Answers in Genesis is apparently still running their own vanity journal, the Answers Research Journal, and the garbled nonsense that finds its ways into its pages is still strangely fascinating. Many of the contributors to the journal are completely unknown, and we have to admit that we have no clear idea who Mitchel Soltys might be. For volume 4 of the Answers journal, however, Soltys penned “Toward an Accurate Model of Variation in DNA”, which is, to be honest, more annoyingly tiresome than fascinating. In the paper – discussed here (yes, there is a lot of toward, in the gesturing sense) Soltys flogs the long-dead creationist “information cannot originate in statistical processes” gambit, which, as always, is based on fully failing to understand “information” and what it might mean in the context of genetics. (Yes: the “information is a code, and a code requires intentions” should sound like a pretty silly equivocation even to those who don’t know anything about DNA or information theory; and yes: Soltys does cite Werner Gitt, and no: he doesn’t address any of the damning objections to Gitt’s claims.) And just to cover his bases, Soltys added a standard “[m]utations don’t result in new genes” stock phrase, completely without backing it up. The really telling passage in the paper, however, is “As we continue our discussion we could use actual gene mappings, but that would be overly large and complex […]”: yes: science, detail and fact is uninterestingly complicated. The primary aim of the article is, relying on analogies, to come up with a definition of “biblical kind”, “[t]he set spanned by all organisms having the same instructional segments and structural arrangements in DNA.” Supporting data? Oh, ye doubting fools.
Diagnosis: Nonsensical pseudoscientist. Probably a very minor figure, though, and unlikely to win many new converts to pseudoscience.