Thoughts from Kansas

The "ID Report" has a post up full of "breaking news": "So much is happening nowadays in the ID controversy..." writes Denyse O'Leary. For instance, she sez "Ann Coulter, who had kind words for the ID guys, has been accused of plagiarism, but Talking Points Memo (no friend of hers) did not find the smoking gun, after a staff day working on it."

First of all, this alleged news is from ... July 7, 2006. But that isn't what's so egregious. What's so egregious is that, what they found is roughly what IDolators believe to be the smoking gun that proves the existence of God! Josh Marshall wrote 3 months ago:

In other cases the similarities of the wording strike me as hard to see as a coincidence. Especially when there seem to be multiple instances of similarities in the same column coming from the same source.

In other cases "there are only so many ways to describe one set of facts," so he thinks those claims are "strained." In other words, some of the similarities he ascribes to chance ("similar statements of the same basic facts"), some essentially to law-like behavior ("only so many ways..."), and others are too complex in a specified way ("hard to see as a coincidence," given "the same column" and "the same source"). If only there were some sciency way of detecting whether something was designed or not, some sort of explanatory filter, perhaps, that could distinguish between law, chance, and design.

Alas and alack, no such thing is to be found in the ID labs. Four million dollars of "research" down the drain.

For what it's worth, here is one example we discussed last June:

Example 1, Page 5: "The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."

Alleged Source: "The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $ 227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct." ("People and events that made Maine's century," Portland Press-Herald, Dec. 12, 1999 (Not available online))
(Identified by Rude Pundit, John Barrie/New York Post)

This one was amusing not just because the words are almost identical, but because the last time the plant was considered extinct was in 1976. What are the odds that Ann produced a nearly word-for-word identical paragraph that just happened to be 30 years out of date?

As Bob Dylan says, "you don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows."