lederhosen

An excellent article on 'intelligent design' by James Curtsinger here, in the Minnesota Daily, gives me warm fuzzies:

Perhaps Dr. Behe publishes research papers that support intelligent design without using those terms. Searching PubMed for “Behe MJ” and sorting the results by date, you will find 11 publications since 1992, when the good professor converted to his new Ideology. Several are just letters to the editor.

The most recent (Behe and Snoke, 2004 and 2005) suggest that certain events in molecular evolution have low probability of occurrence.

This falls far short of the claim that a designer must have intervened, but what the heck, let’s put all 11 in the ID column.

Under these rather generous assumptions, ID’s leading light has produced fewer than a dozen peer-reviewed papers for the cause, none of which explicitly mentions ID. That number is substantially less than PubMed finds for “voodoo” (78), and pales in comparison with “diaper rash” (475).

Perhaps when the number of supporting publications rises to the level of “horse feces” (929) the professional community will grant ID some respect.

Curtsinger also slams Behe on the question of flagellae, one of his favourite examples of supposed 'irreducible complexity': "The old meaning of irreducible complexity was, “It doesn’t have any function when a part is removed.” Evidently, the new meaning of irreducible complexity is “It doesn’t have the same function when a part is removed.”" (Those familiar with the notion of IC will appreciate that this is not so much a matter of 'moving the goalposts' as 'holding the goalposts while backing off the edge of a cliff'.)

But in the interests of balance, sclerotic_rings points me at an experiment which, without hyperbole, provides as much evidence in favour of intelligent design as anything Behe's so far come up with.

( And a meme because I'm still waking up. )

Ganked from various:

( Pick 20 people on your friends list, randomize their order, then read and answer the questions underneath. )