[gdani]

How does Intelligent Design explain male nipples?

[lawnguy]

Check out the latest Weekly Standard for a well written piece on this issue. Quite interesting.

[Tribune7]

Ping but the debate just about over except for the screaming

[eleni121]

The more they find out about the universe the faster they flock to Intelligent Design...scientists with humility that is.

The others will never allow themselves to work within the Lord's framework.

[AmericanChef]

-"Can a nation which believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?"-

It was good enough for our founding fathers, wasn't it?

[Mike85]

It's really astonishing that after sending men to the moon and back, sending robots to Mars, curing Polio, and creating the internet a large segment of our country still clings to primitive Bronze Age superstitions regarding our origins.

It is utterly pathetic, and I can assure you that unless things change our country is going to sink into a new Dark Age of sorts as the Chinese, Indians etc. pass us in the race to the stars.

[procrustes]

"intelligent design", Mr.Colson,can be disproved by a one-word argument:


























"testicles"

[infocats]

"Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts—catch, spring, hammer, and so forth—must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work."

To play devil's advocate, proteins are not complex but rather simple structures composed of hydrocarbons, subject to the laws of natural permutation. Like a tumbler in a lock, life could have begun when the right combination of proteins occured. Although interesting, I don't believe Behe's thesis either proves or disproves Darwin, Creationism, or Intelligent Design.

That is precisely why belief in a higher power is called "faith", sometimes in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[spinestein]

[In The New York Times, Garry Wills credited White House political adviser Karl Rove for getting millions of religious conservatives (whom he compared to Muslim jihadists) to the polls and sneered, "Can a nation which believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?"]



As a thoroughly nonreligious, pro evolutionist, and "broken glass" Bush voter I reject the entire premise of this statement. I voted for President Bush's reelection for the same reason that most of his supporters did (even the creationist Christian ones); He was a far better candidate than his opponents.

He was, and is, serious about protecting our national security and making intelligent decisions on domestic social and economic policy. He demonstrated greater competence than the Democratic challenger and kicked John Kerry's butt because of it.

I don't know how this Garry Wills character thinks he can get away with trying to foist off on the uninformed among the public that Bush was reelected by some Bible thumping zealots who want to bring back the Dark Ages, but it didn't work in the weeks after the election, and it's going to flop just as badly now.

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

ping for input.

[Dataman]

"Can a nation which believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an enlightened nation?"

The underlying reason for attacking creation is exposed. After all, if God created, the leftist way of fixing Social Security (Terri Schiavo) is forbidden.

[b_sharp]

This article typifies the attack on science anti-evolutionists in their misunderstanding perpetrate on a daily basis. It is their intent to push a religious agenda into the scientific community in an attempt to oust the methodological naturalism of science, with no consideration of the efficacy of a science based on supernatural explanations.

This is not simply an attack on evolution; it is an attack on the methodology used by all science. A false dichotomy has been created by anti-evolutionists to facilitate a negative campaign against the sciences. The dichotomy simply stated is as follows; either Creationism is true or Evolution is true. If evolution is shown to be unworkable, creationism is proved true and, conversely, if evolution is not proved unworkable then creationism is proved false. Because the methodology used in all fields of science is the same and the close ties evolution has to other sciences this dichotomy applies to all sciences. Even the much touted ID (which is nothing but thinly disguised creationism) argument basically comes down to pointing out the problems with science without offering a more feasible scientific theory.

Anti-evolutionists have gone so far as to misuse the colloquial definition of the word theory to try to elevate creation science and ID to the same level as evolution. In fact this misuse actually lowers evolution and all other connected fields of science to the same level as CS and ID, as evidentially thin assumptions.

Both Creation Science and ID are at their core untestable, simply because the supernatural can be used to explain everything, whether there is independent evidence or not. It removes the possibility of identifying anything as ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘designed’. The use of supernatural causes weakens all of science, including any science said to be a part of CR and ID, to the point of uselessness. This is because testability is an essential attribute of a hypothesis; without it no hypothesis can be ruled out when developing a theory. The evidence for ID at this time is not so much evidence as an argument from incredulity, simply assigning a supernatural explanation to anything that appears to be too complex to easily understand. Behe’s method of IC determination is completely subjective, relying on the human ability to see patterns and infer causes. This subjective test can hardly be considered scientific. There is also no rigorous methodology yet in any DI subsystem. At this point, the only way ID can be considered a theory is as a ‘supposition’.

Science is methodological naturalism, based on theories developed from well tested hypotheses. The definition used in science for the term ‘theory’ reflects the high certainty that issues from extensive testing done during the development process. Evolution, the main anti-science target, is currently not able to explain all that we see, but it doesn’t profess to do so, nor does this inability make the Theory of Evolution useless, as extant problems may become extinct problems later, as is shown throughout the history of science.

