Dr. Cornelius G. Hunter, Biochemist and Fool

I just discovered Dr. Cornelius G. Hunter, the "scientist" attack dog from the Discovery Institute who is wasting his life defending creationism. I probably should ignore the guy. He's such a sad waste of talent. But like so many of the leaders of the creationist movement, he actually manages to fool a lot of people, and that's not something you can ignore.

Hunter has a PhD in biophysics and computational biology, which gives credibility to his sham science. For every article he's written, you can easily find ten from reputable scientists that resoundingly refute his crazy "proofs." Real scientists spend their time discovering new things and improving our lives. Hunter seems to spend all of his time trying to destroy the work of others. That alone shows his dishonesty – if creationism (aka "intelligent design") was a real branch of science, Hunter could find gainful employment making new discoveries of his own.

I'll leave it to the biochemists to refute his complex, convoluted arguments about DNA. But even an amateur like me can find this guy's mistakes. Hunter wrote a paper with holes so big that even a freshman science or philosophy student could drive a truck through them. In a nutshell, he argues:

• Evolution theory has grown more complex since Darwin's time.
• The principle of parsimony says that given two theories that both explain something equally well, we should prefer the simplest of the two.
• God's magic is a simpler explanation for the complexity of life than our understanding of DNA's evolution.
• Therefore, evolution is wrong and creationism is right.

This is so childish it's embarrassing. Hunter takes a guideline, "scientific theories are supposed to be parsimonious," and mistakes it for an axiom that can be used in a proof. It's a stunning error of logic that no amateur philosopher, much less a PhD scientists, should make.

The idea that a simpler theory is better than a complex one is an observation, not a fundamental principle of science. Duh. You can't use it as part of a deductive argument. But Hunter, a purported biochemist with a specialty in nonlinear systems, conveniently overlooks this glaringly obvious mistake.

For example, look at protein folding. There is nothing simple about it, and no parsimonious theory will ever be discovered that explains how proteins fold. It's just plain complicated. Does that make it wrong? Or more importantly, does that mean God personally folds each of the billions of proteins in your body? That's what Hunter seems to be implying.

Or what about chemical reactions? To this day, there is no simple way to predict what will happen when you mix two chemicals together. Even the most powerful computers, running at billions of computing cycles per second, take days or even months to model a simple chemical reaction. And that's modeling, not a theoretical prediction. There is no parsimonious theory that can explain it. Except one, I suppose: "God's magic makes the chemicals react." Yes, that is indeed simpler. But no competent scientist would write and publish a paper with this as its thesis. Except maybe Cornelius Hunter.

Hunter's basic error of logic must be an embarrassment to the University of Illinois where he got his PhD.

Once again, I'm really saddened by the incredible waste of talent and intellectual energy by the whole theory of creationism. Here you have a man who is obviously intelligent, one who could make real contributions to science. Instead, he wastes his entire career on creationist nonsense. Worse, he forces real scientists to waste their time refuting his crazy theories and defending science itself.