Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances of the experts: "Well, they pretty much agree with one another
Well, that’s often my situation since it's a morass of information out there. But a recent quotation that applies by Jared Diamond is: “Life nor history is an enterprise for those seeking simplicity or consistency.” I’d add to let them stick to religion: it’s simple.
reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.
This is profound, imo, to the natural selection process—if it can’t have an advantage to reproduce, it’s mostly irrelevant. And competition is the underlying motivation.
Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.
The computer-generated model of the eye took only 400,000 generations to evolve—a blink in geologic time.
And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.
In such a complicated topic as origins of life, it would be easy to miss the main points and get stuck in the mire of arguments.
the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal.
Which is what scientists mostly do—hash it out with other experts instead of sidestepping this proven process and going to the public, which has no way to test out the hypotheses.
"Intelligent design itself does not have any content." Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax?
Sensible conclusion.
Thanks for that, Alan. I had mistakenly thought the author’s book (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) was pro ID. I have it in my shopping cart at Amazon.com.