In response to “Behe’s bait and switch: on the falsifiability of intelligent design,” EnlightenmentLiberal comments:
I’ll take the stronger position that you can falsify intelligent design outright, and that is has been falsified, along with the rest of supernatural claims.
Michael Behe. Image from Uncommon Descent.
In a post on Evolution News and Views, Michael Behe sidesteps criticisms that intelligent design is not scientific with a bit of verbal judo. By conflating falsification of particular claims with falsification of intelligent design in general, he seems to back his critics into a rhetorical corner:
Now, one can’t have it both ways. One can’t say both that ID is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental reproach, or it can be criticized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable. The fact that critical reviewers advance scientific arguments against ID (whether successfully or not) shows that intelligent design is indeed falsifiable.
Photo by John Minchillo, downloaded from New Scientist.
Someone over at Uncommon Descent is unhappy with a New Scientist article criticizing Ken Ham’s Ark Park, an explicitly creationist-themed attraction dedicated to Biblical literalism. In the New Scientist article (“School field trips to creationist Ark? Sink that idea right now“), Josh Rosenau argues that teaching school children that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and that a vengeful creator committed genocide by drowning against his creation, is a bad idea.
Uncommon Descent objects, in a post that reveals more about its (unnamed) author than it presents any coherent argument (“New Scientist stomps on Noah’s Ark“) [PG-13 below the fold]:
Over at Discover Institute blog Uncommon Descent, I pointed out that the central claim of Barry Arrington’s post “Further to ‘When You Scratch a Progressive, You Will Find a Fascist Underneath’” is a lie. In response, Arrington calls me and several other commenters “fascist apologists.”
In the original article, Arrington takes issue with the proposals advanced by the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee:
The Democrats’ platform committee says they have a “Final Draft To Advance Progressive Democratic Values.”
Among those progressive values, criminalizing scientific dissent. A plank calling for criminal prosecution of anyone who dissent’s from “the scientific reality of climate change” was adopted with unanimous consent. Progressives do not tolerate dissent even from calling for the persecution of dissenters. [emphasis in the original]
According to back-to-back posts on Evolution News and Views, evolution is religion, while intelligent design is science. In a badly argued post today, Cornelius Hunter says,
As I have explained many times, evolution is a religious theory…
Yesterday on the same platform, Steve Laufmann explained
…intelligent design is science, though not everyone knows it yet.
Well, he’s right about the second part.
Image from www.twoheadedquarter.net. Only $6.95!
I have previously complained that, for cdesign proponentsists,
…if multicellularity is really complicated, that’s evidence for intelligent design. But if multicellularity is really simple, that’s evidence for intelligent design.
Now here’s another example of this logic. Fellows of the Discovery Institute have been arguing for some time that the human and chimpanzee genomes differ by more than is usually reported, and that this (of course) supports intelligent design. [Read more…]
Figure 6 from Hanschen et al. 2016. Multicellularity hinges on the evolution of cell cycle regulation in a multicellular context with subsequent evolution of cellular differentiation (here, cell size-based) and increased body size.
Remember how I said they’re prolific? Before I’ve even had a chance to write up my thoughts on the Gonium genome paper, Evolution News & Views has already published theirs. The story has also been picked up by the Washington Post, New Historian, GenNews, and ScienceDaily (that last one looks like just a reprint of the press release from University of the Witwatersrand). By the way, the genome paper is open access, so you don’t need a subscription to see it for yourself.
We already know that cdesign proponentsists are not fans of research into the evolution of multicellularity, and that they have trouble understanding it. In an unsigned article on the Gonium genome at ENV, they admit that
After reading this paper, we’re none the wiser.
That’s too bad. I’m here to help.
Say what you want about the Discovery Institute; they are prolific! Evolution News & Views alone publishes several articles a day. I’m lucky if I can crank out three a week, and I try to limit the proportion that are about cdesign proponentsists being wrong. It’s a continual temptation, because those posts are easier to write than, say, digging into a peer-reviewed article. PZ promises me that blogging on FtB will eventually earn me enough to buy a cup of coffee, but I have a job. All of this means that I have to let a lot of big, juicy targets sail by. So, quickly:
Thank you, Michael Denton; no evolutionary biologist ever considered the possibility that not everything is adaptive. To answer your question, some aspects of leaf shape are adaptive, some are not. Next.
Double Tourbillon 30° mechanism by Greubel Forsey. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia.
Despite protests to the contrary, intelligent design is a god of the gaps argument. Take a look at Discovery Institute blogs, and a large portion of the posts are essentially arguing that some aspect of biology or biochemistry is really, really complicated (for example, Howard Glicksman’s posts at Evolution News & Views). As if there are bunches of evolutionary biologists running around saying life is simple. So most intelligent design arguments boil down to “there’s no plausible evolutionary explanation for this aspect of biology, therefore it must have been designed.” And cdesign proponentsists insist on a high standard of evidence to consider an evolutionary explanation plausible. For example, here’s Michael Behe’s standard for believing that “…complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection…”:
Noah’s Ark by Edward Hicks, 1845. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.
Cdesign proponentsists frequently claim that intelligent design is not creationism. For example, David Klinghoffer says:
…intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism.