Over at National Review Online, John Derbyshire tackles George Gilder's expectorations on evolution. He writes:
It's a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can't be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn't actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It's boring.
So true.
And ...
There are two reasons why George's ideas, as presented in this essay, are a tough sell. First, he loses biologists right away with his Creationist patter. Second, George's Discovery Institute and his Center for Science and Culture don't discover things and don't do any science.
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It was a great piece. This was another good passage:
Quote> Biologists are of all scientists least in need of a new metaphysic. Neurophysiology aside, it is in the "hard" sciences that our epistemological underwear is showing. When physicists have to resort to explanations involving teeny strings vibrating in scrunched-up eleven-dimensional spaces a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of an inch across, or cosmologists try to tell us that entire universes are proliferating every nanosecond like bacteria in a petri dish, there is a case to be made for a metaphysical overhaul. Not that work in these fields has come to a baffled dead stop, as George seems to imply. Far from it; the problem in fundamental physics and cosmology is not so much that we have run out of theories, as that we have too many theories. I'll grant that there are epistemological issues, though.
Biology, by contrast, really has no outstanding epistemological problems. With the tools of modern genomics at its disposal, it is in fact going through a phase of great energy and excitement, so that biologists are much too busy to be bothered with epistemological issues. To modify the simile I offered above: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, around 1930. "Hey, those machines of yours don't really fly, you know..."
FYI, the whack-a-mole analogy isn't original to Derbyshire. AFAIK, it was first used by Paul Ferrar in 1996 on talk.origins, and I'm pretty sure I've seen it used again since then.
Here's the text of Paul's original posting, as archived by google:
When we go to the mall, and we walk past the game arcade, my 3yr-old daughter always demands to go in for a round of her favorite game, Whack a Mole. This game is quite a throwback, being electromechanical, rather than video-electronic. A large square board is covered with
mole holes, and at irregular intervals toy moles stick their heads up. When they do, the player whacks them with a large rubber mallet. Now I know why I enjoy t.o. It's like Whack a Mole, but with no time limit. Every few days, or even hours, a little head pops up and says, "Consider the bombardier beetle. This interesting little fellow..." Whack! Eeep! Over to the right,"A lava flow in Hawaii,
which is known to be 200yrs..." Whack! Eeep! Up there, "Lucy's knee..." Whack! Eeep! It does get a little fatigueing after a while, which is why I mainly lurk.