Sick Transit

With apologies to the folks from The Panda’s Thumb, whose pun I shamelessly ripped off.

It seems that the Intelligent Design crowd has finally managed a publication in a peer-reviewed journal (albeit one where the editor is a biblical creationist). Unfortunately, the article does not appear to be online, so I can’t link to it. (Update: here is a link to the article, thanks to RBH from Panda’s Thumb.) But The Panda’s Thumb has a rebuttal already, and it’s pretty readable even for someone with a very limited knowledge of biology such as myself, as long as one is not afraid to wade through technical terminology.

Along the way, the authors touch on the main reason why I don’t have to dive neck-deep into the science to be convinced that Intelligent Design is bunk:

The Intelligent Design movement would be more intellectually honest if it called itself the Spontaneous Generation movement. While one cannot logically prove a lack of causality, it would at least be theoretically possible to make a strong case that certain events occurred without immediate physical causation from within our universe.

However, it is inherently impossible for science to make any statements about an extra-universal causation, including its attribution to an agent characterized as ‘intelligent’. So by defining their postulate as that of an ‘Intelligent Designer’, the IDers are inherently writing themselves out of the realm of science.