(un)Intelligent Design
I hate to give any recognition to any proponent of crackpot theories like Intelligent Design, however, one site really caught my eye. William Dembski is one of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, and maintains a blog at Uncommon Descent. Much like the actual Intelligent Design movement, the blog lacks anything of real substance, and spends most of it’s time making snarky comments about various stories that may or may not be related to evolution. Very little serious discussion occurs. I suppose that is fine, after all, it is just a blog, and I know Dembski spends time writing books.
A couple headlines stand out to me:
"Natural selection builds bacteria that build nanowires — yeah, right"
I’m not sure where "yeah right" comes from, since he doesn’t present any arguments for "yeah right." I guess we have to take his argument on faith.
"Marsupials and Placentals: a case of front-loaded, pre-programmed, designed evolution?"
This is interesting. Even though the ID movement is over ten years old, it’s failed to ever make a single scientific prediction, or lead to any advance in knowledge. In fact, by definition, when things get hard for ID’ers to explain, they just end the investigation with "God did it." It’s a very lazy way of being "scientific".
"For sheer smarminess, this one is hard to beat . . ."
In this post, Dembski responds to an email from a writer about Dembski’s own work. Of course, Dembski couldn’t be bothered to respond, and instread resorted to childishness, by belittling the emailer, without responding to any of the points in an email This is typical of ID’ers. When challenged by those outside of their group think, they crumble, just like in the Dover case.
I don’t know where Dembski gets the smugness from. His theories have no acceptance, and worse, no accomplishments. He’s not much different than a member of the Flat Earth Society, peddling old theories that have long been disproven.
