For example, there are plenty of animals that cooperate. The question is then why? It’s an exception to the unfettered competition.

However, the reason is simple, cooperation leads to a competive advantage. Just as tit-for-tat in a long term game of prisoner’s dilema is almost always the optimal strategy.

The other complete falacy is that life forms come about out of chance. ie. I found a watch, it must have been designed, or what use is half an watch.

It’s clear that people making these claims do not understand evolution.

It’s not chance alone. It’s chance and selection.

Half an eye does work. Lots of animals have very poor eyesight or just light sensing cells.

Nick

Zigackly – which is how William Jennings Bryan, a populist left-wing Democrat, found lasting fame as an opponent of ‘Darwinism’. Damn shame. I blame Huxley – Darwin personally deprecated any extension of the theory of descent-with-modification-plus-natural-selection to other spheres.

I think you partially missed my point about the One True Argument, incidentally. It seems to me that there’s a widespread perception of ‘science’ as having the O.T.A. (Widespread, and not entirely unjustified – the formulae which underlie bridges and nylon and iMacs do tend to work, after all.) If you tell people that science actually exists in a permanent state of controversy, a lot of them will think “Well, nobody’s arguing about bridges and nylon and iMacs, so they must be talking about the bits of science where they haven’t found the One True Answer just yet – and if they haven’t found the O.T.A., how can they be so sure Intelligent Design is wrong, then, eh?”

Nick

You’re right though, there is the opportunity to attack science by painting it as totally divided, but as the Dawkins piece in the Guardian the other day highlights, there is plenty that they are united on as well. All science is characterised by a united-but-divided tendency, and I think the public are very much aware of it.

…and they say, “There you are, you see? Even the professional scientists can’t agree!” The idea that you can only disqualify an argument by laying down the One True Argument has a strong appeal to some people – especially, of course, those people who think that theirs is the One True Argument.

I don’t want to get into a debate about the whole existence or otherwise of God, but it seems rather bizarre that they insist on arguing for one that can’t avoid all the tedious business of sitting down and manually inventing 350,000 different species of beetle by hand.

Maybe they think God just really, really likes beetles?

My understanding of the basics of ID is: evolution hasn’t come up with an explanation for X, therefore it must be God who made it that way. Things like the complexity of a composite structure where all the bits must be assembled together before you get any benefit, unlike the less all-or-nothing behaviour normal to evolution: a giraffe with a slightly taller neck could eat slightly more leaves than its peers, a moth that looked slightly more like a leaf would be slightly less likely to be eaten by a predator.

Anyway, the whole thing depends on evolution not having an explanation for X. This sounds as if ID people think that evolution isn’t a developing field. If ever evolution came up with an explanation for X their foundations are undermined.

I prefer to base my belief in God on more fundamental and eternal things, rather than the current state of a field of science.