September 29, 2005
Intelligent Design (again) and mice
Cox and Forkum recently posted a great cartoon on the matter (reproduced here with permission)
As I understand it, the premise is that everything is so unbelievably complex, it must have been designed to fit together so very well. And that so long as the creator isn't named (just think of him as "Big G", or hyper-intelligent aliens), then somehow the theory is not inherently religious.
Now, if you believe we were so complex that we had to be designed, then whatever designed us must have been vastly more complicated (one doesn't wish to say infallible) in order to get all the details just right. So, just for arguments sake, and to avoid the overtly religious "Big G", we'll run with the aliens.
Mice are not, as is commonly assumed on Earth, small white squeaking animals who spend a lot of time being experimented on. In fact, they are the protrusions into our dimension of hyper-intellegent pan-dimensional beings. These beings are in fact responsible for the creation of the Earth.Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Which explains everything but who designed the mice and their pan-dimensional world(s). And who designed the designers of the mice.
Roving about the web, I found something that hits just this troublesome little nail on the head, so I'll just reprint the far more eloquent Dr. Keith Lockitch's summation.
By the very nature of its approach, "intelligent design" cannot be satisfied with a "designer" who is part of the natural world. Such a "designer" would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: it would not explain biological complexity as such. The only "designer" that would stop their quest for a "design" explanation of complexity is a "designer" about whom one cannot ask any questions or who cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study--a "designer" that "transcends" nature and its laws--a "designer" not susceptible of rational explanation--in short: a supernatural "designer."
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 12:03 PM
August 29, 2005
Dinosaurs.
The American Museum of Natural history has a new special exhibit. For a mere $16, they promise, all you know about dinosaurs will be turned on its head. I roved over the AMNH website, and it looked interesting, with mention of some new biomechanics research that I hadn't read a great deal of.
At this point, I was curious, being somewhat interested in dinosaurs and other pre-Cenozoic beasts. Or at least interested enough to have been in a dig crew for three seasons and believe that methodically breaking very large rocks into very small rocks, all the while examining the rubble with a jeweler’s loop (10x magnifier) for small brown fossil fragments amongst the (brown) coal flecks and (brown) fossilized mud was actually a fun way to spend summers. I did find some dinosaur bits - mostly teeth with the occasional jaw, turtle (lots of turtle), the occasional pterosaur bone and jaw fragments and teeth from a large thing called a labrynthodont, which can be imagined as a Mexican walking fish about fifteen feet long (with curiously formed and sharp teeth).
Quite honestly, I didn't expect to learn anything revolutionary, but I thought it might be fun to check out. I knew it would be targeted at the 6-12 year olds, and I don't think I was too far off the mark. That was fine with me, so long as they had the occasional aside for curious adults.
But there was little information there that wasn't contained in the main halls (often with better and wider ranging examples), and where something wasn't well covered in the main hall, the exact text and multimedia presentations are all available on the AMNH website (which I'd already read). For $16, I had hoped it would offer a little more detail.
What was there was presented well, of course. It simply seemed that they'd roped off a standard exhibit and were charging a premium to be allowed into an area more crowded than average. Good, but not great. However, what really soured me was, nearing the end of the exhibit, in front of a large diorama, was overhearing a curious young boy ask his tour guide a question of one of the mammals represented there.
"That mammal there, it looks like one of the ancestors of whales, I think. Is it?" pointing, as he was, to a shrew-like beagle sized thing (an eomaia, a member of a group that spawned placental mammals). It was a decent question, I thought (albeit 70 million years early), which deserved a good answer. I tend to have a soft spot for quizzical kids. The guide’s response, however, was unbelievably bad, and wrong in so many ways.
"Well, we all came from the ocean, so in a sense, we're all the descendants of whales".
Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at 03:58 PM