Thoughts from Kansas

IDolator MikeGene is confused. On considering mice in which a change in enzyme production results in fast running and a longer sex life, Gene makes two comments which do not make sense in conventionally spoken English. First:

Here is an example where the traits of aggression, hyperactivity, skeletal muscle histology, and even fecundity were altered, but not because of selection. They materialized, en masse, simply as a consequence of over-expressing a single metabolic enzyme in a tissue

Translation: There are evolutionary mechanisms other than natural selection.

Alternate translation: Pleiotropy exists.

This, of course, is obvious, or would be if MikeGene had a grasp on basic biology. No biologists claim that natural selection acts in the absence of other evolutionary mechanisms (including mutation, neutral drift, gene flow and recombination). IDolators, however, persist in thinking that only one mechanism exists.

The truly challenging translational issues come in his second claim:

It is also interesting to note that the researchers were not trying to design a mighty mouse, they simply stumbled upon it while trying to better study this enzyme. In other words, the mighty mice exist because of intelligent design (all experiments are examples of intelligent design), yet the mice were not intended by intelligent design. This means design can be divorced from intent.

Translation: accidental discoveries are the same as intelligent design. By this standard, Penicillium mold is intelligently designed because Alexander Fleming discovered that one could extract a medically useful compound from it. Indeed, that cloud outside my window must have been designed because it's almost in shape like a camel (methinks it is like a weasel). This sort of post hoc reasoning is common among IDolators, but it is no less wrong for all that. (See, for instance, MikeGene's later confusion between observations of historical sequence and assertion of causation in book reviews.)

Given the critical role of randomization in many experiments, and that the central goal of many experiments is to mimic natural conditions, the claim that the products of any experiment constitute intelligent design is hard to credit. It makes the notion of design meaningless and useless.

But that's what happens when you translate from ID to English.