Defensiveness, Thy Name is Ann!

Even just this past evening, when I was perusing various websites I came across yet another rebuttal from Ann Gauger on being called to task in a post from Dr. Vincent Torley .  Aside from the whole defensiveness of her post, this is the part that got my attention:

"Common descent cannot explain why egg-laying genes were lost earlier in one lineage than another, since it could have happened either way.  . . . 

From a design perspective, I would say the reason for the difference in apparent inactivation times is because each animal has a different design."

Like most posts from the DI, on the surface it looks fairly innocuous, but are they equivalent comments?  Look at the first one.  According to Ann there is something common descent cannot explain.  Maybe not, but I do have to question the role of common descent, is it to describe the why of an occurrence?  Or is the occurrence itself enough to establish the commonality that supports common descent?

If she claims that common descent can't explain why . . . shouldn't she be asking the same of her mythical designer?  Her comment should be explaining the reason why her mythical designer chose to use different inactivation times for different organisms, but no, she gives the generic because 'it was designed' without any support to actual make a design determination. Wouldn't that make a more apples-to-apples comparison than the way she put it?

Let's get to the root of the problem with intelligent design.  Green-screen Ann says the reason is a choice by the designer.  At that point, she stops asking questions.  The topic is done, she's satisfied.  Yet real scientists are rarely satisfied with such a limited and limiting answer.  They want to understand not just what happened . . . but how it occurred . . . and even why something happened.  Even if it looks like they might never find the answer to a specific 'why' question, they keep digging and learning, and uncover many other marvelous things about the subject at hand.  Whereas the ID proponent hits the theological wall and stops thinking about it.

I believe that if the intelligent design crowd even attempted to take it to another level and claim why their version of a deity did something, the rest of the theists might chase them out of town with torches and pitchforks.  No, they like to keep things as vague as possible while demanding biology take things to a level they will never dare go. Where is Ann asking how the 'designer' did it?  She doesn't ask, because she doesn't care.  She reached the end of her curiosity with her answer of the mythical designer.  Science is never 100% certain, to feel that level of certainty, you need religion.