Well, it's been worth the wait. The week-long attack from the intelligent design crowd on me explodes in a final fireball of absurdity. Read more in the final update of my response to the Pinto-loving Discovery Institute.
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« The Mooney Treatment: Part Deux | Main | Your Monday Morning Parasite Show (Safe for Breakfast) »
"Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed in crash tests, not designed?"
Category: Evolution
Posted on: November 20, 2006 2:23 AM, by Carl Zimmer
Comments
The problem with this is the fact that "common design" only seems to appear when there is evidence for inheritance through common ancestry (a fact that is a very robustly shown through empirical data). On the other hand, when we look at the anti-freeze proteins of Antarctic notothenioid and cod, fish which are separated by hundreds of millions of years (probably didn't get the protein from a common ancestor), we find that while the proteins are vaguely similar, the genetic sequences are entirely different. So, why didn't the designer "re-use designs" in this case? Clearly, they evolved the antifreeze proteins independently through a blind process of evolution, explaining the large differences between them.
The biggest problem with this argument is this: IDists are really trying to argue that God is the designer. When they admit instances of poor design, they fall back on the "poor design doesn't mean no design". But poor design does rule-out design by super-intelligent entities (i.e. God), thus undermining their own not-so-secret agenda - to claim that God did it. Maybe it's me, but if someone told me that an "intelligent designer" made the ford pinto, I'd rule out God as the designer pretty quickly. I'm sure they're hoping that other people don't follow the logical conclusion of "poor design" and conclude that incompetent aliens did the designing instead of God.
Posted by: BC | November 20, 2006 3:02 AM
Of Pintos and People
Posted by: Robert O'Brien | November 22, 2006 6:00 PM
As someone who studies rhetoric of science, I find this irony-rich analogy absolutely delicious. Thanks for calling attention to it.
Posted by: S. Perrault | November 24, 2006 3:18 PM