Just a round-up of points from the ID folder.
First, a general remark. I like a good knock-down argument as much as the next person, but I must say, ID-ers are low-grade opponents, at least if a bulk of my e-mails are any indication. They are still banging away with the arguments I first heard when the whole thing first surfaced 10-15 yrs ago. "What use is half an eye?" "The odds against this are a trillion to one!" etc. etc. There is nothing new here. I understand why biologists get angry and frustrated with ID-ers. All the ID arguments have been patiently refuted many times over. The ID-ers response is to come back with... the same arguments.
Anyway, here are a few of the commonest things I hear.
(1) "The fossil record is incomplete." Well, duh. Fossilization only happens under extraordinary circumstances. The chance that any particular organism -- me, for instance -- will be recovered as a fossil eons hence is microscopically small. To add to the incompleteness, soft body parts hardly ever get fossilized. We are working from a pretty scanty data set here. Hard to see how it could be otherwise.
(2) "...Therefore you have no right to go constructing theories, given that the data set is so sparse." Scientists build theories from much worse data sets than this. Try stopping them. The forthcoming (I think) issue of National Review contains a review by me of Simon Singh's new book THE BIG BANG, about the history of scientific cosmology. The data set in cosmology is so hard to gather that even very basic questions like "is the overall structure of the universe static or dynamic?" were not resolved until very recently. Science does what it can with the data it can gather. A good scientific theory fits the data better than a poor theory. ("God makes it happen!" is, by the way, not a scientific theory, though it may be a metaphysical one.)
(3) "Evolution isn't scientific because you can't test it in a lab." For heaven's sake. That criterion would invalidate most of science. The theory of continental drift, for example -- how are you going to get Eurasia in through the lab door? We have excellent theories to account for the behavior of stars, but you can't put a star in your lab, nor even duplicate star-stuff in small quantitites. As I said, this is low-grade argumentation. (And, see below, we are actually quite close to a point where we CAN do evolution in the lab.)
(4) "Organizational complexity cannot arise from simplicity by natural processes." How do you know it can't? It is true that the genesis of organizational complexity is not currently well understood; but to leap from that to telling me we shall NEVER be able to find a natural-law explanation for it is just dogma. At any point in history, all sorts of thing are not well understood. Science is "open," working from the ground assumption that natural phenomena have natural explanations that can be formulated mathematically. To declare that such and such a phenomenon will NEVER yield to this kind of inquiry is absurd, not to mention offensively arrogant. Perhaps, indeed, it won't; perhaps some phenomena that science assumes to be natural -- the phenomenon of human consciousness, for instance -- may turn out to be not susceptible to the scientific method. I would not myself rule that out. However, to say you KNOW this, because... you just KNOW, is silly. Remember Comte, who in 1842 declared that "We can never know anything of the chemical or mineralogical structure" of the stars. He was hardly cold in his grave before the spectrograph was invented, and now we know all about that structure.
(snip)
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_02_06_corner-archive.asp#055599
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