Re: [Phys-l] Intelligent designists fight back

[Brian Blais <bblais@bryant.edu>]

On Jan 6, 2008, at Jan 6:4:25 PM, Alfredo Louro wrote:

> As I understand it, intelligent design refers specifically to living
> organisms, and claims that they are "too complex" to have arisen

> So my question is, how do you measure complexity, and what is that
> criterion? The question is important, because for something to  
> qualify as a
> scientific theory, it must be testable.

In the cases of ID presented at Dover, one of the leading definitions  
of "too complex" was the notion of irreducibly complex, which is  
testable.  It claims that a biological mechanism, like the blood  
clotting mechanism for example, is a complex biological machine which  
requires *all* of its pieces to be working in order for the whole to  
work.  Take away any piece, and the whole mechanism fails, is not  
useful for anything else.  If it is the case that every piece needs  
to be there, and that no subset of the pieces is functional for  
anything, then the entire mechanism had to be manufactured all at  
once.  It could not have arisen from a step-by-step process, like  
evolution with natural selection, and could not have been  
manufactured all at once at random (probabilities too low), thus they  
had to be designed.

This is indeed testable, and has been shown in *every* example to be  
false.  Dolphins and whales have a similar blood clotting mechanism,  
missing several of the proteins they are present in the human form,  
but works nonetheless.  In many cases it is shown that a subset of  
the mechanism is useful for something else: part of an eye still  
gives an advantage over no eye, the bones in the ear where useful in  
the jaw, etc...

An honest scientist, at that point, would simply shrug and say "well,  
it was a good idea while it lasted...let's scrap it, and move on",  
but the ID proponents do nothing of the sort.  They keep rehashing  
the same arguments, despite the evidence, and show a startling lack  
of honesty in their approach (even as stated by the Judge in the  
Dover case).  For example, after Creation Science was shown to be not  
science, they took one of their primary textbooks (Of Pandas and  
People) and did a text replace with Intelligent Design!


				bb


--
Brian Blais
bblais@bryant.edu
http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais