Orac has been trying to get ID creationist neurosurgeon and recent Google-bomb victim Michael Egnor to provide "examples of medical research in which the design inference has made a difference, in which it led to or significantly contributed to new medical knowledge or a new treatment for disease."

This challenge was first issued a little over two weeks ago, and Dr. Egnor has responded at the DI blog. Color me biased, but the example he gives is piss-poor, off-target, and what have you.

Egnor gives the example of Francis Watson and James Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA double helix. He writes:

"To untangle the structure of DNA, they inferred design, not chance. They reversed-engineered [sic] DNA. They collected physical data about the structure of DNA (X-ray diffraction studies, Chargaff's rules, the physical chemistry of nucleotides, etc), and then they designed a model of the molecule to understand its structure and function."

Notice that the last two sentences of that paragraph do not follow from the first, which makes a gloriously unjustified assumption. Watson and Crick weren't interested in whether the DNA molecule achieved its structure via natural selection or as a result of highly industrious micro-muppets residing in cell membranes. The quotes from the scientific duo's letter to Nature that Egnor provides in no way support the belief that they endorsed the idea that DNA was consciously designed rather than yet another by-product of millions of years of evolution.

Egnor then helpfully offers a Wikipedia definition of "reverse engineering." That's great, but is only relevant insofar as Egnor himself pulled the term out of his own arse earlier in his post. A Wikipedia link is not exactly the peer-reviewed, substantive research Orac had asked for.

Egnor continues:

"Watson's and Crick's work of course had nothing to do with Darwinism (except perhaps their laboratory politics, which is another matter)."

This depends on your definition of "nothing," of course. Without "Darwinism," there would be no DNA. It's always possible to make the claim that a given experiment has nothing to do with "Darwinism," even in biology. But this is tantamount to saying that modern rocketry experiments have nothing to do with Newtonism. Evolution is implicit in the work of virtually all biologists; that it's possible to ignore the aeons' worth of processes feeding into an end product in favor of regarding the end product as a convenient "snapshot" or experimental substrate hardly contravenes the reality of evolution.

Egnor adds:

"This is not to say that Watson and Crick believed that DNA was designed by God. They were both atheists. Even molecular biologists who are avowed atheists use the design inference in their work."

I don't think avowed atheists noted (correctly or otherwise) to be using "design inference" in their work are using the term "design" in the same way an ID creationist does, Dr. Egnor. This is the failing of your entire post: You're using the term "design" in exactly the same symbolic way a biologist committed to "Darwinism" does.

He then mumbles some more about reverse engineering, and ends by asking Orac: "Which inference played a greater role in the discovery of the structure and function of DNA: the inference to Darwin's theory of random variation and natural selection, or the inference to design, applying the principles of reverse engineering?"

Egnor is simply not replying to the challenge Orac threw his way. Let's say biochemists discover a particular cell membrane receptor whose function is unknown but whose structure and cytoplasmic coupling mechanisms are easily discerned. It would be possible under such circumstances to "reverse-engineer" a putative physiologic ligand that binds to this receptor, and perhaps to predict what the effect of such a ligand would be. This, of course, does not mean that if, on the basis of their assumptions, biochemists eventually discover a substance in plasma that activates the receptor, the substance was created by a designer. On the other hand, if pharmacologists synthesize a substance that subserves the same function, that's design.

More broadly, the fact that we can make informed inferences about biological systems based on structural considerations doesn't mean that God is out there yanking levers to make it all look nice and neat and run smoothly. Dr. Egnor knows as much, and pretty much mailed this one in, I'm afraid.

I'm sure Orac will have more shortly.