[Edited 10:45 p.m. EST] Chicago Tribune staff reporter Jeremy Manier yesterday took some incredible liberties in his article, “Unlocking cell secrets bolsters evolutionists.”
"They've admitted, under oath, that they have no direct evidence for design at all," Miller said.
That's absurd. I always and everywhere say that the structure of complex systems is itself overwhelming, direct evidence for design. Miller is either being disingenuous or, more charitably, so confused and inattentive that he ascribes his own thinking on ID to me.
That's true, Behe said; his focus has been on arguing that some systems could not have evolved naturally. He said he has no idea how complex biochemistry actually came about, no suggestions for testing how intelligent design occurred, and he knows of no scientists who are planning such tests."
I did not say it is true that there is no direct evidence for design, as the piece makes it seem. The structure of a system is direct evidence for design, ala Mount Rushmore. I said that one can't easily find out how design occurred; for example, how Stonehenge was designed, which stumped people for a long time after they knew it was purposefully designed. I stressed that design is falsifiable, and therefore testable. That statement is nowhere to be seen in the piece. I also stressed that Darwinism is for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable. That didn't fit the story line either.
More confusion. Manier appears to think that sperm flagella are the same as bacterial flagella. More, he says that the blood clotting system is not irreducibly complex because of proteins found in "the sea squirt, which cannot clot blood". But if its blood doesn't clot, then how does that show the clotting cascade is not irreducibly complex? More, he repeats the ACLU attorney's words about work on the immune system not being "good enough" which the judge in his decision put in my mouth. They make me seem petulant using the other attorney's words. I point out the misattribution of those words in my response to the Dover decision, published by Discovery.
Manier writes, "Yet biologists have made major strides on each of those phenomena since the first ID books were published in the mid-1990s." That's ludicrous. The interesting story is that essentially no progress whatsoever has been made in a Darwinian framework on the systems I discussed in Darwin's Black Box since it was published ten years ago. The Free Press will soon release a tenth anniversary edition of DBB in which I review exactly that lack of progress in a new chapter-length Afterword.
