Blue Collar Scientist

By 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.