Once again, our daily entertainment comes to us from the Discovery Institute. Why? It’s because Ol’ Hambo’s AIG and the gang at ICR have been really boring lately. And of course there’s no real creationist news — like litigation, legislation, or actual science.
So what do the Discoveroids have for us today? This little wonder appears at their creationist blog: “Poor Design”? Human Versus Biological Invention. Like so many others lately, it’s by Klinghoffer. He’s a Discoveroid “senior fellow” (i.e., flaming, full-blown creationist), who eagerly functions as their journalistic slasher and poo flinger. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:
According to a common refrain from ID critics, the theory of intelligent design is defeated by observations of “poor design” in our own biology.
Your Curmudgeon has made that point in several posts. The first was more than ten years ago: Buffoon Award Winner — The Intelligent Designer, and that links to some others. Nothing since then has changed our opinion, but Klinghoffer says:
Smart humans could have done it much better, we are told, so this points to bungling evolution over the work of a purposeful designer outside nature. [That is correct!] Does this challenge hold water?
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Yes, it certainly does hold water. We’re not saying that today we could literally produce a better human, but we can certainly point out numerous blunders the Discoveroids’ designer made. Anyway, let’s find out what Klinghoffer is trying to tell us:
Well, let’s say you compare the most ingenious technological inventions — from Silicon Valley, for example — with the inventions [Inventions?] inscribed in carbon, not silicon, in “simple cells.”
Where is Klinghoffer going with this? Is he going to compare computer chips to DNA? He continues:
On a classic episode of ID the Future [Ooooooooooooh! A Discoveroid podcast — and it’s a classic!], molecular biologist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discussed the question, weighing Silicon Valley against “Carbon Valley.”
Axe isn’t a Discoveroid “fellow.” He’s the director of Biologic Institute, the Discoveroids’ in-house research lab. The Biologic website has a bio page which mentions Axe. We recently wrote about him here: The Discoveroids Have Wonderful News.
You probably know who Meyer is. If not, see this from a couple of months ago: Discovery Institute Claims They Discovered God. Okay, let’s find out what those two towering geniuses say about a comparison of Silicon Valley and “Carbon Valley”. It’s right at the end of Klinghoffer’s brief post. He says:
Guess which one beats the other for inspired design? [Huh?] Download the podcast or listen to it here. [Link omitted!]
So there you are. We’re guessing their claim is that the designer of your junked-up DNA — blessed be he! — is infinitely better than the folks who make computers. The Discoveroids win again!
Copyright © 2020. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Organismal structures are contingent – due to descent with modification – constrained by reproduction and common ancestry. And they work for survival and reproduction or the the organisms would be dead. Humans, as supposedly intelligent agents, produce all kinds of contingent and therefore “suboptimal” designs. Consider the imposition of Windows on MSDos. It is often more efficient to modify an existing structure than create a new one from scratch. The cetacean skull is another good example of the contingency due to descent with modification. Evolution explains why the structures exist as they are – nothing else does.. Trying to determine what an unknown intelligence would or wouldn’t do given the opportunity is not very relevant and putting value-judgements on structures is best left to the anti-evolution essentialists who never consider fitness is relative to the environment.
As long as the advocates of ID don’t say what design is, they can always object that design isn’t like that.
TomS: Exactly. And one thing ID advocates will never admit is that design that is less than optimal for any given function is actually a denial of the desitgner’s perfect wisdom, foresight and omniscience. That is, their “designer”, if s/he existed, couldn’t be God.
Thus, they are actually opposed to theistic creation – but they can never admit that, because politics. They are trying to ally with the droolers over at AiG and ICR and whatnot, in the (mistaken) belief that they are stronger together. But the DI is to the hard-core creationists as the Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks, or the Girondins to the Montagnards. In the event – impossible, I trust – of any of them gaining actual power to implement any of their aims, the theocrats would actually start by eating the DI alive.
Which, I suppose, makes us White Russians, or Royalists. Now that’s an unpleasant thought.
@DaveL: Fortunately your analogy isn’t exactly perfect. I mean, what would the creationist equivalent be for the Russian elections of late 1917?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election
Also there were many more parties in Russia 1981 than the three you mentioned. What would the creationist equivalent be for all those “left-wing uprisings against the Bolshviks” (you can find it on Wikipedia too) ?
Both questions are unanswerable. So I sit comfortably; I don’t fit anywhere.
But it is an amusing thought that Ol’Hambo’s ark is the creacrap equivalent for Lubyanka prison – where the mensheviks and the anarchists were the first to be tortured by Dzerzhinsky. I’m willing to consider the hypothesis that Ol’Hambo somewhere has hidden a torture chamber for IDiots who in his eyes aren’t loyal enough to his favourite Holy Book.
They’re in a cleft stick, which is nice for us.
The qualities traditionally attributed by theists to their god — omnipotence, and so forth — are undermined by the clear suboptimal workings we see in biological organisms.
YEC’s can at least fall back on the myth of the Fall to account for that, but the Discoveroids have to dodge those theological trappings, making pretend that, no, they’re not really flaws or suboptimal traits, and besides, let’s see you do better.