If anti-evolutionists were to apply the same standards of observable proof to their own assumptions that they try to apply to evolution they would see that CS and ID fall far short of reliably and convincingly explaining nature.


There are reasons science does not and can not use the supernatural when investigating and developing theories about natural phenomenon. These reasons, and not any desire to disprove the existence of god, is what is behind science’s reticence in using intelligent Design or any other creationist philosophy in a naturalistic explanation. It is also why they should not be included in science classes. When ID becomes a true ‘theory’ based on objectively tested hypotheses, then science will consider it a valid alternative. If the struggle is to include teaching the difficulties within the methodology of science and to show the problems within the Theory of Evolution, this can be done, and in fact is done at the university level, without resorting to teaching untestable, unfalsifiable, non-predictive hypotheses such as CS and ID.

[StJacques]

This is a crock.

". . . For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts—catch, spring, hammer, and so forth—must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article—and found that the study proved just the opposite . . ."

I have no idea what Russell Doolittle may or may not have said, and I seriously doubt the claim that he admitted Behe's arguments were correct, but that really doesn't matter. A more useful critique may be that of Kenneth R. Miller who, like Behe, also believes the universe reveals "a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence," but, unlike Behe, doesn't pretend -- and ID advocates only pretend -- to argue that this viewpoint is scientific.

The Flaw in the Mousetrap
Intelligent design fails the biochemistry test.

By Kenneth R. Miller

To understand why the scientific community has been unimpressed by attempts to resurrect the so-called argument from design, one need look no further than Michael J. Behe's own essay. He argues that complex biochemical systems could not possibly have been produced by evolution because they possess a quality he calls irreducible complexity. Just like mousetraps, these systems cannot function unless each of their parts is in place. Since "natural selection can only choose among systems that are already working," there is no way that Darwinian mechanisms could have fashioned the complex systems found in living cells. And if such systems could not have evolved, they must have been designed. That is the totality of the biochemical "evidence" for intelligent design.

Ironically, Behe's own example, the mousetrap, shows what's wrong with this idea. Take away two parts (the catch and the metal bar), and you may not have a mousetrap but you do have a three-part machine that makes a fully functional tie clip or paper clip. Take away the spring, and you have a two-part key chain. The catch of some mousetraps could be used as a fishhook, and the wooden base as a paperweight; useful applications of other parts include everything from toothpicks to nutcrackers and clipboard holders. The point, which science has long understood, is that bits and pieces of supposedly irreducibly complex machines may have different -- but still useful -- functions.

Behe's contention that each and every piece of a machine, mechanical or biochemical, must be assembled in its final form before anything useful can emerge is just plain wrong. Evolution produces complex biochemical machines by copying, modifying, and combining proteins previously used for other functions. Looking for examples? The systems in Behe's essay will do just fine.

He writes that in the absence of "almost any" of its parts, the bacterial flagellum "does not work." But guess what? A small group of proteins from the flagellum does work without the rest of the machine -- it's used by many bacteria as a device for injecting poisons into other cells. Although the function performed by this small part when working alone is different, it nonetheless can be favored by natural selection.

The key proteins that clot blood fit this pattern, too. They're actually modified versions of proteins used in the digestive system. The elegant work of Russell Doolittle has shown how evolution duplicated, retargeted, and modified these proteins to produce the vertebrate blood-clotting system.

And Behe may throw up his hands and say that he cannot imagine how the components that move proteins between subcellular compartments could have evolved, but scientists actually working on such systems completely disagree. In a 1998 article in the journal Cell, a group led by James Rothman, of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, described the remarkable simplicity and uniformity of these mechanisms. They also noted that these mechanisms "suggest in a natural way how the many and diverse compartments in eukaryotic cells could have evolved in the first place." Working researchers, it seems, see something very different from what Behe sees in these systems -- they see evolution.

If Behe wishes to suggest that the intricacies of nature, life, and the universe reveal a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence, his point is philosophical, not scientific. It is a philosophical point of view, incidentally, that I share. However, to support that view, one should not find it necessary to pretend that we know less than we really do about the evolution of living systems. In the final analysis, the biochemical hypothesis of intelligent design fails not because the scientific community is closed to it but rather for the most basic of reasons -- because it is overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific evidence.

Though the above critique is rather short in length, and omits much I would like to see added, it points out the most basic flaw in Behe's work -- it is simply not supported by the known facts of biochemistry.

And with that you have your answer to the question "just who is holding back" the Enlightenment.