Michael Egnor is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s been responding to criticisms from us sciencebloggers with more and more inanities — it’s like all you have to do is poke him and he starts puking up more and more transparently fallacious creationist talking points.
Mark Chu-Carroll schools him on his tired claim that selection is a tautology, something we’ve been hearing from creationists since at least the days of Gish. In response to Orac’s challenge, requesting examples of how ‘design’ has helped modern medicine, Egnor coughed up … Watson’s and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA? You’ve got to be kidding me. Orac sounds incredulous, too.

I had dinner with James Watson last January, and one of the topics of conversation was, of course, Intelligent Design creationism (it comes up a lot around me, for some reason). I can tell you with absolute certainty that Watson has nothing but contempt for those fellows; so much so that he considers arguing with them beneath him (which is true enough.) If you want to read his opinion of evolution, one place to look is in a book he edited, called Darwin: the Indelible Stamp^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}. It’s a collection of four of Darwin’s books, with a foreword and introduction to each written by Watson. The work he and Crick did strengthened evolutionary theory, it was not independent of it, and to try and recruit the man’s work to the side of Egnor’s creationism is simply ridiculous.

One recurring theme I have going on here is that creationists aren’t necessarily stupid (although some are, very much so) — their problems are ignorance and arrogance. Those two traits reinforce each other; the ignorance allows them to think their pitiable store of knowledge is adequate and allows them to arrogantly assume they’re competent, while their arrogance drives them to refuse to consider correcting their ignorance. It’s an ugly spiral that locks them into what are genuinely stupid opinions.

Case in point: the creationist “For the Kids”, or FtK, who makes little drive-by comments here, at my daughter’s blog, and various other sites on the evolution/creation pseudocontroversy. There is now a whole, entertaining thread dedicated to FtK at Antievolution.org. She doesn’t talk science, she doesn’t understand it, but she sure likes to pretend that she’s knowledgeable. This one comment where she tries to belittle biology is a good example.

Biology certainly isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand it.

No, it’s not rocket science, but then rocket science isn’t rocket science either, in the sense of an extremely difficult subject beyond the ken of mere mortals. Both are difficult disciplines that require a fair amount of study to grasp; they may not require geniuses, but they do require some intelligence and a lot of hard work. FtK hasn’t done any of the work, and her arrogant presumption that she can master this ‘easy’ subject precludes her ever learning more.

She’s not alone, either. The only member of the intelligent design creationist cabal who has shown even the vaguest signs of comprehension of basic biology is Behe, and even he views it through the distorting lens of his creationist baggage and a lack of knowledge of the specific sub-discipline of biology, evolution, that would directly address his arguments.