Panda's Thumb Hall of Fame
From EvoWiki
Introduction
This page is the virtual back wall of the virtual pub the Panda's Thumb. Here shall be collected posts that are so brilliant -- in terms of having an important point, making it, documenting it, etc. -- that they deserve special recognition, referencing over the longer term, and possible further life as FAQ articles at more staid locations such as talkdesign or talkorigins. It's the virtual equivalent of winning the weekly pub quiz at The Field, the best Irish Pub in San Diego, except that at The Field they give you a free T-shirt.
Additional categories may be added as people are inspired. If they don't seem so inspired the next morning, they might get removed.
Exceptionally coherent and well-documented posts
- Ian Musgrave, ID research, is that all there is?, on the evolution of protein-protein binding interactions.
- Ian Musgrave, Dembski and Human Origins, referencing a Dembski essay on human origins and pointing out how Dembski completely missed the Comparison of the Human and Great Ape Chromosomes as Evidence for Common Ancestry
- Ed Brayton, in "The Passion of the IDalogue", scores Intelligent Design on the Baez Crackpot Index. Actually, reviewing the index, there were a lot of low-scoring criteria that were highly applicable ("5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment") but that Ed skipped over out of kindness.
- Andrea Bottaro, in "Embarassingly short of IDEAs," documents the flaws in the exceedingly poor IDEA Center article, "Can irreducibly complexity be evolved via gene duplication and co-optation of parts?" A good short review of some gene duplication and cooption references.
- PZ Myers, in the "Descent of the testicle." An excellent summary of research on the evolutionary question of why most mammals "let it all hang out." I have seen the question discussed before, but never received an answer that was more than speculation. Myers reviews the hypotheses and recent papers that map the descent of the, um, relevant trait onto a mammalian phylogenetic tree.
Epic take-downs
- Is ID Unfairly Censored?, in which Steve Reuland knocks Phyllis Schafly down a few pegs for her article "Darwinists top the censorship food chain".
