I’m going to have to address some of your provocations later, particularly since I don’t have Pringle’s book in hand. Is that where the Dobzhansky note is? What exactly does he have to say?

I wasn’t hoping for anything that might make intelligent design or any other form of creationism sound scientific to you. It may seem heretical to my creationist/ID friends, but too many of their arguments are political in nature, and thus uninteresting to me.

What can I say about Weismann and Mendel? Let me finish reading Elliott Sober’s Philosophy of Biology and I’ll get back to you.

Don’t get a hernia straining at those gnats. The gnats are probably refugees from Morgan’s fly room.

Go back and review Dobzhansky’s note that evolution is the binding framework of all the rest of biology, that “nothing makes sense” in biology, except in the light of evolution.

Should we listen to Dobzhansky? As a refugee from Stalin’s reign of terror, as a life-long, devout Christian, his views might shed some light on the issue.

There’s a rumor that Lysenko didn’t like bright lights. No cockroach does — they are “negatively photo-tropic.” You may want to get the book and actually read it. It’s a tragedy without the politics considered. It’s an almost Biblical story, with Vavilov’s brother winning promotion under Lysenko, in a bizarre set of circumstances that will wrench your gut and make you shake your head at the insanity of it all.

Does this book propose anything that might make intelligent design or any other form of creationism scientific, or less brain sucking? No.

You’ll do well to read it. Let us know when you do.