Michael Behe--the only academically employed and credentialed scientist to have ever written in support of Intelligent Design Creationism (though not in peer-refereed journals, needless to say), and whose arguments, though long demolished, are still favorites of the ID conmen--has exploited that familiar bit of journalistic pablum about "two sides to every issue" ("You say black is black, but in fact there are good arguments that black is white") and snuck on to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Pharyngula, happily, has already struck back; an excerpt:
From the very first sentence, Michael Behe’s op-ed in today’s NY Times is an exercise in unwarranted hubris.
In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design.
And it’s all downhill from there.
Intelligent Design creationism is not a “rival theory.” It is an ad hoc pile of mush, and once again we catch a creationist using the term “theory” as if it means “wild-ass guess.” I think a theory is an idea that integrates and explains a large body of observation, and is well supported by the evidence, not a random idea about untestable mechanisms which have not been seen. I suspect Behe knows this, too, and what he is doing is a conscious bait-and-switch. See here, where he asserts that there is evidence for ID:
Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims.
This is where he first pulls the rug over the reader’s eyes. He claims the Intelligent Design guess is based on physical evidence, and that he has four lines of argument; you’d expect him to then succinctly list the evidence, as was done in the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ on the talkorigins site. He doesn’t. Not once in the entire op-ed does he give a single piece of this “physical evidence.” Instead, we get four bald assertions, every one false.
I know there are some New York Times journalists who read this blog. Please, folks, get your editors to print Pharyngula's comments, or provide a link! Your newspaper has done a huge disservice to your non-scientific readers by serving up this garbage as though it were anything more than "black is white."
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