First, their supposed rebuttal begins with -- and is characterized throughout by -- a condescending tone and personal attacks on Meyer's motives.
Not a promising beginning to the daunting job of defending a sow's ear against the charge of not being a silk purse.
Four-fifths of the way down the page, and the counselor is still telling the jury what he's going to prove someday:
Second, GME claim that Meyer's article contains "serious mistakes" that include "errors in facts and reasoning.” Yet, as we will show, GME misunderstand and/or misrepresent important aspects of Meyer's argument. This calls into question the relevance of some of their critiques and their overall judgment about the quality of Meyer’s reasoning.
By comparison, the "GME" paper is very specific in its charges and summons solid evidence.
Bibliographic search engines such as PubMed make it easy for literature bluffers to compile long lists of citations. The literature bluffer, however, rarely explains the arguments or evidence contained in the publications on the list. That would defeat the bluffer's purpose, which is not really to address the merits of the case, but rather to overwhelm the reader with the apparent weight of scientific authority. The reader is then left with the work of actually studying the publications and assessing their relevance.
The charge--well, one of the charges--is that Meyer like Behe before him ignores the existence of gene duplication, subractive mutations, and several other elements that destroy the "It has to happen this way or it can't happen at all" strawman origin of biological complexity. Supposedly, this slight can be justified by the controversial--Nay!--conjectural nature of such elements, which are not recognized in real science.
The citations document that Meyer like all IDers routinely and brazenly filters reality, presenting a picture edited to the desired effect, ignoring the obvious issues, knocking down strawmen, etc. The treatment of the elements (gene duplication, subractive mutations, etc.) inside the papers is thus not the real issue. The issue is whether such elements are recognized and dealt with routinely in the real scientific literature and they are.
Furthermore, the citation list is only evidence for two charges against Meyer, specifically the selectiveness of citations and the dodging of relevant issues. So far, this defense of Meyer promises to deal with only a fraction of the criticisms of Meyer's paper raised by "GME," who in several places mention that their criticisms are only a preliminary outline of the problems with Meyer's paper and are not an exhaustive list.
Then, the promises are not fulfilled. The offered refutation is in the mail, somewhere. All we have are the wish list of promises. You can ask Mark Geragos, attorney for Scott Peterson, if a high-falutin' opening statement is good enough.
subtractive