor" at a YEC Christian college and has as his only outlets ID/YEC public relations websites and magazines. If he could play with the big boys, he wouldn't have resorted to the silly antics he did when his big 'paper' got rejected. He would have done what any other real scientist does and tried to resubmit. Instead, he just went on a whine-fest and claimed it was a big conspiracy.

Having read his paper, I can see why iot was rejected - it was written like a high school essay, most of his claims were redundant and trivial, and his conclusions were speculative at best.

But no, you go ahead and think them worthy.