Intelligent Design is falsifiable, stupid – Evolution Isn’t!
Michael Behe: “ID is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection. It needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all the scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes of the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab, and grow that bug for a long time, and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum. If that happens, ID, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. Now, I don’t certainly expect it to happen, but it’s easily falsified by a series of such experiments.” “Now, let’s turn that around and ask how do we falsify the contention that natural selection produced the bacterial flagellum. If that same scientist went into the lab and knocked out the bacterial flagellum genes and grew it through the bacterium for a long time, and nothing much happened, “Well”, he can say, “Maybe we didn’t start with the right bacterium. Maybe we didn’t wait long enough. Maybe we need a bigger population.” And it would be very much difficult to falsify the Darwinian hypothesis. I think the very opposite is true. I think ID is easily testable, easily flasifiable, although it has not been falsified, and Darwinism is very resistant to being falsified. They can always claim something was not right.” Quote comes from this DVD: www.amazon.com Could the flagellum have evolved?: intelligentdesign.podomatic.com More on Intelligent …
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This present-day version of God of the gaps goes by a fresh name: intelligent design. The term suggests that some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster, created or enabled all the things in the physical world that we cannot explain through scientific methods. An interesting hypothesis. But why confine ourselves to things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a superintelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence? And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs-an entertainment complex built around a sewage system? Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself. It may not be nature’s default, but it’s ubiquitous. Yet people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it’s a good antidepressant to think so. But it’s not science-not now, not in the past, not ever. ~Neil Tyson fora.tv Commonwealth Club of California San Francisco, CA Feb 9th, 2007 Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about Death By Black Hole And Other Cosmic Quandaries Free (mp4) Download: fora.tv
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