Well, it's been worth the wait. The week-long attack from the intelligent design crowd on me explodes in a final fireball of absurdity. Read more in the final update of my response to the Pinto-loving Discovery Institute.
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Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well.…
In celebration of Darwin's 198th birthday, there will be lots of events--talks, etc.--going on around the world next week. I'll be doing my part, heading to the Rockies to talk at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. My talk is entitled, "The Descent of Man, From Darwin to DNA." I'll be…
Mark Twain once discovered to his horror that his story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" had been hideously translated into French. He went so far as to publish the original story, the translation, and his own retranslation of the French back to English to show just how badly it had been…
A professor at the University of Vermont, Nicholas Gotelli, got an invitation to debate one of the clowns at the Discovery Institute. Here's what they wrote.
Dear Professor Gotelli,
I saw your op-ed in the Burlington Free Press and appreciated your support
of free speech at UVM. In light of that, I…
The problem with this is the fact that "common design" only seems to appear when there is evidence for inheritance through common ancestry (a fact that is a very robustly shown through empirical data). On the other hand, when we look at the anti-freeze proteins of Antarctic notothenioid and cod, fish which are separated by hundreds of millions of years (probably didn't get the protein from a common ancestor), we find that while the proteins are vaguely similar, the genetic sequences are entirely different. So, why didn't the designer "re-use designs" in this case? Clearly, they evolved the antifreeze proteins independently through a blind process of evolution, explaining the large differences between them.
The biggest problem with this argument is this: IDists are really trying to argue that God is the designer. When they admit instances of poor design, they fall back on the "poor design doesn't mean no design". But poor design does rule-out design by super-intelligent entities (i.e. God), thus undermining their own not-so-secret agenda - to claim that God did it. Maybe it's me, but if someone told me that an "intelligent designer" made the ford pinto, I'd rule out God as the designer pretty quickly. I'm sure they're hoping that other people don't follow the logical conclusion of "poor design" and conclude that incompetent aliens did the designing instead of God.
Of Pintos and People
As someone who studies rhetoric of science, I find this irony-rich analogy absolutely delicious. Thanks for calling attention to it.