Denyse O'Leary is worried. People are claiming that Intelligent Design Creationism is in trouble. Denyse disagrees [Why the predictions of ID’s demise are false].The many predictions of ID’s demise, based on current theories, have been so completely and systematically falsified that it is time to look for explanations with better predictive value. Not only did ID not die out after various court cases in the United States, but it is now pretty much an international thing - contrary to many predictions.This is going to be fun ...
ID is not happening because the folks at Discovery Institute are clever and nefariousor because American fundies run the planet. Four factors mainly account for its continued growth:
Let's see what four factors tell us that the IDiots are going to be around for a long time.
1. The general acceptance of Big Bang cosmology focused attention on the mathematical probabilities of Darwinism. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the world inside the cell turned out to be much more awesomely complex than anyone had realized. So, just when it should have triumphed, Darwinism received a one-two punch from reality. It is no accident that so many of the ID guys are in math, information sciences, and biochemistry, bioinformatics, etc.As usual, the lead-off reason has nothing to do with intelligent design. It's all about so-called problems with evolution. Now this would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. The IDiots are always telling us that they have solid scientific evidence for
We scientists are not the least bit worried about the "awesome complexity" of cells. It all fits nicely with evolution. Furthermore, it's very misleading to suggest that there are "many" IDiots who are genuine researchers in math, biochemistry, etc. You can count the number on the fingers of two hands.
2. Not surprisingly, the current generation of Darwinists operates on faith, mostly. The recent involvement of key ultra-Darwinists in the activities of the Church of Atheism is, under the circumstances, a normal and foreseeable development. You see, once you commit to materialist atheism, something like Darwinism must be true. That lifts a crushing burden from the shoulders of the Darwinist.Reason #2 for IDiot survival has nothing to do with evidence for Intelligent Design Creationism. It's just more complaints about so-called "Darwinists" and atheism. If you read #2 carefully you'll see nothing that suggests why IDC should survive.
Why are the IDiots such hypocrites? Why do they always claim to have positive evidence for IDC but the evidence turns out to be just anti-evolution diatribes?
3? And the Darwinists themselves are largely responsible for the success of ID. The ID guys are smart enough to serve their turn, to be sure, but they have also been lucky in finding so many meatheads among their opponents. The persecutions of Rick Sternberg and Guillermo Gonzalez, to name two, left little doubt that Darwinists did not expect to succeed by convincing anyone of the sweet reasonableness of their cause or their methods.Are you seeing a trend here? Reason #3 for why intelligent design creationism will survive is because the "Darwinists" are meatheads. Sheesh! Is this the best she can do?
4. The fact that Darwinism is the creation story of materialism says nothing, one way or the other, about whether it is an accurate account of origins - but an important consequence follows. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it was an accurate creation story. The fact that it is any kind of a creation story at all means that it tends to be treated as both science AND religion. Those who affirm Darwinism often have a heavy emotional investment in it, in a way that they do not have in, say, continental drift. People notice this fact (it’s hard not to). That raises the justifiable suspicion that many arguments for Darwinism are put forward to boost faith, far beyond the argument’s actual strength.Well there you have it, folks. The top four reasons for the success of intelligent design creationism are:
1. Darwinism is bad,
2. Darwinism is atheistic.
3. Darwinists are meatheads.
4. Darwinism is faith.
And you wonder why we call them IDiots?
10 comments :
What do you think of Micheal Behe? He also has credentials in biochemistry. I'm not a creationist nor do I believe in God. I'm skeptical.
The first reason isn't only about negative statements on evolution, it is partly about negative statements on abiogenesis, which O'Leary obsesses about:
"The general acceptance of Big Bang cosmology focused attention on the mathematical probabilities of Darwinism. As if that wasn’t bad enough,"
Actually, big bang focuses attention on the problems with the vacuous ID design argument. The finite age of the universe assures us that their initial designer is the supernatural creator they try to hide.
(ID)Creationism WILL survive, becouse:
They mostly try to convert "normal (american fundie) people" - becouse they buy their books, and many religiously minded are more than happy to read them(they are not critical, they just "hate darwinist's")
"Normal (american fundie) people" wants (ID)creationism or something like that, so there will allways be a guy, who says that he is "scientifically proven God" - and sell some books.
Those who affirm Darwinism often have a heavy emotional investment in it, in a way that they do not have in, say, continental drift.
But people aren't hotly contesting continental drift the way they do evolutionary theory. If they did, we'd be going bananas. Luckily for us, there aren't enough people who are that stupid.
As anonymous above says too, ID will survive because of its appeals to ignorance. The four reasons provided above, which offer NO positive evidence (as usual) for ID, are just the same boring mud-slinging and assertions of both wishful thinking and anti-evolutionary newspeak.
