I am not interested in the cat fight about arguments etc...
What was the article about and what were the criticism -- I'm talking methods and data and analysis.
Forget the political stuff.
Ok, posted below is a rather lengthy quote from the article. The faulty logic of the ID article invalidates the argument, and to quote myself in the previous post:
Aye, there's the rub. To argue that something "cannot be explained" by blah, blah, blah. This is a purely subjective judgment, (substitute 'opinion.')
One cannot "Prove a Negative" (i.e., "cannot be explained") and even if one could - that wouldn't prove a "Designer" since another explanation not yet considered may be the actual answer.
The criticism from the link is as follows:
The Power of Negative Thinking
Negative argumentation against evolutionary theories seems to be the sole scientific content of “intelligent design”. That observation continues to hold true for this paper by Meyer.
1. Meyer gives no support for his assertion that PE proponents proposed species selection to account for “large morphological jumps”. (Use of the singular, “punctuated equilibrium”, is a common feature of antievolution writing. It is relatively less common among evolutionary biologists, who utilize the plural form, “punctuated equilibria”, as it was introduced by Eldredge and Gould in 1972.)
2. Meyer makes the false claim that PE was supposed to address the problem of the origin of biological information or form. As Gould and Eldredge 1977 noted, PE is a theory about speciation. It is an application of Ernst Mayr’s theory of allopatric speciation — a theory at the core of the Modern Synthesis — to the fossil record. Any discussion of PE that doesn’t mention allopatric speciation or something similar is ignoring the concept’s original meaning.
3. Meyer also makes the false claim that PE was supposed to address the origin of taxa higher than species. This class of error was specifically addressed in Gould and Eldredge 1977. PE is about the pattern of speciation observed in the fossil record, not about taxa other than species.
4. Meyer makes the false claim that genetic algorithms require a “target sequence” to work. Meyer cites two of his own articles as the relevant authority in this matter. However, when one examines these sources, one finds that what is cited in both of these earlier essays is a block of three paragraphs, the content of which is almost identical in the two essays. Meyer bases his denunciation of genetic algorithms as a field upon a superficial examination of two cases. While some genetic algorithm simulations for pedagogy do incorporate a “target sequence”, it is utterly false to say that all genetic algorithms do so. Meyer was in attendance at the NTSE in 1997 when one of us [WRE] brought up a genetic algorithm to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, which was an example where no “target sequence” was available. Whole fields of evolutionary computation are completely overlooked by Meyer. Two citations relevant to Meyer’s claims are Chellapilla and Fogel (2001) and Stanley and Miikkulainen (2002). (That Meyer overlooks Chelapilla and Fogel 2001 is even more baffling given that Dembski 2002 discussed the work.)