07.25.09

Booknotes: signature of the sneaky ID-ist: Meyer’s tome

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 2:42 pm by nemo

Am reading (and almost finished reading at super hi speed) Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Hardcover)
by Stephen Meyer (Author)
I don’t buy it, but….
If nothing else it will finish off self-organization theories.
The exterior finish, and spit and polish of this book will help it to promote its devious schemes of ID propaganda. It is an appealing book, with a lot of good history, background, and without excessive and obsessive ID junk, simply the basic argument presented against a backdrop of many references to the development of evolutionary thinking, and genetic discoveries, principally dna. If you are vulnerable to ID arguments, it may confuse you.
The book gets one thing right: biologists have a problem with dna and the origin of life. This gives ID folks a permanent perfect way to needle Darwinists, making them miserable to see the obvious phooey in all their sophistries.
But does it follow that ID is then the answer? The answer is that no matter how hard they try, ID-ists are in the same boat as Darwinists: case not proven.
And probably: case not provable.

One might consider the insight of Kant, that while design arguments are flawed, they can be used in an ‘as if’ mode to elicit insight about questions of biology. That’s the subtext here in Meyer’s book: it is as if he is using as if arguments, and the result is a first class way to debunk Darwinian pretenses, and a third class way to arrive at not much, except ‘Mr ID did it, but who is he??’
As noted in passing, the brands of ‘self-organization’ theories tend to be the default ‘press release’ mode of explanation by scientists on the question of dna and the origin of life. The ‘as if’ ID approach is convincing in eroding the credibility of such arguments, which, however, remain of value.

I always come to the same point with ID arguments, which is that, despite the clever way ID-ists have of making it seem that design is the answer, you can objectively assess your situation by asking if your net knowledge of how things evolved has increased, once you subtract mere plausibility arguments. At that point you realize it has not increased, and that natural selection and ID both leave you in the lurch.
Nonetheless, it seems that ID is really a religious knock off of teleological thinking, design with no designer, and such thinking is overdue for a comeback in biology, it seems, save only that no simple theory of such is available. But if you look at the comical failure of Dawkins ‘methinks it is a weasal’ argument, you realize that in fact it works fine if you change the label to postdarwinian and that it is a crypto-teleological process disguised behind a darwinian coverup, and that it just might indicate the real answer beyond natural selection and design in the teleological processes somehow embedded in nature.

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