New "Reports of the NCSE" is out

Here. I was especially interested in a couple of articles. One, by Lorence G and Barbara J Collins, is More Geological Reasons Noah’s Flood Did Not Happen (pdf). It contains a good discussion of what “uniformitarianism” means in contemporary geology, as distinguished from its 19th century usage.

Another is from James A Shapiro, University of Chicago geneticist, whose ideas about an alleged paradigm shift in evolutionary theory have been severely criticized by (among others) Jerry Coyne, also at the U of Chicago. See

James Shapiro, in his attempts to forge a new evolutionary paradigm, is reduced to going after my commenters

James Shapiro gets evolution wrong again

James Shapiro goes after natural selection again (twice) on HuffPo

Jim Shapiro continues his misguided attack on neo-Darwinism

Larry Moran reviews Shapiro’s anti-Darwinian book; and another new anti-evolution book is about to appear.)

Shapiro’s article in the new RNCSE, however, is an attempted rebuttal of Larry Moran’s scathing RNCSE review of Shapiro’s new book, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. Moran’s review concluded

Shapiro, like [Richard von] Sternberg, is widely admired in the “intelligent design” community and there’s a good reason for this. This book is highly critical of old-fashioned evolutionary theory (neo-Darwinism) using many of the same silly arguments promoted by the Fellows of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Those fellows are dead wrong and so is Shapiro.

Fun times.