Every Intelligent Design debate ever

I’ve been in a few. I hate ’em. Here’s how they work: the ID proponent declares that the thesis of the debate is “Everything is Designed” and launches into his argument:

Cars are designed by intelligent agents. Shoes are designed. Computers are designed. iPhones are designed. My right hand is designed. Therefore, everything is designed.

The scientist who got suckered into this engagement begins to unlimber their long list of counter-examples. “We have natural mechanisms that generate complex forms without the need for a designer…wait, did you say your right hand is designed?”

Sure. It’s made of cells, and cells are designed, so of course it’s the product of design.

“You can’t just declare that everything you don’t understand is designed. That’s the whole point of contention here; you have to address the evidence for your position, not just announce by fiat that everything is designed.”

I’m ready to discuss all of the evidence.

“OK, I begin again. So Tiktaalik…”

Designed. Clearly designed.

“The entire fossil series illustrating tetrapod evolution…?”

Designed.

“The citrate metabolic pathway?”

Designed.

“Cells are…”

Great example. Cells are complicated, with lots of fiddly bits, therefore implying a Fiddler. Shall I throw some big numbers at you to show you how complicated cells are?

“No, that’s OK. I know how complex cells are. You don’t get to simply decide that all complex things have to be designed. Again, that’s what we’re debating! If I show you something of unknown origin, or even something with a well-documented history of natural evolutionary history, you don’t get to just greedily snatch it up and put it in the “Designed” category!”

Yes, I do. The burden of proof is on you, and I can refute everything you propose by pointing out any one thing that could have been designed, and that is sufficient to make it designed.

“By a mysterious invisible intelligence that operated for billions of years before the origin of intelligent life on Earth.”

Now you’re getting it! By the way, welcome to my proof for the existence of my God.

I bring this up because I listened to another Intelligent Design debate, this time between James Croft and the reliably ridiculous Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. It was interesting because I’d be one of those guys who brings a catalog of biological counter-examples to the debate; as a philosopher, Croft ignores all that and drills right down to the logic of the argument the creationists are making. I think that’s a smart approach, even if Meyer is only capable of a different flavor of evasion.

I’ve queued it up below at the start of James’ argument, because all the politeness and niceness in the introduction turned my stomach.

He starts by summarizing Meyer’s position:

Note: Meyer has turned that simple statement into three long-winded, tedious books now. If you can grasp that simple summary, there’s no reason to read any of his books, since they don’t provide any further evidence for his position.

Point 1 is false. Meyer exercises a kind of studied neglect of the actual state of the evidence in biology that allows him to pretend there aren’t any adequate explanations for evolutionary phenomena. Croft focuses on the link between 1 and 2, that Meyer is making an abductive argument while failing to support his primary premises. He points out three problems with the logic of Meyer’s claims which I won’t get into — watch the video. It’s not as painful as it looks: Croft begins at the 14 minute mark, and wraps up at 25 minutes, so the interesting part is only 11 minutes long. The rest is Meyer making noises with his mouth and frequently interrupting Croft, and then there’s the interminable period of the two of them telling each other how nice they are and what a worthy and interesting this conversation was. That bit was aggravating: Meyer is his usual pompous self, pretending that Croft’s annoyingly congenial, smiling manner was an affirmation that there was something of substance to his pretentious bullshit, completely oblivious to the fact that the cheerful fellow with the British accent has effectively torpedoed him below the waterline. He is unconcerned; he’s just going to sail off and write another tendentious, wordy tome repeating his 3 points over and over again.

Tom Cotton is proud of his paranoia

Why else would Tom Cotton include the full text of his letter to Joe Biden, warning him of his insane concerns about those dang Chinese, on his own website?

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates the world’s most invasive domestic surveillance system. Chinese authorities closely monitor internet traffic within the country and block or censor online information that the Party views as adverse to its grip on power. The CCP also continuously tracks persons in Chinese cities through a network of facial-recognition cameras and other advanced sensors. Further, members of the American delegation should expect their rooms in the Chinese Olympic Village to be bugged with audio or visual surveillance equipment and all their onshore electronic devices to be hacked by Chinese authorities.

Second, the CCP also considers DNA collection a vital intelligence-gathering objective. As the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center recently noted, “The PRC views bulk personal data, including health-care and genomic data, as a strategic commodity to be collected and used for its economic and national-security priorities.”[2] The CCP has reportedly conducted tests to develop biologically-enhanced soldiers and intends to use DNA data to catapult Chinese biotechnology companies to global market dominance.[3]

In 2022, thousands of world-class athletes will gather to compete in China. Their DNA will present an irresistible target for the CCP. Thus, we should expect that the Chinese government will attempt to collect genetic samples of Olympians at the Games, perhaps disguised as testing for illegal drugs or COVID-19.

Wait wait wait wait. None of this makes any sense.