The many predictions of ID’s demise, based on current theories, have been so completely and systematically falsified that it is time to look for explanations with better predictive value. Not only did ID not die out after various court cases in the United States, but it is now pretty much an international thing - contrary to many predictions.
There's a delightful irony in seeing that paragraph come from an IDiot: it's exactly the kind of "hey, we're still here and we're still relevant" statement that evolutionists have had to make dozens of times after creationists of various stripes declared evolution dead. The contrast between the usual evolutionist version and this IDiot version throws the irony into sharp relief:
IDiot version: "ID is still relevant because Darwinism is wrong, and to prove it we have all these ad hominem attacks against Darwinists."
Evolutionist version: "Evolutionary theory is still relevant because the evidence supports it."
What a perfect illustration of the difference between science and superstition.
Darwinism is faith
It's funny how religious IDiots nowadays are so embarrassed by the foundation of their religions. Now they imply that faith is such a bad thing (even though, for example, in the bible it is the probably most exalted "virtue".), and they even ridiculously claim that their enemies have too much of it! 6-day creations, talking bushes, virgin births, world floods are now based on evidence and the big bang theory, and evolution are based on faith! WOW
I was under the impression the inner workings of the cell are much simpler than anyone had anticipated even a few decades ago. Humans only have 20,000-35,000 genes as opposed to over 100,000, while the simplest free-living organism has only a few hundred genes (many of which are not essential). There are only an extremely limited number of secondary structures and folds out of the nearly infinite possible variety. Basic folds are highly conserved in many proteins in all kingdoms among proteins with no apparent functional similarity. There are only a handful of basic cell-to-cell signaling systems, the wide variety of signaling is based on slight variation on these basic themes (for instance Na, K, Cl, and Mg channel proteins are nearly identical, and GPCR's are ubiquitous). The functional regions of enzymes are tiny, with most of the remainder of the protein being largely unimportant in terms of its primary structure.
All in all it seems like cells are much simpler than people expected. They are still complicated, but much of the molecular biology of the cell is based on a relatively limited number of basic themes that are just re-used over and over and over for seemingly unrelated tasks. This is exactly what evolution predicts, although I am under the impression the degree of conservation of these features was still a surprise.
"… heavy emotional investment in … continental drift."
Eh?
A bad analogy…
Continental Drift was comprehensively replaced by Plate Tectonics c.40 years ago.
I rather seriously doubt anyone nowadays cares about Continental Drift.
Substitute the current consensus Theory, Plate Tectonics, for something long since discarded, and I suspect you will find people requiring extraordinary evidence to (significantly) alter it—much less replace it with something batshite crazy such as, oh, "the Noah family's flood"—which is as it should be.
Good point.
Besides, who predicted that ID would fail after a single district court case? Certainly nobody I have ever heard of. It was predicted that it would be harder (although not impossible) for it to get its way in schools, which is the case. But that is far from dying. And it was predicted it would become popular with a certain subset of people in certain countries, although in most countries it would not go anywhere and would be no where near as popular as it is in the U.S. This is also the case. In fact, people were warning before Dover even began that a victory there would not stop ID, only weaken it somewhat. That was the case. And that is why people haven't just been laying around twiddling their thumbs after Dover, they have added that to their arsenal and gone even more on the offensive.
It seems to me that ID, instead of being on the offensive like it was before Dover, is now the defensive, trying to downplay that loss and several others (like Kansas) and trying unsuccessfully to find counters to the issues that lost them Dover to begin with. I am frankly surprised at how successful Dover was and how much it rattled the ID community considering it was not a supreme court case. I expected it be fairly meaningless, more of a precedent for a later supreme court case, but it does seem to have had a significant impact.
"All in all it seems like cells are much simpler than people expected. They are still complicated, but much of the molecular biology of the cell is based on a relatively limited number of basic themes that are just re-used over and over and over for seemingly unrelated tasks."
From todays ScienceDaily:
"Although the human and chimpanzee genomes are distinguished by 35 million differences in individual DNA "letters," only about 50,000 of those differences alter the sequences of proteins. Of those 50,000 differences, an estimated 5,000 may have adaptive consequences in the evolutionary divergence between these two species, according to a study published in the March 6, 2007, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[...]
Although the physical or chemical differences between the various amino acids should provide a straightforward measure of the "radicalness" of amino-acid substitutions, those measures did not correlate well with how these changes fared in evolution.
"This tells us that we need new measures for how conservative or radical an amino acid change might be," Wu said. "We need to base that on evolutionary dynamics in addition to biochemical structure."
( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070305202948.htm )
So not only structure constrains proteins, but also evolutionary dynamics, implying those basic themes I guess.
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