Evolutionists and "cdesign proponentsists"

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At the famous Dover, PA trial, Behe was deconstructed on the witness stand. His nonsense was thoroughly refuted. Even Judge Jones, a Republican and a non-scientist commented on how shoddy the intellectual claims of the I.D. folks were.

ruveyn

Incorrect. The creationists are the ones who invented Intelligent Design so that creationism can be taught in schools under the guise of science. Obviously you have never heard of the Wedge Strategy. I already know what irreducible complexity is and nothing has been shown to be irreducibly complex. I remember the argument that the flagellum of a bacterium was irreducibly complex but in fact it isn't. See the following article from Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v4/n10/abs/nrmicro1493.html

The flagellum is irreducibly complex only in the sense that a cheese sandwich is irreducibly complex.
I. e. it would cease to function as a cheese sandwich if the cheese were removed from it.

But it would make great putty for fixing a hole in the wall.

ruveyn

For those of you who can't access that article I cited (I can't access it either). The bacterial flagellum probably evolved from the Type III secretion system that some harmful bacteria use to inject toxins into living cells. It is made up of a simpler subset of components of the flagellum and is still functional. Hence, the flagellum is not irreducibly complex.

The cheeseless cheese sandwich would also function as a sandwich.

That is certainly one possibility. Of course, right now we don't have a clear understanding of how the bacterial flagellum actually works in its present state, so debating its evolutionary path may be a bit premature.

0hanrahan, I'm curious - Did you actually watch the video?

1:05:45 through 1:06:10 - exactly my thoughts. The science will go where it will go. There are two sides to every story but trying to sneak an idea into class rooms as equivalent before the ground is even there is hitting pretty low.

Interesting to note that Ken Miller is a practicing Roman Catholic and from his description of family life pretty devout. Peter Ward in his debate with Stephen C Meyer, after sounding pretty heated over the idea of ID and admitting to not being particularly religious made a comment in which he went after Dawkins, claiming that he had profoundly disserviced science via his claims about faith and religion. I think that cultural battle is part of where this preemptive push for ID (prior to scientific saleability) comes from.