What they’re left with, in the absence of a proper theory/definition of design or any kind of testable mechanism “outside nature”, is the unstated deux ex machina of miracles — not a good look for anyone claiming to do science.
And once invokes miracles of the supernatural, what sense does “design” make?
Doesn’t a design involve working under constraints? If you design a bridge, you have to take account of the weight and size of whatever is going to cross the brodge, the strength of the materials that you’re using, the costs involved, and a whole lot of details: part A is attached to part B and has to keep out the way of the traffic etc. Tell me enough about Intelligent Design to understand whether this is relevant.
Has anyone addressed the observation of Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason A 627
“The utmost, therefore, that the argument can prove, is an architect of the world who is always very much hampered by the adaptability of the material in which he works, not a creator of the world to whose idea everything is subject.”
Located on chromosome 11 is the INS gene. In cells in the Islands of Langerhans in the pancreas this gene is a major player in the production of insuline (hence its name).
I don’t know what this gene does in all the other 37 thousand billion cells of the body (37 with 12 zero’s) but it certainly is not making insuline in those cells.
Maybe it is part in other chemical processes, I don’t know -maybe anyone here?-, but I get the feeling we have way to many of those INS genes.
I don’t know about Kant, Tom, but here’s a definition to piss off the Discoveroids: design is what you’re left with when you can’t work miracles.
As you say, design involves working within physical constraints, but that doesn’t square with what we’re asked to believe about the Abrahamic god.
@chris schilling
Thanks.
One more thing about design. Unless someone has another description or defition of design. Design is an approach to a problem – something is not the way that you want – necessity is the mother of invention.
How did things come to be so that God would change his creation? What was wrong with creation?
And then, instead of re-creating, he resorted to design, as if that worked better than creation.
Maybe somebody has an idea how design works to address such problems, but they are not telling anyone about it.
As I said before, the “designer” is the biblical creator, but judges aren’t supposed to notice that when they rule (as they haven’t yet) that intelligent design is just another scientific theory.
TomS points out
Yep–that’s yet another problem of the Creationists’ consistent teleological fallacy, which consistently leads them to frame the problem wrong, viz., how can this precise world come to be, as if our present world–and our presence in it–was an inherent purpose of nature.
And there the problems really start. One cannot get to this precise world, if one assumes that is the necessary goal, without foreknowldege of this end state either being front-loaded and baked into the initial conditions and/or undergoing in-flight adjustments by some holder of that foreknowledge. But why, then, could not this present world have been created in its present state? What was the point of all those dinosaurs, and why did they have to be wiped out by an asteroid.
Worse: were the world the product of some supernatural entity with the comprehensive foreknowledge to create the world, it would mean that no living thing, including ourselves, can possibly have free will: we cannot choose an action with results contrary to the foreknowledge of the supernatural creator.
No doubt there is plenty of theological sophistry to deal with issues like this–but is that really a better explanation that what science can demonstrate?
But the fact that I have flat feet, that I am very nearsighted and had to have cataract surgey, that I developed basal cell carcinoma on my ear lobes because of a lack of melanin in my skin–those are irrelevant factors. I just don’t see the perfection of my design. After all, since God designed me, what I have must be perfect.
BTW, I am being sarcastic, though my imperfections (and others) are true.
@Mega: “No doubt there is plenty of theological sophistry to deal with issues like this–but is that really a better explanation that what science can demonstrate?”
Of course, because theology does accept teleology as an explanatory model. And with hindsight apologists can explain a lot, including the suffering of LauretteM. For instance one can follow Leibniz and maintain this possibly is not a perfect world, but still the best possible world. That way one can also maintain that human design (whatever design means) may not be perfect (and add that speculations about the motives of the Grand Old Designer – blessed be MOFO! – are not science and hence beyond the theory called IDiocy) but still the best possible design. Of course the next trick is carefully not specifying what “possible” means.
Inferring purpose – that age old hobby of theists everywhere. Like the rainbow is a sign from God that marriage equality is a natural right. Like Thermus aquaticus was created so humans could use Taq polymerase for PCR. It is amazing all the things God thought of – all with us in mind.
And the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Or, if there be such a principle of the natural world as the Conservation of Specified Complex Information, why so burden the natural world?
I anticipate that some may suggest that such burdens are the fault of Adam’s Fall. If so, but when life, and the constraint on evolution to the “macro”, within a “created kind”, occurred before Adam and Eve in Eden; and thus life could have appeared, for all we know, according to the original laws of nature.
Megalonyx uses the phrase “teleological fallacy” as if teleology is a bad thing. But wait. Sometimes I am impelled toward it. Like a few days ago when the weather was warm enough for college students to frolic on a sandbar in a nearby county park. One young woman had on a string bikini, and I found myself focusing irresistibly on the end in view.
Teleology is not a bad thing, it fails to explain anything except when it can turned into causality. I don’t see any teleology in your example, unless you think that young woman wanted to have that effect on you before she met you.
FrankB, I was only making a silly off-topic equivocation on two meanings of “end”: “purpose or intention” on the one hand, and “buttocks” on the other. You can imagine how fascinated I was by the end in view, irrespective of the young woman’s intentions.
+1.