New Anti-Science

An article by Sahotra Sarkar at American Prospect on the Creationists' new strategy:

According to Gonzales and Richards, conditions on Earth have been carefully optimized for scientific investigation in such a way that it is "a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we've been willing to expect to imagine." The evidence for creation, in other words, now comes from physics, not biology.

Of course, there's always the possibility that we're smart enough to have figured out the basic mechanisms of the universe and develop means of exploration that take advantage of them. What a bunch of idiots.

The goal, of course, is to stab evolution in the back, since frontal assaults have repeatedly failed. We can expect more false reasoning, straw men, and red herrings, but this time in the realm of physics.

This also seems like a good time to call attention to TalkOrigins and a few other good sites. Check out the "Interesting Ideas" group in the sidebar.

And speaking of non-scientific approaches to evolution -- or, rather, their complete irrelevance -- here's an article from NYT on some recent human evolution.

What delights me about something like this article is that it does demonstrate how completely inconsequential people like Michael Behe, Jonathan Dembski, and Philip Johnson are in terms of seriously affecting the course of science. There's even a nice bonus here: the research was done by a group at an American university.

All is not lost.