"That's not an argument, that's just contradiction!"

Abe: I got a riddle for you, Sol. What's green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?


Sol: I give up.


Abe: A herring.


Sol: But a herring isn't green.


Abe: So you can paint it green.


Sol: But a herring doesn't hang on the wall.


Abe: Put a nail through it, it hands on the wall.


Sol: But a herring doesn't whistle!


Abe: So? It doesn't whistle.



Borrowed from Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes



Everyone knew it was coming; Ben Stein goes on Bill O'Reilly's show and says that intelligent design has a religious agenda and is concerned with showing people the "gaps in Darwinism," and now the Disco. Institute has released an arm-waving statement that asks us to please stop looking behind the curtain when it comes to the supposed identity of the ever-mysterious "designer." In case you missed it (or are just a masochist), here's the horrid Stein/O'Reilly interview;


I won't go into everything that was incorrect about what Stein and O'Reilly said (noticed how creationism was framed as a "freedom of speech"/"freedom of inquiry" issue), but what is notable for our purposes here is that to both of them creationism = intelligent design, the "creator," "designer," or "higher power" unquestionably being the Judeo-Christian God. Fair enough; at least they just said it instead of acting otherwise. Now along come our pals from Seattle who say that ID is not creationism as it has been described by the very person who just made a film about it (Stein), issuing this short missive on the subject;

Last night Ben Stein showed up on The O'Reilly Factor to talk about his forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the fact that scientists are being persecuted for simply questioning Darwinism in some case, or for researching and advancing the theory of intelligent design in others. Interestingly, I would bet that none of the scientists who will appear in Expelled (and by all accounts there will be a LOT of them) are creationists. Unfortunately, Bill O'Reilly simply conflates intelligent design with creationism, mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer. Not so...

It was unfortunate too that Ben referred to the "gaps" in Darwin's theory, as if those are the only issues that intelligent design theory addresses. To be sure there are shortcomings with Darwinism, the scientific literature of late is full of them. However, intelligent design also provides a robust positive case, and a serious scientific research approach. This is the news that O'Reilly's viewers need to hear about.

But wait, didn't the Discovery Institute just try and switch tactics with the awfully-slim textbook Explore Evolution? After getting thoroughly drubbed at Dover it seemed that ID advocates were trying to confuse schools by claiming that they were primarily interested in the gaps of evolution, even Michael Behe's latest book The Edge of Evolution being far more interested in the "limits" of evolution than making a positive case for ID. Indeed, there's little different from what Stein said and what Behe said some time ago on the Colbert Report, so why didn't Behe receive the same rebuke? Indeed, it seems that intelligent design advocates can't even keep things straight for themselves anymore, and they might as well be trying to tell us that the answer to the riddle "What's green, hangs on a wall, and whistles?" is "A herring."

Still, I'm sure the DI and advocates of intelligent design will continue to try and hide the fact that their ideas stem from theology and not scientific observation, their rhetoric being strangely reminiscent of a certain clinic I once heard about;


More like this

Oh my, this is such a wonderful precedent. From now on, every blog post dealing with ID simply must be accompanied by a Monty Python video!

Brilliant idea, Brian!

I'll do my best Dave; I figure there's enough skits on YouTube, but it's just a matter of making them fit. I think I'm up to the challenge, though.

Platypus?

Platypuses Emerged 120 Million Years Ago
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/10/22/platypus-evolution.html

Oct. 22, 2007 -- Close relatives of the platypus, a semi-aquatic mammal that is so unusual scientists at first thought it was a hoax, emerged much earlier than previously thought, scientists announced recently.

Instead of dating to long after the great extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, as researchers suspected, it is now believed that platypus descendents, including those of their echidna relatives, go back to at least the Early Cretaceous period, and possibly even earlier.

The Early Cretaceous is associated with the first appearance and prominence of numerous dinosaur groups.

The key to the platypus puzzle was an ancient egg-laying mammal relative called Teinolophos trusleri, whose fossils have been collected over the past decade. [more at link]

Creationism? Hm, my standard response: Yup, it's a miracle; next Q.

I would say you must use "Every Sperm Is Sacred" from "The Meaning Of Life", but the Catholics are actually doctrinally pro-evolution so maybe we don't want to annoy them...

a retraction of a paper on origins

I think it's kind of sad this guy felt the need to retract the paper. I've only read the news story, I'll admit, but it sounds like the parts he now feels were mistaken were interpretative, and there's no indication that any actual data (if there was any - it might have been a solely hypothesis-driven paper) was erroneous in the light of what was known at the time. It's just frustrating that researchers feel the need to curb valid speculation (even dated speculation that by the author's own admission wasn't very influential in the mainstream) because of how people might chose to misrepresent it.

A certain "Theory on the Brontosaurus" may have to make an appearance as well, and I would love to somehow get the "Confuse a Cat" one in somehow as well.

I agree with Chris that the retraction of the paper is a bit strange; a correction/update/reanalysis may have been called for, and I'll be interested to see how creationists (especially ones who cited the article) react to the news. It does speak a little to the problem of keeping oneself updated on what's going on in a particular field but also using critical thinking skills when it comes to new research. Sometimes it seems that people assume that if a paper has been peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal, no matter when that was, the statements of that work are beyond question. Readers of this blog will know that this isn't true at all, but I think that most of the public has no idea how research is carried out and ideas/hypotheses are formulated and change.