I don't understand these far right-wingers. They are so adamantly anti-evolution, and their arguments are so damned annoyingly stupid. A while back, it was Timothy Birdnow humiliating himself with vacuous nonsense assertively expressed; now it's some guy named Edward Daley's turn. And whoa, it's another doozy that flames out, spirals down, and craters in the very first paragraph.

According to Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, Ph.D., the basic theory of evolution, as it relates to the origins of life on Earth, can be explained by using the following formulas:

1.) M (matter) + T (time) + E (energy) = ABIOGENESIS (the development of living organisms from nonliving matter)

2.) C (cell) + T + E + MUTATION + NATURAL SELECTION (survival of the fittest) = SPECIATION (the evolutionary formation of new biological species into two or more genetically distinct ones)

He does it again deeper into the sludge pit of his essay.

The basic theory of Intelligent Design as it relates to the origins of life on Earth, can be explained by using the following formulas:

1.) M (matter) + T (time) + E (energy) + I (information) = ABIOGENESIS

2.) C (cell) + T + E + I = ALL SPECIES

Isn't it amusing how a non-scientist (or more accurately, an anti-scientist) will try to make his argument look more convincing by inventing an equation? Too bad it is total nonsense. No competent scientist has ever proposed those formulas; they don't make sense, and even on the most basic level of factor analysis they don't work. Abiogenesis is not measured in units of grams+seconds+joules+whatever natural selection is measured in. Stringing letters together in pseudo-algebra is not science.

Daley goes on and on, dredging up the same old stupid creationist arguments that we've all dealt with over and over; it's the usual bad probability arguments, Piltdown Man and peppered moths, Haeckel and mangled homologies. He's just another slow-witted disciple of the anti-evolutionist Wells.

I'm not going to take the whole thing apart—it's not just wrong, it's boring—but here's his first argument.

However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion, and even Darwin knew about the lack of evidence in the fossil record to support his theory a century and a half ago.

At least he spelled "phyla" right, but the rest is garbage.

A phylum is a high-level taxonomic group, an abstraction that describes a clade, a complete group of related organisms. When scientists say that most (not all) phyla arose in the Cambrian, they are not claiming that all species present today were also present then; it doesn't even make sense to claim that a phylum "appeared fully formed". The earliest chordates from the Cambrian look nothing like bony fish or reptiles or birds or mammals or horses or people. The earliest Cambrian arthropods were not lobsters or snow crabs or ants or monarch butterflies. These forms emerged gradually over the next half billion years.

What actually happened is that over the course of several billion years, life diversified in many directions. At the time of the Cambrian, about 30 of these lineages expanded into the "large, multicellular, heterotrophic" organism niche. It's a big planet with many strategies for these early adopters of that lifestyle to follow, so each of these lineages expanded further. The planet is of finite size, however, so those 30+ base forms were sufficient to populate it, and any new niches are filled with progeny of those phyla—so we don't see any new phyla emerging. Because a phylum is a very large taxonomic group, filled with many species, it is also unlikely that any one event can totally wipe out all of its members. The constancy of the number of phylum level groups is not a major issue or surprise.

It's no more surprising than the observation that because my father had 5 brothers and sisters, I can group my cousins into 5 lineages; you'd think I was pretty silly, though, if I claimed that all of my cousins (who were born mostly in the late 50s and 60s and 70s) appeared suddenly in the 30s and 40s, when my aunts and uncles were born. Yet this is what creationists commonly try to imply when they claim that all major animal groups appeared all at once in the Cambrian.

The creationists are also not thinking their comments through. There are no Cambrian rabbits, but there were spineless, headless fish. When the creationists claim that all forms were present in the Cambrian, they are making a useful admission: they are telling us that rabbits evolved from acraniate fish. By implication, they are admitting that there were transitional forms from Pikaia to Oryctolagus.

OK, yadda yadda yadda, Daley goes on and on with these same kinds of peculiar objections that he doesn't really comprehend. Go ahead and write your own rebuttals as an exercise. He concludes with more whining about those evolutionists:

They behave as if they have an exclusive handle on the truth underlying all living things, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and they react like spoiled children whenever anyone attempts to break down their facade. In my opinion, Neo-Darwinism is based as much on the philosophy of naturalism, as it is scientific evidence, and any proponents of Evolution theory who insist that Intelligent Design is somehow a more religious theory, should familiarize themselves with the concept of, "the pot calling the kettle black."

Wrong on all counts. Biologists have a better handle on the subject than some random guy with no training in biology bloviating on a website; we react with laughter when said bloviator puts on a circus parade of bad arguments. Who can blame us? And, ummm, scientific evidence is based on naturalism by definition—does he think bringing in the supernatural would produce valid science? I hope not. He's made another useful confession if he thinks Intelligent Design creationism requires unnatural phenomena.

One other thing: here are Daley's qualifications.

Currently he is the full-time caregiver to his elderly father and a landlord of rental property. Edward has been a salesman, bar doorman, typesetter, and security guard.

While I don't think you need a Ph.D. to discuss evolution intelligently, it does require some competence and study. Daley shows none in his essay, and his experience includes nothing relevant to this field. What is it with property managers and obtuse creationism?