Absolutely terrific profile of Philip Johnson, founder of the Intelligent Design movement, in this morning's Post. Reporter Michael Powell clearly has a real respect for Johnson, which is a relief --not the usual Style-section sneer. Hey, it's Pentecost, maybe the Spirit moved him. Something humorous is that much of the contra-Design evidence the reporter marshalls from Darwinists to "balance" the story is false in some way. He cites for example this evidence:
"fruit flies branch into new species; bacteria mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics; studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans. There are fossilized remains of a dinosaur "bird," and DNA tests suggest that whales descended from ancient hippos and antelopes."Small problem, though. Intelligent Design thinkers have no quarrel with 4 of those 5 "examples," and the most interesting --the alleged missing link bird-- is a fraud. Here's the press release National Geographic was forced to issue after Intelligent Design people berated them for a laudatory story on the "archeoraptor." Their claim they would work to confirm the story is like Dan Rather's standing by the Bush-Awol memos --a pathetic effort to save face. (Here's more on the archeoraptor fraud. Have to laugh at the Skeptic's Dictionary claiming that science at least admits its frauds, unlike Christians. Pardon me, but it took an incredible effort to get NatGeo to recant, and if you visit the National History Museum here in our berg, you can still find a bas relief of the archeoraptor skeleton and a big puff piece about its importance for evolutionary theory. More for our "stuff we know that isn't so" collection).
Then Powell asks, "Does it make any more sense to challenge Darwin than to contest Newton's theory of gravity? You haven't seen Phillip Johnson floating into the stratosphere recently, have you?" He obviously doesn't realize that quantum physicists DO question gravity (not its existence, obviously, but its cause) and all of Newtonian physics is currently up for grabs for that matter.
One major thing Powell misses about the Intelligent Design argument is that it is more than simply poking holes in Evolutionary theory; the ID guys argue that certain developments are so complex that it is illogical and unscientific to suppose they happen merely by chance. This weakness notwithstanding, however, it's a very nice article. Read it here.
UPDATE: a reader takes RC2 to task for generalizing about Darwinists (see comments), rightly pointing out that some of them are theists and accept the concept of design. Fair enough. RC2 has no beef to pick with theistic Darwinists, she just kept with the categories presented in the article.
