My only point in the earlier post was that someone mentioned that Berlinski could have clicked on one of Ichneumon's posts.
He couldn't do that, unless he actually read Free Republic.
Whether or not he knows, or should be expected to know, the information contained within Ichneumon's earlier post is another matter. And if RWP is correct, Berlinski doesn't know what on Earth he's talking about, concerning recent developments in the chemistry of abiogenesis.
He doesn't know, he doesn't point out that he doesn't know, and commits the additional error of assuming his threshold of ignorance is the same as everyone else's--and we have a number of posters pointing out exactly at which point he drives into a ditch.
That's good for the intellectual state of readers of this thread. (I have been given to understand that other famous personages, such as "The Great One" Mark Levin, and possibly Ann Coulter, read Free Republic.)
But is Berlinski himself gonna read it on this thread?
Cheers!
This is indeed the problem. FR is not a primary source of abiogenesis information. It is not even secondary. People who have done important research in the field do not publish here as the primary means of announcing their findings to the world.
Thus, asking whether Berlinksi reads the threads here is something close to irrelevant if not a strawman. The question is whether Berlinksi has availed himself of the public research of the last decade or so in abiogenesis. My particular answer based on long observation of the creation/ID publishing genre is "Yes, but only to get what he considers the 'good stuff' and leaving everything else."
Holy Warrior Recta (Latin plural of the singular rectum--look it up) are allowed to do that. It's for a good cause and all that. Traditional scholarship equates it with lying. When you say the preponderance of evidence is really A, but it's really B, you're a liar if you selectively filtered all the non-A because it doesn't work for your agenda.
I said anyone could do that, meaning "anyone here." Someone writing something that purports to be a review of where we are in abiogenesis research should not need to do that, of course.
The problem is that Berlinski has assumed the mantle of someone qualified to review where we are, but he would appear not to know anything about the evidence inconvenient to the agenda of the un-Discovery Institute of which he is a fellow.
I suspect you're right: that Berlinski doesn't know what's hot in abiogenesis right now. This is probably because he's relying on secondary sources rather than the primary research literature. In this, I have some sympathy for his plight. Not only is the research literature still largely inaccessible online, because most access is subscription only, but it's often rather out of date, because important ideas get discussed at meetings well before they make it into publication; and because outsiders find it hard to determine which papers are taken seriously in a field and which are ignored or laughed at. (I know you know this, it's for the benefit of non-scientists.) I myself am a comparative outsider to abiogenesis, but I do have access to the literature, and the chance to talk to some of the insiders as a peer.
The people he cites as having read his m/s, those I recognize, are cranks themselves, so he won't have gotten anything useful from them. Still, it's better than most creationist writing.