Stumble it!The creationist follies
posted in Creationism by themaiden |What are the creationists up to these days?
Well, Casey Luskin is blaming cancer on Darwinism. Really, he’s claiming that the “failure to recognize function for introns” resulted in delays in the discovery of the causes of colon cancer. The “failure to recognize function for introns” is, of course, all the fault of the neo-Darwinian paradigm.
Luskin’s argument is yet another incarnation of the somewhat silly, but very popular among creationists, argument that “scientists have been wrong before so they must be wrong now about… um… stuff we don’t like.” David Heddle made the same spurious point sometime back when talking about Carl Sagan. Jonathan Witt made the point as concerns Percival Lowell. I myself have asked, “Stupid scientists! Why can’t they see the truth?”
To Heddle, I wrote:
Some of what Sagan said has turned out to be wrong, but Sagan was no maverick. Where he was wrong so were many of his contemporaries. Nor were Sagan and his peers wrong because they were nit-wits, as sniping like Heddle’s suggests. They did what they could with the evidence they had. No more can be asked of anyone, and criticizing, effectively, someone for not having evidence and equipment not available for twenty, thirty, and forty years is nothing short of childish.
To Witt I responded:
… Witt, most perplexingly, makes the less controversial, even banal, point that scientists sometimes get it wrong. Science does– I think it is pretty blatantly obvious– move forward, in general, over a significantly long time frame. However, it does move forward by fits and starts, and sometimes things go wrong. I am quite sure he won’t get much argument on that issue, which makes me wonder where he got the idea that “the idea that science moves inexorably forward, with never a major backward step” needs discrediting. Really, I’d think an idea would need crediting prior to needing discrediting. Of course there are mis-steps in science!
Intelligent Design the Future: Percival Lowell, Mars and Intelligent Design
It is most unfortunate that people do sometimes get things wrong, but that is the price you pay for drawing your conclusions from the available evidence, rather than, say, making things up and calling it good. Evidence has an annoying tendency to accumulate and it has an even more annoying tendency to not follow the party line.
Now, two questions.
1) Casey, who exactly ended up figuring out that introns are important?
The creationists? Nope. The ID theorists? Nope. They are busy complaining. Who figured it out? Why! The damned Darwinists!
2) Lets say that we accepted Intelligent Design. We see introns and we conclude what? That whatever they are doing they were designed to do? Sounds reasonable. Doesn’t that mean that if they are causing colon cancer they were designed to cause colon cancer? Shouldn’t we just let them alone to do what they were designed to do then?
Let me anticipate a response to that second question. “But, yes, those things were designed but that doesn’t mean that can’t be broken. Designed things break all the time. Or maybe the design simply wasn’t optimal. Humans make non-optimal designs all the time.”
Richard Spencer makes much the same point, with apparent blessing from Dembski himself.
“Given that God uses secondary agents to bring about physical structures, we can expect to see certain patterns and processes repeated in many places and used in different ways even though the design may not be optimal for each individual application.”
Intelligent, Optimal, and Divine Design
Try… try to ignore that bit about God. ID isn’t about at all you know.
As for the argument, true enough. It has peculiar consequences for the designer, but that is beside the point. It is also an answer that, on the one hand, can provide an excuse for so many problems that it is virtually meaningless, and on the other hand undercuts much of the ID theory itself.
… that there is a relationship between an object’s design and its effectiveness for a particular purpose. There is a lot of slop in the calculation, but this basically means that the more effective an object is at performing a particular function the more likely it is that it was designed specifically to perform that function. This also means that as the fit between form and function becomes messier, as efficiency drops, so does the likelyhood that the object, or system, was specifically designed to perform the function it performs.
An absolutely perfect fit implies design a lot better than a workable, but messy, fit. It is possible to dig a post hole with a fork, or a pair of chop-sticks, just as it is possible to dig a post hole with a shovel. But compare the relative efficiencies at that task and which was more likely to have been designed to dig post holes?
So, Casey, let’s go ahead and say that scientists got it wrong. So what? Doing the best you can with what you’ve got is doing the best you can. I can’t fault anyone for that. Taking, or implying, that we’d have been better off had we embraced a ‘theory’ that isn’t even really a theory as it has no evidence beyond “well it sorta looks like someone made it” and it offers no framework for that evidence beyond “well it sorta looks like someone made it” and it makes no predictions beyond “kinda looks designed doesn’t it?” and it offers no course of action beyond “Oh lookie here! That looks design-ie-ish!” and it supports no research programs beyond the culling of other people’s research and whining about it and its ‘theorists’ publish no papers of any substance except the aforementioned whining but do publish books aimed at the uneducated masses but which get torn to shreds by the scientific community and the organizations that promote it, like the Discovery Institute of which you are affiliated, focus not on science but on public relations, propaganda, and lawsuits… well, pretending we’d be better off accepting such a theory is patently insane.
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