Discovery Institute official denies central tenet of intelligent design
Posted on April 11th, 2008 by blue collar scientistMichael Egnor, writing on the Discovery Institute blog, has said
Complexity can arise without intelligent design, but complexity is not the same thing as design.
I can’t explain the implications any better than Skeptico, so go over there if you want to learn what I think.
Tags: discovery institute, evolution, Skeptico
April 11th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Hate to say it, but unimpressed. I think it isn’t directly against their “irreducible complexity” argument. Don’t get me wrong, the argument is fluff, and this sort of thinking will hopefully lead them to the eventual conclusions the science world has come to, but in the mean time it’s a small, semantic picking that I’d expect from the fundies, like us using the word “design” in any way during an explanation about evolutionary results.
These guys are fragile too, let’s not scare them off of the very kind of subtleties that we have been hoping they would lean into all this time.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Egnor is “fragile”? His past performance belies that greatly, so are you sure you didn’t mean “stubborn and resentful”?
I don’t think this is indicative of any real understanding on Egnor’s part. If it were, it would not be allowed past the DI censors (remember, the DI is a thinktank–i.e., a political, not scientific organization).
This is a blunder, but not the sort of blunder that will lead them to wisdom.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:10 am
You make a good point. Either way I guess it feels like classic political finger pointing instead of real issues, so I’m not big on it.
Then again, as you pointed out, they’re a political engine, not a scientific one, so maybe dealing with their clumsiness on this level is useful. “god” knows we’ve been trying to deal with it on a scientific level for some time.