Google
 
Internet Goosing the Antithesis

Monday, December 12, 2005

ID Meeting its Maker ? / Seed on ID


What moron designs an important tube to pass through an inflatable organ ?

There were many good articles written about "Intelligent Design" recently, and here are two of them. Unfortunately, both come from very stupid sources. First, everyone's favourite left-wing rag, the New York Times, has an optimistic assessment of the time left to Intelligent Design propaganda :

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

(...)

While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated in comparison to evolution.


I'm surprised. The Templeton Foundation accepts any old bullshit about science and religion. That even they reject ID proves how inept its proponents are.

Talking about disreputable media, the completely useless magazine Seed, America's most superfluous yet self-important magazine, has an interview with Don Wise, the father of "Incompetent Design" (not to be confused with "Unintelligent Design" :

If you were to redesign things, how would you make design intelligent?
Well, for one thing I would put fewer teeth in our mouths. I would put fewer bones in our face, so that it could drain properly. I would straighten up the pelvis so we wouldn't have to have that bend. I would certainly take out the appendix so we don't have that problem and the tonsils, too.
And I did have one other. Some guy from Texas listed a number of things with this and he said, "Actually I would write more, but I have to go pee in Morse code, because some idiot designed my aging prostate."
Intelligent designers and, in fact, everybody from the creationists and so on back to the beginning of the last century used to talk about the wonderful design of the eye—which somehow has all your receptor cells behind a membrane curtain!
I mean, evolutionarily all of these things make sense but in terms of a reasonable, intelligent design? They're idiocy. So, the argument is there is no intelligence there in a lot of these things.


To this I would have to add that, if our body is designed, then this designer is so mind-bogglingly stupid that he created more than two pounds of muscles to move two little eyes around, instead of creating more eyes to fill that empty forehead of ours and save a lot of moving parts. He would fail any engineering test.

Don't miss my entry "Who wants to be a ghost ?", just below. Thanks !

Post a Comment


3 Comments:

At 12/12/2005 11:17 AM, Blogger BlackSun declaimed...

Very true. Also, there's the little matter of aging, where cells essentially commit suicide after a while as their telomeres shorten. There is an unbroken chain of cell division since the beginning of biology. So there is no theoretical reason an 80 year-old man, who is capable of fathering a child, cannot regenerate his skin, bones, or brain with the same vigor as his child. After all, the child comes from his own sperm cell, made from his now decrepit body. Ironic that religious people are so against committing suicide, while if you believe their rhetoric, their 'designer' designed our cells to do just that.

 
At 12/12/2005 12:18 PM, Blogger Aaron Kinney declaimed...

Great point about telomeres Blacksun. I forgot about that.

Good article Franc. And I like the illustration so that everyone can see just how easily the prostate can interfere with peeing later in life.

 
At 12/12/2005 12:57 PM, Blogger Zachary Moore declaimed...

I'll join the chorus in denouncing the prostate. Sure, it makes life more fun for us younger guys, but I'm not looking forward to my eighties.

 

<< Home