Abnormal Interests

The next paragraph gets at another major goal of ID creationism's marketing effort: You don't need to be a scientist to understand biology, in fact, being a scientist can get in the way.

Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. The late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure and an outspoken critic of religion, remarked, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved."

The "hard evidence" turns out to be naive intuition. For ID creationists, naive intuition provides enough evidence that biological science cannot be correct. Hartwig wants his readers to believe that such a great scientist as Crick had to work to overcome what was obvious even to him. This is a great, if deceptive, way to conscript an opponent into your argument. Naive intuition also tells me that computers don't work and no one can go to the moon. But then I do have a little informed knowledge of these things so I am not skeptical.

After his introductory non-sense, Hartwig goes over well-warn ground with a discussion of the cell that is without any scientific basis. As Afarensis correctly says,

Some people actually need to look at a cell through a microscope.

The problem is most people don't look through a microscope. They take the word of whomever they think is an authority. It helps if the opinions of that authority match their own causal observations and opinions. Hartwig presents himself as an authority, Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in statistics and research design (not design research), and cites another "authority," Dembski. Of course, we are not told that Dembski is a

. . . mathematician and a philosopher, William A. Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University and a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. . . A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. [Discovery Institute Bio]

That none of this was included is not an accident or minor oversight. Any one of his credentials would raise a question about the claims of the first paragraph. You can bet the farm, that if Dembski were a professor of biology at a major university Hartwig would have noted it.

I jump to Hartwig's final paragraph,

Of course, what’s important here is not what we conclude about the flagellum or the cell, but how we study it. Calling design theorists religious is just a cheap way to dodge the issues. The public — and our students — deserve better than that.

In science, it is important what we conclude. This first sentence is an attempt to move the discussion from the properties, function, and evolution of the flagellum to something else. If you accept this sentence, you can agree with ID creationists "that intelligent agents exist" without being correct about any detail regarding biology. By the way, does anyone really think that Hartwig or other ID creationist believe there might be a plurality of "intelligent agents?" Here we have a use of the plural to make this whole mess look "objective."

The second sentence of this last paragraph attributes name-calling to a straw man. The charge against ID creationists is that they are creationists not that they are religious. Many very religious people do not believe in ID creationism but rather follow science on the issues of the origin of the diversity of life. However, the sentence does further one of ID creationism's marketing goals: branding science as anti-religion.

The last sentence of the piece is pure unadulterated rhetoric. It is an empty slogan. Hartwig's readers — and our students — deserve better than that!

At the end of his debunking post, Afarensis asks the following question,

More importantly, do the ID crowd really think the rest of us are that stupid?

The answer is, "yes!" Not that they think scientists are that stupid. They have never really tried to engage scientists, except to improve their own image. But their target audience is indeed that stupid. I hope my next post on Marketing Biology will document that, if any documentation is needed.