Well, I continue to peruse The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design in anticipation of the debate tonight. (11 pm ET, the Alan Colmes Show, website here.) By this point in the text, Wells is done debunking evolution; now he's on to promoting intelligent design. In the "debunk evolution" section, he tried to undermine evidence from the fossil record, embryology, molecular phylogeny, and speciation. None of these attacks were convincing, but what's even more illuminating are the strands of evolutionary evidence that got completely ignored: biogeography, DNA evidence, homology, and so on. Not that we want to give Wells any ideas, of course. Anyway, now the defense of ID begins, and instead of running roughshod over the scientific literature, we suddenly get all the arguments by all of the people affiliated with the Discovery Institute (which are almost never in the scientific literature): Behe, Meyer, Dembski, Minnich, Gonzalez, etc. Somebody really ought to do a social network analysis of these guys. Could we get Congressman Barton to arrange that? Anyway, it all seems a rehash; if you weren't convinced before, you won't be this time. Still, let's cruise down memory lane by recapping some of the traditional ID arguments:
1. Intelligence does not imply a violation of the laws of nature. When I choose to write this paragraph, I did not violate any laws of nature. I used natural physiological processes to move my fingers and natural mechanical and electronic processes to record the words. Intelligent design does not suspend natural laws, it supplements them. (p. 87) 2. Do living things contain irreducibly complex features? If they do, then they pose a challenge to Darwinian evolution. Natural selection cannot assemble parts for the purpose of producing future functions; it can only preserve features that already have functions. So a feature that is irreducibly complex--that does not function until all of its parts are in place--cannot be assembled by natural selection. (p. 109-110) 3. The properties of the elements follow from the universal constants, so cosmic fine-tuning results not only in a habitable universe, but also in elements uniquely suited for life. Some people have attempted to explain these remarkable coincidences by invoking "the anthropic principle." We should not be surprised by fine-tuning, they say, because if the universe were not fine-tuned for life we would not be here to observe it. This hardly counts as an explanation. (p. 121-122)
The last argument is slightly more intellectually interesting, at least to me. Unlike with the semblance of design in nature--where we know how this semblance has been produced, aka evolution--the semblance of design in the cosmos is not really explained and perhaps cannot ever be. Of course, whether that implies God or some other kind of designer is quite another matter. Once Wells gets into the pro-ID mode, there's quite a lot of "help, help, I'm being repressed!" Virtually every chapter ends with another case study of mean Darwinists suppressing poor revolutionary IDistas. You know the stories: Dembski and Baylor, Behe at Lehigh, etc. Somehow, thinking about the schoolchildren and their families who have to live through these divisive evolution fights at the state level allowed me to get through these sections without shedding a tear for the ID crowd....
