> purports to show that reproduction cannot be explained by natural selection and is irreducibly teleological<p>Anyone who's looked into creationist arguments, or argued with creationists, will immediately be put on guard by this sentence fragment.<p>First, reproduction is necessary for natural selection to take place. It's a precondition, not something to be explained.<p>Second, "irreducible" is one of those words that is somehow never given a definition that an observer can use to decide that a process or feature is "irreducibly complex", or "irreducibly" anything, really. When you peel off the layers, you end up having to rely on some authority to say, "Feature X is irreducibly complex".<p>Third, "teleological". A philosophical or theological term that invariably gets misused in discussions of biology as a kind of disguised circular argument.<p>I'm not saying that this paper is garbage disguised by a big vocabulary, but I would certainly be alert for rhetorical sleight of hand sneaking in creationism of one kind or another.