Jason Rosenhouse has a thorough and devestating takedown of Sal Cordova's recent post at Dembski's blog about redundancy as proof of ID. I especially like this part:
Hard as it is to believe, Salvador is actually arguing that redundancy in complex systems is what signals design. Which is amusing, since the main weapon in the ID arsenal, irreducible complexity, is based entirely on the idea that it is lack of redundnacy that signals design. A structure is said to be irreducibly complex if it has several well-matched parts, such that the removal of any one part causes the system to cease functioning. Here's William Dembski explaining the logic:
Far from being a weakness of irreducible complexity as Miller suggests, it is a strength of the concept that one can determine whether a system is irreducibly complex without knowing the precise role that each part in the system plays (one need only knock out individual parts and see if function is preserved; knowing what exactly the individual parts do is not necessary).
But in arguing in this way, ID folks entirely ignore the possibility that a part that is essential to proper function today might have been redundant in some ancestral organism. Indeed, this is one of the primary fallacies of irreducible complexity.
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What amused me most was Cordova's gall in claiming the research as some sort of victory for ID, when use of the "organism's evolutionary history" (along with "knowledge of its surrounding environment") was explicitly cited as the basis of the research.
Evolution proving fruitful in terms of inspiring further research is a "victory" for ID? Sure Sal!
I think the fundamental issue that causes trouble for ID advocates and other Christian apologists is the idea that evolution can produce functionality. They just can't get their heads round it. But, since the rest of the world considers it a demonstrable fact, they have to launch their attacks on the evolution of specific types of functionality. It doesn't really matter which type, hence this sort of confusion.
Tim Makinson writes:
Apparently the criticism that ID is totally vacuous and has produced absolutely no new insights into the workings of nature rankles him. So now he's going off and simply shanghi-ing the work of others and claiming that that is an instance of ID in action, even if the authors in their ignorance don't even mention the name of Dembski.
Apparently he doesn't mind tossing Behe to the wolves in the process, but let's face it, Behe's damaged goods since the Dover debacle. Dembski has no credibility in science or information theory, but that hasn't dawned on him yet.