Sunday, December 18, 2005

Today's Doonesbury on creationism/intelligent design

Of late I've often thought that drugs developed on the basis of evolutionary biology should have warning labels indicating that their effectiveness is predicated upon the fact of evolution, and creationists should not make use of them. Today's Doonesbury is along similar lines. (Of course, creationists will say that this is microevolution, not macroevolution, and they only disbelieve in the latter.)

This is as good a place as any to recommend Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams' book, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1996, Vintage).

2 comments:

  1. I'm not sure if I see the concrete difference between microevolution and macroevolution. I mean, I don't see how minor differences in a living being's characteristics can't lead to slightly bigger differences which ultimately create new species. It seems like kind of a slippery slope to me. I'm sure I'm speaking to the choir, but I've never figured out exactly what creationists (or, IDs, as the newer breed of creationists like to call themselves) believe exactly, other than in the invisible superhero from space who watches over them (and who exists, unlike that dastardly Zeus).

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  2. I agree with you--the creationists owe an account of *what* acts as a limit on change, since they accept microevolution and changes within species. But providing positive scientific theory has always been a major gap for creationist... they've not produced much since Henry Morris' flood geology and "hydrological sorting."

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