DI claims evolutionists have ‘no comment’ on RNA World — but they rejected my comment! - The Panda’s Thumb
The common feature of JonathanM’s posts is above-average research for an IDist, but way below-par research in terms of actual scholarship. He knows just enough to seem informed, but doesn’t bother to look up any of the actual research on the questions he asks – he just assumes that whatever problem with evolution that he thinks up over breakfast is some crushing objection that none of the experts has ever thought about before.
Usually this boils down to not a God-of-the-Gaps-Human-Knowledge argument, but a God-of-the-Gaps-in-JonathanM’s-Knowledge argument, which is, I think, an even more devastating mistake than the usual God-of-the-Gaps argument.
Anyhow, as background to the below, a week or two ago JonathanM made a post on UD that claimed various half-baked problems for the natural origin of life, one of which was that the assembly of RNA was difficult, because nature would have to separately sugars, bases, and phosphates separately, and then assemble them. The only problem with this argument, whatever its original merits, is that it was directly falsified by the Sutherland Group’s famous experiments in 2009. Oops! I pointed this out on UD, and although it took some tooth-pulling, got some UD people to more-or-less admit that JonathanM made a mistake there. JonathanM, though, seems to be acting like his sure-thing takedown of the origin of life from a few weeks ago never happened.
All of this may explain why, when I posted the following comment to JonathanM’s RNA World post at the DI website – hours after the original RNA World post was published, if I recall correctly – it said “comment received”, but the moderators never approved it. So there you go, David Klinhoffer – an answer to your question about why there were no challenges to JonathanM.