If the Horse Is Dead, Why Keep Kicking It?

 
Bill Dembski notes the publication of two new book that demolish the arguments for intelligent design (Living with Darwin by Philip Kitcher and Darwin and Intelligent Design by Francisco Ayala). Dembski then asks If the horse is dead, why keep kicking it?.

I'm reminded of a quotation from a 1965 paper by Emil Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling. They were publishing the first sequence based phylogenetic trees. When commenting on why we need more evidence for evolution they said ...

Some beating of dead horses may be ethical, where here and there they display unexpected twitches that look like life.

Zuckerkandl, E. and Pauling, L. (1965) in EVOLVING GENES AND PROTEINS, V. Bryson and H.J. Vogel eds. Academic Press, New York NY USA