Tuesday, August 23, 2005

ID and the Vastness of Time

It seems the SSSBlog has inspired the New York Times! A good opinion piece appears today making one of the points made earlier in this blog, that people can't really comprehend the vast time scales necessary to make evolution work.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Back to Intelligent Design

Intelligent design can't be taken seriously as science. If people want to believe in intelligent design, astrology, pyramid power, fine; it's a free country. But as science, intelligent design is in the same category as astrology. Consider the case of bacteria and viruses that change into forms that resist whatever antibiotics or antiviral drugs they are exposed to (suggested by Yale molecular biologist Robert Dorit). The evolution of these micrscopic critters into drug-resistant strains is a classic case of evolution taking place under our noses. A population of organisms is faced by a severe environmental challenge. Random mutations are acted on by natural selection to ensure that the fittest little beasts survive in the new, threatening environment. The result is the emergence of strains of bacteria and viruses that are immune to the effects of the medicines directed against them. Now, what might the intelligent design folks' story be? It's impossible to literally document their story because ID advocates don't chose to talk about these cases, but I guess they might have to say that, well, the Intelligent Designer has decided that these little reascals shouldn't be thwarted, and so He has deliberately jiggered their "irreducible complexity" to make them drug resistant. But the general form of that argument makes intelligent design just another name for evolution. Let's face it, whatever ones attitude toward the biblical account of creation or toward the value of science in our culture, intelligent design is not science.

...Grumpelstilskin

9:33 PM

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