#1549: Gil Dodgen

An admittedly pretty old picture

Gil Dodgen is a software engineer, classical pianist and exasperating creationist who writes for the creationist tripe-pit Uncommon Descent, mostly about scientific topics he really doesn’t know anything about (including topics one would expect him to know something about), predictably failing to be even remotely aware that he doesn’t know anything about them – a familiar cognitive shortcoming. He is also a member of Dembski’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab, which is a website and not a lab. He provides a brilliantly apt summary of his efforts (and those of his fellow bloggers) here.

A large part of his rants about evolution seems to be written under the assumption that evolution is random (“tornado in a junkyard”), which it isn’t, but Dodgen seems rather uninterested in actually trying to understand how it is supposed to work since strawman caricatures are much easier to overturn. Another fine example of his argumentative powers can be found here. Dodgen has, like many of his fellows, for years predicted the imminent demise of Darwinism, which is just about the only (reasonably precise) prediction the ID folks have come up with. It has also been falsified. To which the ID folks usually respond they way they usually do to empirical data.

Diagnosis: Well, the Dunning-Kruger effect hardly comes any denser than this. Completely exasperating.