A quote I found, while killing the time it takes to get from there to here:

"We should not imagine … that the struggle over spontaneous generation was a story of the triumph of materialism and empiricism over superstition and a priori natural philosophy. On the contrary, nineteenth-century materialists took sides against the biogenetic law, the rule of 'all life from life.' For if there were an unbridgeable gap between the nonliving and living, how could we explain the primal origin of life except by the infusion of a vital spirit into clay by a Promethean God? … Nothing could be more antimaterialist than the claim for the uniqueness of life"
Richard Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York Review, 2001), pp.112-3, original emphasis

I'm glad that I'm not an ID critic. Or at least not the sort that works the mainstream media (fyi, it is worth taking note that some otherwise intelligent, respectable scientists have sold their souls to the MSM and now regularly make quite stupid statements for the sake of "the cause" that they should be embarrassed to make - not just on both sides of the ID debate but also regarding other science/culture issues).

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If you've been following the rhetoric from many ID critics, you could be excused for thinking that ID was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, designed by creationists to have Christianity taught in science class. Unfortunately, reality is much too messy to fit into sound-bite labelled boxes, as illustrated by YEC Dr. Georgia Purdom, speaking at the 2005 Creation Mega Conference about the problems with ID.

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Since the debate concerning intelligent design is drawing more and more public attention in the press and the media, there seems to be a growing number of people who sense there is something important going on who also want to get the straight scoop of things. Problem is that since the debate really stems from battling worldviews, it can be very difficult for those who are not deeply involved in the debate to get as an objective a picture as they would like. Why is that? Because of spin.

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Recently, I blogged on David Barash’s misguided attack on ID. Apparently, Barash's article sparked many letters in reply and PZ Myers has recently come to his defense. Myers tells us what Barash’s real argument was about:

As is common, these writers completely misunderstand the argument from imperfections that Barash presents; they treat it as an argument for atheism, rather than evolution. It isn't. It can be used as an extremely hypothetical argument about the nature of god, I suppose, which is how these writers treat it and as Barash briefly mentions (admitting that these observations could be accounted for by a god of "incompetence or sheer malevolence"), but as an argument for evolution, this is irrelevant. These imperfections are seen as relics of our past history, and indicate that we did have a complex history—we were not born as a species with no heritage from our forebears.

I’m not buying it.

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Ken Miller recently wrote an essay in response to Cardinal Schönborn's piece in the New York Times.

Miller writes:

Neo-Darwinism, he tells us, is an ideology proposing that an “unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” gave rise to all life on earth, including our own species. To be sure, many evolutionists have made such assertions in their popular writings on the “meaning” on evolutionary theory. But are such assertions truly part of evolution as it is understood by the “mainstream biologists” of which the Cardinal speaks?

Miller answers, “Not at all.” Really?

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Apparently there are evolutionists who are now wanting to distance themselves from the term "Darwinism". See Denyse O'Leary's site here and William Dembski's here. Does this bespeak the end times for the label and the paradigm with it? Will it just go quietly into that good night, displaced by some new non-telic flavor of the month? I don't think so. Why? Because it is such an appealing framework for the many who advocate it. But what's the appeal?

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It looks like Oxford University is going ahead with its plans to build a new research facility. But there’s a problem: “Hundreds of animal rights activists marched through Oxford in protest at a new animal testing laboratory.”

Actually, it’s worse than this.

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Paul Nelson has a nice blog about scientists getting concerned about their dependency on teleological concepts and language.

Speaking of Rudy Raff, Nelson writes:

His most recent, "Stand up for evolution" (Evolution and Development 7 [July 2005]:273-275), advises biologists to police their own language when describing biological systems. As Raff writes:

…let us not play into the hands of ID propagandists. For instance, be careful about using teleological words to describe biological entities in our teaching and writing. Calling cells "machines that do X," or describing biological structures as "well designed to do Y" will be duly cited in ID propaganda as one more biologist-supporting design.

Nelson then follows with some clever commentary. But I have a dream.

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…engineers need biologists. So says David Low in the most recent edition of Convergence a premiere journal for Systems Biology. Very well said and something the intelligent design community needs to help fascillitate.

Here's an excerpt from the journal:

Khammash and collaborators including Hana El-Samad, who recently earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering at UCSB, have used mathematical modeling to show how the complex workings of the heat-shock [of E. coli] response reflect features that make the protein repair fast, robust and efficient. “It is how, if you had a good engineer, the process would be designed,” he says.

Good engineer? Bet you won't see that quote appear in any anti-teleologist's BuzzBox. Imagine what would happen if the bad/sloppy design argument had pervasive counter-examples?
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