Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

PBS did a fine job at analyzing the absurdity of the Dover trial, the lengths we as a species still need to traverse (Galileo 2.0?) and that reason eventually wins the day. But it doesn't happen without a fight. People are scared because their tightly-held beliefs are being chipped away piece by piece. I am with Neil deGrasse Tyson when he says that "Intelligent Design" or "Creationism" or "anti-Darwinism" doesn't belong in a science classroom, if anything it belongs in a philosophy classroom as none of its assertions can be scientifically validated.

The highlight of the two-hour broadcast for me was the refutation of "irreducible complexity" as coined by Creationist Michael Behe. He argues that there are some aspects of nature which, if you remove even a single component, wouldn't be able to function making it impossible for it to evolve overtime. A common comparison would be a mousetrap. If you take away one piece the mousetrap wouldn't work. As this is true, if you take away three of the five parts of a mousetrap, as was demonstrated during the trial, the mousetrap can be transformed into a crude tie clip. The lesson here is these mechanisms which at first appear to be fully-formed actually evolved from less sophisticated forerunners with an entirely different purpose.

I encourage everyone to check out PBS's website and see this documentary immediately!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/