There used to be a country called America. It was a place which thought of itself as the inheritor of the logic of Rome and the inquiry of Athens. But now, it is a land known as IDiotia - a place where ghosts, ghouls and goblins are officially the curiculum of the land. It used to have a President, but now it has a Pope, who lives in the same house the President used to live in.
What is absurd about "intelligent design" is that it would not know intelligent design if it tripped over it. Seriously.
[Crossposted at Bopnews.com]
There are, we know for a fact, particular genes loose in the wild that were put there by artifice rather than by evolution. The simplest example is the introduction of non-native species by human beings. There are thousands of these. What does intelligent design offer as a methodology for spotting these obvious ringers - for example, the horse, starling or bee mite in North America?
Nada. Dumbaski* and his ilk couldn't find them without a program. While Dumbaski is being paid lots and lots of money to write obfusticatory nonsense and Behehehe is running around getting people to sign his petition to overturn Darwin, the real problem of artificial insertion marches onward. There isn't one useful mathematical theorum in their copious alogorhea that is remotely applicable for identifying cases that we know to be true. An IDiot is a person who tells you he can identify the hand of God at the distance of 900 million years, but can't identify human activity here in the present.
But there is a second class of human intervention, namely the release of human created strains. There is, again, not one useful method in all of IDiotian thought that would identify cases such as Taxifolia. The question of whether Taxifolia is a natural strain, or one created by algae being subjected to mutagens and artificial pressures is still, as far as I know, open. There are peer reviewable papers to be published on the question. But Dumbasky and Behehehe aren't going to publish them.
The third class is the most recent, namely, the insertion of genetic material that was placed by genetic engineering - such as the escape of herbicide resistant genes into the wild. Again, IDiotian thought, so busy telling us what God told them over breakfast, has not created one useful method to identify present, real, and pressing cases here on earth.
In short, the evidence that human beings are intelligent designers, or at least unintelligent interferers, is overwhelming. In real Science, this would be regarded as a fertile ground for test cases. Prove that a particular method identifies natural colonization of species versus those which are escaped domesticated ones, and there is a big plus for the theory. But Dumbaski and Behehehe don't deign to deal with reality, they are making too much money calculating how many angels can dance on the head of a biochemical pathway.
Into this fray of Intelligent Designer (snerk) comes George Bush, who has always been a poster boy for Design, if not always for intelligent. Iraq was his design from the beginning, as was bankrupting the United States for the benefit of his rich friends. He wants Intelligent Design to be taught "along side" evolution. If by which he means a thorough debunking of Darwin Denying dead enders, and the trail of well paid useful idiots who provide the drool fuel for Darwin Denying Dead Enders - by all means.
The reality is this, and it is something that ordinary Americans need to impress upon themselves. America is at the fore front of the world for a few simple reasons. One is that a continent was virtually emptied by small pox and conquered and colonized. The second is that while the United States learned after a brutal Civil War to avoid sectarian violence and outright pogroms driven by racism - though not other atrocities of that social disease - Europe did not. To some extent the large amount of land brought about by Fact One helped. The third is that given the first two advantages, Americans made the most of them.
The current reactionary regime is a direct threat to all three of these basic reasons for our current material prosperity. It is time that Americans grew up, stopped treating the government as a giant Sunday School operation, and realized that the reason we are where we are is because of our offering a haven to those murdered and oppressed in other regions, and our committment to science and technology. A secular state preserves our union, it prevents civil disorder, and it promotes research and development upon which our continued prosperity depends.
I don't expect the moderates of this world to listen to facts or reason. Instead, let me speak in the most crass of terms: reactionary non-science is a threat to your paycheck. America cannot export sermons, and an American economy reduces to people preaching at each other is one which will fold up and be reduced to the level of Pakistan in relatively short order. I don't ask that Americans learn from the example of how Louis XIV bankrupted France with his religious pogroms and wars of agrandizement, but I do believe that they should be able to realize that filling the skulls of school children with mush is a bad way of attracting the top talent from around the world. Top talent that our high tech industry relies upon. The closing of the American Mind is not a project of the left, but a project of the right.
If you want to be poor and backward, if you want your children to fuck their cousins because they don't learn in school that inbreeding is bad, if you want bombs to rip through federal buildings because of sectarian violence, if you want your parents to die slow painful deaths because biology bashers have tried to outlaw medicine - by all means do so. But at that point drop the pretense that America is a great nation, and that the rest of the world should be deferential to us. An American that wants to turn its back on reason, knowledge and science, because these interfer with religious preferences and the creation of Pakistan on the Potomac, is an America that will be turned into a slag heap by enemies who will exploit this weakness.
In short, people like George Bush, Dumbaski, Behehehe and Bobo Brooks are direct threats to your way of life. They don't represent the cutting edge of your values, and their America isn't going to be one with less drinking, drug use and adultery. Just tune into a country music station, or any television show that catters to the white trash demographic. There they will be, without shirts and belting each other for sleeping around.
People who can't recognize a threat to their economic interests, very soon don't have economic interests to be threatened. This is the end point of biology bashing, Darwin denying and theocratic education. Look it in the eye, and make your choice.
* For those that object to my use of personal attacks against these frauds and charlatans, all I can say is this: after listening to cabinet officials run around and call their political opponents terrorists, with nary a whimper of protest from the supposedly sensible - if you want respectful discourse, then it is up to you to start evicting frauds, charlatans and assorted smear artists from political life. Having accepted, and indeed rewarded, the kind of brazen smears that Karl Rove and Lee Atwater engaged in with such exquisite skill, you are now stuck with it. Having flocked to Foxnews, you are now stuck with it.
You can make it go away any time you want, by simply laughing drug addicted right wing screaming heads from the airwaves.