Silly Creationists! Nature is for adults!
Posted on March 24th, 2008 by blue collar scientistBy way of Evil Bender, I learn that intelligent Design Creationists on the Uncommon Descent blog have been crowing about how the scientific journal Nature recently published an example of intelligent design, and that this proves god green space aliens the designer, etc.
Here’s what the creationists had to say (emphasis mine):
The following is an edited extract from a Nature paper. It is an example of real ID research…. The novel active site was completely intelligently designed.
Holy smokes! Real intelligent design? And published in Nature?
That must really burn Ben Stein’s shorts, after he went to so much trouble to make a movie about how intelligent design is excluded from schools, scientific journals, and so on.
So, anyway…. The Nature article they cite is called “Kemp elimination catalysts by computational enzyme design.” I went over to the Nature website, and right on the front page was a link to the paper. You can go over there and read its abstract if you want, even if you can’t get the whole paper.
So guess what the paper is about? It is about people designing new enzymes. Yes, folks, the paper is about chemical engineering by humans.
We designed eight enzymes with computationally designed active sites. In vitro evolution enhanced the computational designs, demonstrating the power of combining computational protein design with directed evolution for creating new enzymes.
Again, we see the bad scholarship of creationists. It is bad enough that creationists repeatedly confuse fishing lures for real insects; now it looks like the quality of their scholarship will be limited by their inability to tell the difference between people and space aliens gods supernatural intelligent designers.
Tags: chemical engineering, creationism, enzymes, intelligent design, supid
March 24th, 2008 at 10:47 am
That’s amazing. It’s a snowy day in Stockholm, Sweden, and there are a lot of newly made snowmen around. According to the logic you describe, these snowmen are also evidence supportive of creationism!
March 24th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
That bug hook was clearly evolved…I mean designed to inject eggs into the host…um…fish. Also, the bugs were bred using computerized logorithmic…models.
MATH = CREATION
*sigh*
March 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Do you realize that you’ve made statements [backed with easily observable ad hominem] that make you look like you lack basic comprehension of the subject at hand?
Maybe you just picked a bad straw man. maybe you’ve simply overlooked the facts.
The ID guys are simply pointing out that scientists have purposely designed something here, so it did not come about by natural selection; it came about by unnatural [ala Mendell] selection. As such, the experiment proves that we can purposely design but says nothing at all to the concept of whether it could occur naturally. Maybe that’s over your head. I dunno.
Let’s use the snowman example. Now if you see a yardful of snowmen, Martin, are you going to presume that they came about by random natural processes of weather OR that someone made them? That’s right; you’re gonna weigh in on the side of design [of human origin, in this case].
The presence of design suggests a designer. Evolution is an unfalsifiable tautology.
–Sirius Knott
March 28th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
More of the usual creationist lies….
“The presence of design suggests a designer.”
What a stunning, mind-blowing realization! Do creationists also claim that the presence of poop suggests a pooper? Does the presence of a lie suggest a liar? (In this case, we know the answer: Yes.)
Nobody argues that the presence of design suggests a designer. The issue is that design isn’t present.
I know, I know - it sure looks like some biological things might be designed. But scientists have gotten past the third grade and have figured out that looks can be deceiving.
“Evolution is an unfalsifiable tautology.”
Oh, stop telling lies. Evolution would be totally falsified by the discovery of Precambrian rabbit fossils. It would be totally falsified by the discovery that DNA can’t be inherited. Or by the discovery that DNA can’t mutate. Or by the discovery that - well, there’s thousands of such discoveries that would falsify evolution, I’m afraid. Just because it hasn’t been falsified so far, doesn’t mean it CAN’T be falsified.
I know, I know, this science stuff is just so hard, actually requiring you to learn stuff, rather than just make things up….