A suggestion for the intelligent design folks

The teaching of intelligent design is a hot subject. There is a fight between the secular scientists pushing evolution and religious groups advocating intelligent design. The intelligent design folks are going after the wrong group. They have a much better case against the cosmologists than the geneticists. The theory of evolution can do one thing that intelligent design can’t and that is predict things. If you want to breed plants or animals, design new pharmaceuticals, understand the relatedness of organism, the modern theory of evolution and genetics can predict outcomes of experiments and breeding programs. Intelligent design provides no such guidance. It can’t predict anything. The whole purpose of a theory is to be able to predict things or it is worthless. One might accept it on the basis of religious belief but it has no use in the physical world we live in. When Darwin and others created the theory of evolution they had very little proof other than the pattern of plants and animals seen on the earth at that time. Geology was suggesting an ancient earth but there was little corroborating evidence. Today there are many independent disciplines that support the original theory in general. The theory of radioactive decay fits very well with the predictions of an ancient earth. Looking at the abundance of decay products is an excellent estimator of the age of a chemical system. These age determining techniques depend on the same theories that allow the design of atomic bombs and medical radiation therapy. If one challenges the dating then one has to deny the existence of nuclear fission and fusion. This shows one level of conformation by an independent discipline. Modern molecular genetics using DNA sequencing and sequence comparisons also support the dating provided by the theory of evolution. I will talk more about this tomorrow.

The area of science that is weak is cosmology or the study of the origin of the universe. Intelligent design is really a cosmology or a way to explain how we got here. The most advanced cosmologists have the same problem as the intelligent design groups in that they can’t predict anything. The energies required to look at the strings they hypothesize as being at the route of all matter are too small to be “seen” by any conceivable atom smasher. So the intelligent design folks should go after the cosmologists and leave us geneticists alone.