simiply left behind gives us the best antidote to the id movement: knowledge, this time in the form of november's issue of
natural history magazine.
click on the "intelligent design - special report" link, and you will find three fine counter-arguments (by real, live scientists) to three of the more popular talking points the id'ers like to muddy the waters (we summarize after the jump):
- irreducible complexity turns out not to be so irreducible;
- "random," "chance" and "design" are not necessarily mutually exclusive;
- and the idea that natural selection doesn't explain everything doesn't take into account other processes like gene transfer, symbiosis and chromosonal rearrangement; ie, natural selection is not the unified field theory of biology.
this last one has been knocking around in a vague cloud in our subconscious for a while now. we (who are not scientists, but we've played them on tv) have always felt that the biggest complaint that id'ers have with evolution is that it doesn't explain everything, and, since it doesn't, that's enough circumstantial evidence to claim that the "god did it all" theory is more valid, because, after all, that
does explains everything, don't you see?
well, pardon our college education, but we don't know of any scientific field which explains everything. not evolution, not biochemistry, not chaos or string theory, not psychology, not geology, (certainly not theatre arts, our major)...not nothin!
for instance, as those of you mathematicians out there can bear witness to, there has yet to be proposed a way to predict when prime numbers will appear on the infinite number line. so, if intelligent designers were to apply their warped logic to numbers, because nobody can predict prime numbers, we should teach god along with algebra in school, because those equations are so darn incomplete.
as we have said elsewhere, the main reason most fundamentalists don't want to accept the idea of humankind evolving from lower animals, is not the idea that man shared a common ancestor with monkeys is so abhorrent to them...but that the idea that white man shared a common ancestor with the negroes definitely is.
and, thus we suggest, take the knowledge provided, and confront id'ers with that argument. ie, scratch a fundie, find a bigot.
teach the controversy!