This is a really interesting video presentation by Dougla Axe, a leading proponent of Intelligent Design Creationism. He's criticizing the argument from poor design; an argument that attempt to refute intelligent design by pointing out examples of poor design that a creator would never create. Axe uses an example from Neil Degrasse Tyson and if you look at this objectively you would say that Axe does a pretty good job of refuting Tyson's claims.
Tyson is not a biologist and he shouldn't pretend to be one, but that's not the most interesting take-home lesson from this video. The most interesting point concerns the comments Douglas Axe makes at the end of the video beginning at 11:30 minutes. He claims that Neil deGrasse Tyson is not an expert on designing life so it's foolish of him to pretend that he knows anything about the subject. When you hear someone making an imperfect design argument he asks his listeners to challenge them by saying, "What have YOU made that you think qualifies you to critique life."
Yep. He actually said that! Someone who promotes intelligent design without any experience in designing life actually tried to use that argument against opponents of intelligent design.
God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.
J.B.S. HaldaneThe burden of proof is on Intelligent Design Creationists to demonstrate how their view is compatible with science and with the history of life. They have to demonstrate why it took 3.5 billion years to get where we are today and why the history of life is so compatable with evolution. They have to demonstrate why millions of species of bacteria and almost as many species of beetles can only be explained by the actions of an intelligent designer. They have to explain why all the data shows that modern humans and chimpanzees have descended by gradual fixation of mutations from a common ancestor that lived only a few million years ago. They have to explain why an intelligent designer would design a genome that's 90% junk.
These creationists haven't made anything that qualifies them to be experts on the design of life1 but I'm willing to listen to any ideas they have. So far, all we've seen is criticisms of evolution, which is also a topic where they lack expertise.
The Haldane quotation is accurate. See “"A Special Fondness for Beetles" by Stephen J. Gould in Dinosaur in a Haystack.
1. Unless they have some special insight into the mind of god in which case they should be able to tell us exactly how he did it. Why did he create all those strange animals in the Cambrian only to allow most of them to go exinct? And speaking of extinctions, what did he have against most dinosaurs that he decided to kill them by smashing a meteor into the Earth 66 million years ago? Can you explain that, Dr. Axe?
