Alles Klar? Jerry Coyne on an “Argument from Incredulity”

Alex Kacelnik, archerfish, argument from incredulity, Evolution, guesses, inferences, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, larval wasp, Life Sciences, nature video, Popular Science Monthly, Stefan Schuster, University of Oxford, Why Evolution Is True
If you look at Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution Is True from over the past weekend, you will find his rebuttal to what Coyne calls an argument from incredulity. He comments, “You will recognize this argument as the basis for Intelligent Design.” We have taken Coyne’s rebuttal, deleted the inessentials, and placed in bold all of the inferential steps, credulous guesses, and other leaps of imagination. It is astonishing that anyone would think the result a scientific argument, or, even, an argument at all. From “A creationist writes in espousing the Argument from Incredulity,” suitably modified: Let’s take the larval wasp…The way to address the incredulity argument is to postulate a plausible step-by-step process in which each step is adaptive…. In the case of the wasp, all that is required is that…
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