Bogus Design

A few monthes ago, Ed Darrell at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub posted a short essay — that you might want to read — discussing the signs of bogus history, itself inspired by a chronicle of Robert L. Park. A lot of those traits are shared by intelligent design.

Why using the word traits, and not the word signs? I strongly believe that all non-Darwinists theories could be seen as new versions of creationism, and I will discuss this issue in another post. Therefore, if we want to understand intelligent design and other theories, we need to consider that they are all part of an ecosystem — except that we are not looking at species sharing genetic material, but frameworks to understand (or disprove, for that matters) evolution, sharing concepts. The overall “appearance” of a theory is its phenotype, and the aspects of this theory are its traits.

Can we apply the traits proposed by Ed Darrell to intelligent design? For sure! Just note that I completely modified the last one, which was too much “history-biased” for this particular situation… And now let’s go…

The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations — This point is quite obvious for intelligent design theorists. They are yet to be published in a scientific journal, that is, not a journal founded by and for themselves. Since it is not going to happen, they target the civil society for their communication, by writing books or editing blogs. 

The author says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work — Again, intelligent design theorists spend most of their time complaining about the “censorship” (this issue needs to be discussed in detail, as ID are themselves prone to censor discordant voices) by the “established” neo-Darwinian community. And the Expelled : no intelligence allowed movie is a perfect illustration of this fact.

The sources that verify the new interpretation of evolution are obscure — if they exist at all! Intelligent design is characterized by the total absence of experimental work (whereas experimental evolution had been achieved a lot of times). Most of the time, intelligent design theorists refers to books (mostly their own books), or to out of context quotes — by Nobel prizes, evolutionists, or even Darwin himself.

Evidence is anecdotal — And frankly, it doesn’t exists. See the previous point. Intelligent design is not a theory. It’s merely a concept.

The author says a belief is credible because it has endured for some time, or because many people believe it to be true — … or the “knowledge of the masses”. With a logic of this kind, we would still be living in caverns, throwing stones at animals because “everything believe it to be the only possibility”. The fact that a lot of people believe in Genesis 1 doesn’t mean it is true. At all.

The author has worked in isolation — If there is one fact that always strike me in intelligent design, it’s definitely the lack of interaction between this theory and other fields. Biologists worked with chemicists and mathematicians for ages. Physicians and mathematicians works hand in hand. Sociologists and economists. And so on. But intelligent design proponents? Well, except other pro-ID people, nobody wants to team with them…

The author is only re-analyzing facts, without any clues about the mechanisms involved — Most of intelligent design pros have some ready-made “exemples” that their belief is true. Most of the time, they just try to interpretate those facts with — only — the first theory of Darwin. It would be like understanding organic chemistry with 4 elements, air, wind, earth and fire. And in the other few cases, you could be assured that their interpretation is irrelevant to the mechanisms involved in evolution in general, or this particular process. ID is about believing, science is about learning and understanding…

Now what?

Of course, one could raise the point that we can define a pseudo-science in a much more formal way. Anyway, theories of Popper and Kuhn, for exemple, even if they provide an exciting framework to analyse intelligent design —  not the intelligent design controversy, but the theory of ID — are more… well, more formal, and maybe less suited to a “blog” environment. Looking at some preminents features of a corpus of beliefs is probably more informative than a thorough analysis of those beliefs.

Just like I said in the introduction, the next post — one of the upcoming posts, anyway — will be dedicated to show in what all non-Darwinian theories are the common descent of creationism, even if some proponents of those theories are trying to disprove it.