Raging Bee
Posts: 8
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Here's my (admittedly hasty) fisking of Luskin's rubbish (from my latest blog post):
'While we cannot study the "supernatural" through science, we can study intelligence. We have a huge sample dataset to tell us how intelligent agents operate: technology produced by the human race.'
Yes, and that technology bears almost no resemblance to the life-forms biologists are trying to explain. And Luskin's point is...?
'Design theorists observe that intelligent action produces large amounts of "complex and specified" information. Language and the finely-tuned, purposeful arrangement of parts in machines are prime examples of this encoded information. If the cell was designed, then we would expect to find language-like encoded information commonly throughout biology.'
The reference to "amounts" of "information" implies that "information" can be quantified; otherwise the "amount" of "information" cannot be reliably measured. This is a long-standing scam in creationist circles: they maintain that no amount of evolution or mutation can create "more" "information," but since they never define "information" or explain how, or in what units, the "quantity" of "information" can be measured, the argument is hollow.
'The conversion of DNA into protein relies upon a software-like system of commands and biochemical codes.'
I've had enough direct experience with "software" to know that there's nothing "software-like" about the manufacture of protein. Does Luskin even know what the word "software" means? (Also, DNA is not "converted" into protein, but that's a minor mistake in the ID universe.)
'Moreover, the machines in our cell[s] are often said to resemble human design machines -- such as the rotary engine found in the bacterial flagellum. This is powerful evidence that an intelligence was at work.'
What "human design machines" bear any resemblance to "the machines in our cell[s]?" Luskin doesn't specify, despite the apparent importance of this point to his argument.
'Many design theorists, including myself, believe the designer is God. But that is my personal religious belief and not a proposition of the scientific theory of intelligent design.'
So why did he have to mention his belief while talking about a scientific issue?
'The explanatory category of an "intelligence" is a valid scientific form of explanation because we have much empirical experience with how intelligent agents operate.'
This sentence is pure mush. What, exactly, is an "explanatory category?" What are the other "categories?" And what good is all that "empirical experience with how intelligent agents operate," when none of those "intelligent agents" have ever designed -- let alone built -- anything similar to the life-forms found on Earth?
All of these superficial logical flaws serve to conceal at least one fundamental flaw in Luskin's spiel: today's creationists pretend they can infer "design" without relying on supernatural explanations. But what is designed must subsequently be created (otherwise it wouldn't exist). And as long as the ID/creationist crowd fail to explain the specific means by which all of these elegantly designed life-forms were actually built (leaving no traces of the process behind that we've identified so far), then Intelligent Design will be nothing but what the software people call "vaporware."
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