How dumb can one person really be? Let Canadian ID dingbat Denyse O'Leary show you:
Jay Kelly of Wired Parish directs my attention to an item he did recently on intelligent design. Jay and I have had some excellent conversations, on and off air, and hope to do so in the future as well.
Jay is right, of course, when he wonders why the Polk folk (see the story) think that intelligent design is an alternative to evolution. Intelligent design theorists hope to make sense of evolution, by finding out how it really happens, rather than hoping that a tornado in a junkyard will somehow accidentally do the trick.
Identifying the jaw-dropping scientific illiteracy in the above is left as an exercise for the educated reader. Praising the above as a wicked and cutting smackdown of scientific orthodoxy is left as an exercise for the Blogging Tories.
5 comments:
intelligent design theorists hope to make sense of evolution, by finding out how it really happens...
She's lying here. ID theorists want to find a different explanation for how evolution happens, not how it really happens, because they don't like the explanation that we currently have.
Jesus Christ, Denyse. Become a nun already and help the poor or something.
I love the argument that because it's hard to fathom how this all could have happened by chance, it must instead be the result of something else we can't fathom, namely magic. So stop asking questions.
Were these people all dropped as babies?
To quote from Indiana Jones: " If you want the Truth, try the Philosophy Department. ..."
Of course, Denyse'd be a lousy philosopher, so she has to focus her mediocrity on science.
Every time I hear bullshit like this I pull out the Dice test. Being a gamer, I'm pretty familiar with die with these handy little bits of plastic.
Get yourself 100,000 10 sided dice and roll all of them.
Separate out the ones that come up 1, 2, 3, and 4. Then take these dice and add pairs together to add up to 5. ( ie: 1 pairs with 4, 2 pairs with 3 ).
Then take the rest and repeat. Every once in a while select 10,000 random dice from the entire 100,000 pool and 'kill' them to represent environmental hazards, radiation, and so forth, separate them out from the rest. How quickly do you have a large pool of paired dice? DNA is made up of only 4 chemicals so anything above 4 would be chemical junk. It's not an exact simulation of course but it's a decent enough one.
Once you have say, 500 DNA pairs you've got yourself a simple cell. You'll be surprised how fast it happens too. Now that you have a living cell, every once in a while it will split and have offspring, increasing the number of cells over all.
All you have to do to understand that evolution is possible to imagine this process happening with untold billions of molecules over billions of years. Anyone who can't see it is either an idiot or a religious zealot who refuses to believe anything that contradicts their preconceived notions and aren't worth the time to explain it to them.
In fact, experiments where randomly generated circuit boards were allowed to 'evolve' towards accomplishing a particular task, simply by recombining random elements from the boards with came closest to doing the job, were able to produce the desired effect surprisingly quickly. Not only that, but they produced a final circuit so elegant that designers were still trying to figure out exactly how they worked years later, and which required far less components to do the same job than designed boards.
Evolution is not only capable of producing anything a designer can produce, it is better than a designer, because it is not restricted by having a viewpoint, or preconceived notions of how things should be done. Its only restriction is that it requires a lot more time than a designer does.
Post a Comment