My fellow blogger Jonathan Pearce recently wrote a post on the predictive power of evolution. There was a very long thread of comments, coming in response to that, basically made of anti-science objections to biology, and responses to those by defenders of science. Here are a number of those objections, and what I think about them.
1. “Similarities among living things are not surprising. Starting a model from scratch would be time consuming and costly. Designers use previously developed blueprints all the time.”
Here are a few reasons this is so absurd:
-Applying typical human limitations (time and money) to the so called all-powerful Creator. You are talking about a God with (literally) all the time and resources in the world. Why would something more suitable be a problem for this god? Did he have to hire more engineers and worry about their salaries? Did he need run experiments to show if his models worked?
-Shared blueprints are useful when you are developing a new product that roughly does has the same function as the old one, like a new car. You wouldn’t use a blueprint for something new that supposedly has a different function altogether (at least as far as physical objects are concerned). Humans built ships first, then cars, then planes. They did not use the same blueprints; they started from scratch. Why do bats and human being are “built” using the same map originally used for a fish?
-When old blueprints are re-used, old parts still have (again, for physical objects at least) the same function. For example, in today’s cars, wheels still have the same role they played a hundred years ago. This is very different in living things: gill slits build gills in fish, whereas they build the head, neck, and part of chest in mammals, including us. Why? God was too rushed, or too limited on budget, to come up with something better, that for instance, wouldn’t give us the absurd recurrent laryngeal nerve, needlessly prone to damage in cases of lung cancer?
2. “Flaws in the anatomy of living things (such as blind spots) are not evidence of bad design. They were placed there intentionally by the designer, for a purpose. You have to ask him.”
It is convenient that the designer is never available for questioning. But we don’t need to ask the designer to judge whether the design was good or not. Real designers never get the benefit of the doubt that way. If the chair a carpenter makes for you is wobbly, you will conclude that he was sloppy. You don’t go after him and ask him what the purpose of doing a poor job was. Or is the “purpose” to come across as incompetent and sloppy?
3. “You should look at the bigger picture. The fact that some animals have a blind spot in their eyes shouldn’t distract you from that.”
As it turns out, it is the bigger picture that is the most damning to the design hypothesis. In the case of the eye, for example, we see that vertebrates have a camera eye with a blind spot. Cephalopods, on the other hand, have eyes that resemble vertebrate eyes, but without a blind spot.
Among tens of thousands of species of fishes, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and mammals, you can’t find even one that has an eye without a blind spot. Likewise, among dozens of octopus and squid species, you can’t find one with a blind spot. If a designer build each species separately, the expected distribution would be random. The reason for this conserved pattern is SHARED ANCESTRY. Unless, of course, the “designer” wants to trick us into thinking evolution happened (see item 2).
4. “Intelligent design doesn’t negate evolution, it just says mutations are not random, but guided.”
That is a breathtakingly ignorant statement, if you have the faintest clue how science works. It is like saying, denying gravity is not negating physics, as long as you believe the Earth goes around the sun. Scientists spend vast amounts of time and resources (which God apparently is short of) working out MECHANISMS. And the mechanisms of random mutations followed by natural selection have been observed many, many times, whereas “directed mutations” leading to an organism to be able to use its environment better have never been observed, not once.
