discovery institute caught daydreaming

Take a peek into the bizarro world of the Discovery Institute, where random cranks are scientific icons in waiting and evolution is about to be rejected by Big Science.





Apparently within five years, the idea that evolution can produce complex microscopic structures will be dead, thrown into the enormous junk bin of science and creationists will be riding high and calling the shots around biology labs as their movement flourishes. Or at least this is what William Dembski fantasized about in 2004 during an interview with a religious magazine. It’s been five years now and evolution is still going strong as the dominant theory underpinning modern biology. I suppose it’s going to be a sudden collapse. Or maybe, in a much more plausible scenario, this was just Dembski being himself, making bold claims he can’t support by anything other than the fantasies of the Discovery Institute and its small staff of whiny, vapid ignoramuses.

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism, the idea that Darwinian processes produce complex molecular structures at subcellular levels, will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

If you note, he doesn’t say why scientists will all of a sudden discard the principles of evolution in microscopic structures. He just proclaims they will and goes on to daydream about how great it will be to spout all sorts of quasi-theological pseudoscience once all the real scientists pack up their things and take a collective hike. It must’ve burned him pretty badly to hear actual scientists tell the public that his book has about the same level of scientific validity as Deepak Chopra’s fluffy pontifications on New Age woo, so he’s savoring the thought of vindication in the eyes of the people he wanted to impress and failed miserably in his attempt. If he was able to really show that evolution couldn’t have happened without a supernatural catalyst, he wouldn’t be regarded as a pompous buffoon paid to talk about things he knows nothing about. Instead, he would be giving a lecture on his ideas after accepting his Nobel Prize.

People like him have been predicting that evolutionary ideas will fail as inadequate and unproven for as long as Darwin’s theory of natural selection answered questions being posed by naturalists about the similarity of all living things on our planet. They’ve been wrong for almost a century and a half. Maybe that should’ve been a signal that they’re barking up the wrong tree? It’s painfully embarrassing to fail at something generation after generation and yet keep trying. And to be cruel but honest, that’s also the colloquial definition of insanity: to do the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result with every attempt. Even their basic lingo hasn’t changed in 150 years. They still call evolution Darwinism, which is like calling gravity Newtonism and ignoring Einstein’s profound expansions of Newton’s framework. It’s intellectually lazy, scientifically inept and just plain wrong. Pretty much like the entire intelligent design movement.