I said I’d tell you when it was published – and it’s been published! Somewhat surprisingly, I was asked by my friend Khalil to write up my thoughts on the whole ENCODE project/junk DNA/the-human-genome-is-80%-functional fiasco for the Student Voices blog, but from the perspective of what intelligent design proponents were taking from it all. If you’ve been following pro-ID blogs Evolution News and Views and Uncommon Descent lately, there’s been little end to the victorious proclamations – because, as we all know, the more functional the genome is, [...]
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When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. ~ Cersei Lannister, HBO’s “Game of Thrones”1 Bit of a dramatic quote, isn’t it? But for some reason it entered my mind when I read what David Klinghoffer wrote about me and my views on the dismissive rhetoric of the scientific community towards the intelligent design movement (which I maintain is understandable, given the history of ID and creationism), in [...] » Continue reading ““You Win or You Die” – Unintentionally nourishing the ID rhetoricotrophs” The intelligent design (ID) movement has been around for over 20 years, and few (if any) of its stated and implied goals and plans have thus far come to fruition. While contributing factors to this lack of success are certainly the hard work of the scientific community and its friends, as well as the fact that ID has never been adequately formulated as a scientific idea, a significant proportion of the responsibility for the outcome should be laid upon the ID movement itself. It has, in arguably many respects, [...] » Continue reading “Does the intelligent design movement need to be demolished and rebuilt?” Intelligent design news from the 28th of April to the 18th of May, 2011. Finally! It’s back again, your fix of ID news and discussion. To make up for my three-week-long absence, this post will cover five of the top ID blog posts from the past three weeks. Lucky for me then that it hasn’t been an especially busy time for the ID community during my break – otherwise I’d have a much bigger job on my hands. Anyway, enough grovelling, let’s get into it. Today’s posts are about Osama [...] » Continue reading “These Weeks in Intelligent Design – 18/05/11″ Intelligent design news from the 14th of April to the 20th of April, 2011. Another week, another lot of ID blog posts to wade through. Not a lot I want to mention in this intro, particularly, except for perhaps this recent post of mine responding to an Uncommon Descent post about ID’s supposed scientific predictions. It was going to be included in this post, but it needed a larger amount of specific attention, given how important the topic is. Other than that, this week wasn’t particularly noteworthy. Nothing [...] » Continue reading “This Week in Intelligent Design – 20/04/11″ A well-accepted characteristic of a scientific hypothesis is that it must generate predictions about the world against which tests can be run – confirming or falsifying those predictions and thus supporting or not supporting the hypothesis in question. Understandably then, intelligent design proponents need to demonstrate that ID can produce predictions if it is to be taken seriously as a scientific hypothesis and alternative to evolutionary theory. Historically (as much as I can say “historically” in the context of such a new movement), this has not been a major goal [...] Intelligent design news from the 23rd of March to the 29th of March, 2011. This week marked the highly notable, first ever mention of yours truly in an official Discovery Institute blog post, which is rather exciting. Pity then that, as I already said today, the mention was a horribly confused jumble of misinterpretation and laziness that made me come off like an undefinable supporter of ID-dualism, or something like that. But whatever, that doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. What else happened [...] » Continue reading “This Week in Intelligent Design – 29/03/11″ Intelligent design news from the 9th of March to the 15th of March, 2011. Another week, another lot of posts by the ID community to sort through. As you may have noticed by now, I’ve given up on devoting much time to anything posted on Uncommon Descent (except for quick links), due to their insular nature (they seem to be read only by their preexisting, fervent community), their complete lack of substantial and interesting discussion, and their overwhelmingly religious tone, which I’m fairly sure robbed them of any [...] » Continue reading “This Week in Intelligent Design – 15/03/11″ Intelligent design news from the 16th of February to the 2nd of February, 2011. The ID movement isn’t getting anywhere fast, something you might have picked up on if you’ve been reading this blog over the last year and a half, and nowhere is this exemplified more than online. Post after post comes out of the “official” blogs, yet nary an insightful sentence is produced week after week. This past week was especially bad, and you’ll see why very shortly. You’ve got to be kidding me – Robert Sheldon, Uncommon Descent blogger and rocket physicist, has come out with a post on The Procrustean, his personal conservative political blog, defending the arsenic-metabolising GFAJ-1 paper. It truly is a perfect storm of ID proponent meets terrible scientific methodology. The scientific backlash against the recent NASA-funded paper, which claims that a strain of Halomonadaceae bacteria called GFAJ-1 can metabolise arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus, has been swift and punishing, as anyone involved with the [...] |
Homologous Legs is the personal blog of Jack Scanlan, an Australian science communicator and biology student. Topics of interest here include the intelligent design/evolution "war", biology, philosophy, religion, music, and mostly coherent thoughts from a scattered brain. 
 
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