These are notes taken by someone else based on a talk at UCLA by the distinguished biologist Francisco Ayala at UC Irvine; they provide a nice summary statement of the case against the ID nonsense:
1. The fact of evolution -- species change over time -- had been established by paleontology and was common currency when Darwin wrote. His contribution was natural selection as an explanation for evolution.
2. Darwin was responding to William Paley's Natural Theology, which was a standard text at Cambridge when Darwin was a student there.
3. Paley's book deserved its place in the canon. It contains the best summary of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century biology. Contemporary "intelligent design" essays are just bad plagiarisms of Paley. He made the "irreducible complexity" argument (which he called "relatedness") much better than current ID proponents, because he knew more biology than they do.
4. But "irreduciable complexity" is simply wrong, as illustrated by the step-by-step development of the complex eye in marine invertebrates, leading from a simple layer of photosensitive cells in the limpet up to the human-like eye of the octopus....
7. If organisms were the design product of engineers, the engineers ought to be fired for, e.g., making the human birth canal too small for the human newborn head. Intelligent Design would therefore be, to a large extent, Incompetent Design....
9. The evolution controversy is an almost entirely American phenomenon. Growing up in Franco's Spain and attending Catholic schools, Ayala was taught evolution as an uncontroversial fact about the world....
12. With tens of millions of dollars flowing into the Discovery Institute and other organizations advocating ID, some organized push-back is needed, and may be underway.
Recent Comments