  • US athletes are not privy to deep, important state secrets. They’re going to be talking about competitions and workout regimes and the weather and how much they miss good ol’ American cherry pie and their sweethearts back home, probably while trying to have sex with each other. Aside from personal privacy concerns, why is this a concern of the president?
  • We don’t have a way to translate DNA sequences into “super-soldiers”. There isn’t a sequence imbedded in the genome that turns you into an agile muscular mass murderer. If there were, we wouldn’t know what to do with it, but there isn’t. Genetics isn’t that simple.
  • Chinese people have DNA. They also have outstanding athletes. Why would they need to tap into American blood samples to find the pieces for their super-secret super-soldier recipe? I suspect this is the product of combining unthinking American exceptionalism with racist bigotry, nothing more.
  • It’s got footnotes, but most of them are links to opinion pieces in places like the WSJ and Bloomberg. His claim that Chinas is making biologically-enhanced super-soldiers comes from an op-ed by John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s director of intelligence (imagine having that on your résumé).

It all sounds like something Cotton pulled out of The Sun or some other gossipy tabloid.

You cannot trust Tom Cotton at all, though. Look at his website: it’s got red stars all over the place. A red star! That’s how you know he’s a closet Bolshevik.

How can you bring people to reason without a whip?

I’ve been doing a little research lately into the use of common, happy atheist terms, like “reason”. Here’s a truly hideous example of how the vague word “reason” can be used as a tool to advocate for great evils. Did you know that kidnapping, torturing, and murdering people is the only way to get others to recognize the virtue of rational thought?

Bonus points for treating reason and religion as equivalent enlightened phenomena.

A triumphant moment in history

Today I was surprised to learn that there was one time — one time only — that Charlie Brown managed to kick the football, and it was thanks to Spider-Man.

This is what radioactive spider bites were intended for.

Suddenly, meetings

Nothing for a year, and suddenly I’ve got two meetings at once this week. The big one is the annual meeting of the American Arachnological Society, which begins on Thursday and continues until the following Wednesday. It’s a virtual meeting (I think registration is still open, and it’s cheap at $20) so it’ll be almost a week of nothing but spider talk on a fairly loose and casual schedule. I am so looking forward to it.

And then, on Sunday, I’m going to have to skip an online poster session because — hold on to your hats, this is unbelievable — I’ve been invited to speak to the Atheists of Florida. An atheist meeting? Do they still have those? And they invited me? Don’t they know who I am? Sheesh. A fellow works hard to destroy the whole atheist movement and a few years later they all forget.

Anyway, they probably think they’re safe, since I’ll be talking about science. Little do they know, my topic is the biology of intelligence, and one of the things I’ll be doing is taking apart atheist buzzwords, like “rationality” and “reason” and “logic” and “intelligence” by explaining how spiders, and other animals, are also logical and intelligent, and are probably better atheists than humans, since none of them have any need for that god hypothesis.

Expect schisms, rifts, and recriminations all across Florida after my poisonous spirit touches the state. It’s what I do.

A dismal day for spiders

Grey, cloudy, cool, raining. We did a little early morning spidering, checking out the Stevens County Fairgrounds, and found nearly nothing. The barns were open, but they’ve been shut up for over a year, so the spiders probably starved to death — two years ago, there were lots of fat orbweavers thriving in the shadowy corners of the cattle barn, feeding on juicy flies. But no cows last year meant no flies meant no spiders.

The pandemic has been hard on us all.

I spotted one teeny-tiny juvenile orbweaver lurking in a concrete drain pipe, out of the rain. That was it. I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to be out in weather with giant water-drops bigger than your whole body splashing down, punching big holes in your home.

We did see some nice Parasteatoda and one jet-black brawny S. borealis hiding inside the windows of the 4H administration building, where we couldn’t get at them. They waved to us and asked us what the heck we were doing out in the rain. So we decided to come home and sit inside and drink hot coffee, like smart sensible spiders.

At last, we’ve all been invited to speak at Skepticon!

Yeah, you. Get to work preparing your talk and putting it on video.

Our theme for Skepticon 13, starting on Friday, August 13, is things that scare us. Our panels will be on creepy-crawlies, horror as genre, and math. That leaves huge portions of this topic still begging to be covered. You can help fill in the gaps with a video of 3 minutes or less.

Do you have a favorite cryptid that other people haven’t heard of? Does your corner of the world share an unusual superstition or moral panic? Do you have the inside scoop on a “real-life mystery” that caught the public imagination? Are you good at explaining a particular piece of political fear-mongering? Have we left out something else important or funny about being scared? Tell us! Tell the world!

The theme is “things that scare us”? Well, I’m out. I can’t think of anything scary or creepy-crawly. But maybe you can! It’s also only 3 minutes. Being cogent in 3 minutes is harder than you think — you’ll have to pare out all the rambling asides and hesitations and coughing fits and that cool story you would have mumbled out if you were chatting at the bar.

Go for it, though! I expect to see you all there!

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Here’s what’s nice about being an early bird: it’s cool still, it’s quiet, the spiders built their webs overnight and are ready to show them off, and that morning light low on the horizon is absolutely perfect for visualizing webs. Also, the spiders are having their breakfast so you can see lots of predatory action.

Not here, though: I put photos of spiders on iNaturalist and Instagram, and also on Patreon, although it costs a dollar a month to see them there.

If you’ve got the earworm, you can listen to the rest of the song on YouTube. The corn isn’t quite as high as an elephant’s eye though, yet.