New York Botanical Garden - Beautiful!

We went to the NY Botanical Garden yesterday. It was gorgeous, except the wind chill. It was a first time experience for me, 50 years of living around NYC and had never been there before. Highly recommended, I'll probably go there again for the blossoming of the cherry trees. And again, and agian! It was easy to get to, becoming members felt like the right thing to do, to help green the city.

The Retraction of Granville Sewell

Followers of Uncommon Descent and other Intelligent Design websites may be aware that recently there was a triumphalist announcement by Dr. Dr. William Dembski of the acceptance for publication of a paper by Dr Granville Sewell, a math professor at University of Texas, El Paso. It was exactly the kind of premature "Waterloo" announcement that has backfired on Dembski in the past, and it did this time as well.
Applied Mathematics Letters had accepted the paper, but not yet published it. Dr. Sewell had a prepublication version up on his own site, to which Dembski's UD post was linked.
The paper itself was a repetition of Sewell's argument that SLOT disproves TOE. Sewell's argument is more like FOOT in MOUTH, though that hasn't prevented him from repeating it nearly word-for-word over the years, as Wesley Elsberry showed in a posting on Panda's Thumb.
Looking up the editor of AML, I took it upon myself to apprise him of the error of his ways.
 

Dr Rodin,
 
I am appalled to see a preprint, apparently from Applied Mathematical Letters, of the often repeated and often refuted nonsense of Granville Sewell on an anti-science web site.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/elsevier-publishes-granville-sewells-latest-on-the-second-law/
 
Dr Sewell, whose expertise lies in partial differential equations, has writen several times on the relevance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the topic of evolution. Each time he makes poor arguments that do not show any understanding of the physics or chemistry involved, clearly contradicting the philosophy of your journal.
 
A concise refutation is
http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v76/i11/p1031_s1
 
The reputation of AML will be harmed by publishing this article by Sewell.
 
Yours,
David vun Kannon

Dr. Rodin's response was swift and has been published elsewhere. AML retracted publication. Science wins!

 

A big shoutout of thanks to Dr. William Dembski, whose premature ejaculations helped avoid even more severe embarrassment for AML.