"This Year in Intelligent Design"

I am borrowing this title from another blog, Ford Denison's This Week in Evolution blog. Back only one year ago he published a post called "This year in intelligent design" and showed how little actual work is being done in the field of Intelligent Design, like we didn't already know that. It was an interesting post none-the-less.

Well he's updated it for 2008 and once again searched scientific sources looking for all the work the Discovery Institute and their ilk claims to be doing. Funny thing is in the 2008 installment of "This year in intelligent design" he found . . .nothing. Now please remember he was searching in scientific journals, so you can see why that is the case. He did provide a link over to Allen McNeil's blog and said that ID "never got off the ground as a scientific field and now it seems to be dead even as a religious movement."

Elsewhere on the blogsphere, PZ Myers, over on Pharyngula posted this one, so I had to follow up. According to Casey Luskin, (DI mouthpiece) a Bicycle is Irreducibly Complex! Huh? Well read for yourself, here is the original quote off the Discovery Institute's blog:

"For example, consider again the bicycle. Bicycles have two wheels. Unicycles, having only one wheel, are missing an obvious component found on bicycles. Does this imply that you can remove one wheel from a bicycle and it will still function? Of course not. Try removing a wheel from a bike and you'll quickly see that it requires two wheels to function. The fact that a unicycle lacks certain components of a bicycle does not mean that the bicycle is therefore not irreducibly complex."

It's part of an article doing their best to obfuscate the Dover trial, 3 years now and they are still backtracking and trying to marginalize something. An aside to Casey and his buds . . . if you are still re-positioning yourself after 3 years, you cannot expect anyone to take you seriously. Give up on Dover and move on.

But back to the Bike. So you take off a wheel, does it still function? As a bicycle, no! By definition a bicycle requires two wheels (hence the name BI-cycle). But does that mean a bike is irreducibly complex? Now the way I remember Behe trying to explain it in Darwin's Black Box. It might not function as a bicycle, but how many of us used bicycle parts for something else? I helped build go-carts as a kid using bicycle parts. I've seen single wheeled bicycles converted to generators when placed on an appropriate stand and connected to a generator. One friend used to only watch TV powered form her bike. It's been years since I've thought about her, at the rate she was losing weight, she should be just about gone by now!

Let's look at the evolution of the bicycle, from Wikipedia. Bicycles didn't spring into existence, but have a long history as adaptations from various forms of three and four wheeled carts of the time period.

So what have we learned? That once again something proposed, by one of the pseudo-scientists at the Discovery Institute, as irreducibly complex is nothing of the sort. It didn't spring into being, but evolved over a long period of time. It might no longer function as a bicycle with a wheel missing, but it can certainly have other functions. In other words, Casey flunks again.