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You're Bustin' My Balls Nature

By evolgen on October 11, 2006.

Busting my balls, indeed. Check out this headline:

Intelligent design gets political

Geoff Brumfiel

Teaching creationism becomes an election issue in Michigan.

Intelligent design didn't get political in Michigan. Intelligent design is politics. Intelligent design isn't science; it's a political movement. And they sure as hell ain't offering anything new in the philosophy front (Paley is so last millennium). And my religious friends tell me that it's not even satisfying for the faithful. Intelligent design is just a well funded campaign to destroy science education. Can't get any more political than that.

Tags
Anti-Science
Science Policy

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Speaking of intelligent design... I don't know about you, but I find the results of this poll (http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/poll?poll=160;results=1) heartening. Even at FreeRepublic, the most hyper-conservative site on the internet, only 57% of people support teaching intelligent design. I don't know about you, but I think that this indicates that evolution-as-science really transcends political boundaries (for example, see this other poll in which 81% think that the President has the power to clearly contravene the Constitution). This makes me think that perhaps the majority of the fight against evolution is a few ideologues and (still!) a massive amount of inertia.

Although you equate ID with Paley, and say there is nothing new about ID, I beg to differ.

Detecting designs in nature is what science does all the time. Attributing design that is found to intelligence, rather than time, chance and necessity, is where ID differs from other models.

I recently asked Paul W. K. Rothemund from CALTECH, the molecular biologist who made the smiley faces and world maps out of DNA, whether it is possible to scientifically detect design in what he produces. He said in is not.

Even if he finds a map of the world in DNA, he still can't scientifically detect design. Should we give up?

It seems ID is needed. Whether or not there is intelligent design in biology from the past, we need to learn to be able to detect it in biology in the future, where the human intelligent designers, like genetic engineers, will want their intellectual property protected.