Letters to the Editor

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After their notorious legal defeat, intelligent design proponents are resurfacing with insidious new assaults on science.
  • All design is evolutionary

    Discourse is healthy. Lazy reporting is not.

    Evolution is an established fact - see the fossil record, DNA, and other evidence mentioned by others. Natural Selection is a theory to explain the evidence.

    Creationism is another.

    The issue with today's creationism (under whatever name) is that it is insipid compared to that of the great naturalists of the nineteenth century. These were scientists willing to challenge the details of their theories with evidence from the natural world. Challenged their theories were - and Darwin won the arguments.

    Today's creationists are dogmatists, not scientists. They invert the process and attempt to challenge the natural world by sculpting the details of their theories to fit. The Tortured Scablands must be evidence of Noah's flood, not of the Lake Missoula flood(s) of the recent ice age. Dinosaur bones represent creatures slaughtered as kine by the deity, not collateral damage from one of the deity's solar system shooters. Two miles of Antarctic ice either relentlessly grew two feet per year over 6,000 years - or drilling down we should soon reach ice personally created by God. It wasn't a gamma-ray burst that toasted the trilobytes, but rather Yahweh's passion for a bottomless shrimp salad.

    The creationist's theories fail to survive cursory inspection to even enter the ring against Natural Selection's mibster.

    Perhaps there is a designer. What the evidence can be taken to show is simply that the deity chose the excellent and handy tool of Natural Selection to sculpt the world. What other design process is envisaged? What are the use cases for the universe? What requirements did the deity discover?

    Evolution is the ultimate of rapid prototyping, agile design, extreme programming, spiral development.