The Problems with Intelligent Design

[Techne]

Intelligent Design is defined as (intelligentdesign.org):

Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.

From uncommondescent (citing intelligent design.org):

The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.

In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). An inference that certain biological information may be the product of an intelligent cause can be tested or evaluated in the same manner as scientists daily test for design in other sciences.

ID is controversial because of the implications of its evidence, rather than the significant weight of its evidence. ID proponents believe science should be conducted objectively, without regard to the implications of its findings. This is particularly necessary in origins science because of its historical (and thus very subjective) nature, and because it is a science that unavoidably impacts religion.

Positive evidence of design in living systems consists of the semantic, meaningful or functional nature of biological information, the lack of any known law that can explain the sequence of symbols that carry the “messages,” and statistical and experimental evidence that tends to rule out chance as a plausible explanation. Other evidence challenges the adequacy of natural or material causes to explain both the origin and diversity of life.

An agreement on definitions for the following terms is needed:

A) Intelligent and intelligence (there is no agreed upon definition for this term)
B) Cause
C) Natural selection
D) Chance
E) Natural law
F) Information
G) Complexity

Obviously Intelligent Design is relevant where an intelligent cause needs to be detected for example anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) etc.

ID, in theory, can be an empirical physical science and can get you to an intelligent cause. Supporters of ID make it also very clear that ID does not posit a supernatural designer (for example here) although this is often disputed and it is claimed that ID is just young earth creationism in disguise (cdesign proponentsists...).

Now the question is, can ID and ID supporters ever conclude or prove that ANY of their discovered intelligent causes is actually God? Or can it only ever claim it to be just another intelligent cause among other intelligent causes in the universe or multiverse?

It appears to me that ID can only ever discover intelligent causes that are "tinkerers" or "artisans" and NOT God as God is understood in classical theism. The intelligent cause may be some clever intelligent cause that tinkered with the genome of some ancient species, or tinkers with other causes to make "irreducibly complex" structures with large amounts of "specified complexity", or perhaps a contingent master mathematician tinkerer that is the per accidens first cause of a universe (which happens to be ours) that played a little bit with a few constants for some purpose.

ID can only get you to an intelligent cause and it cannot be God. ID can ONLY discover intelligent causes that may tinker with the system here and there. In other words ID can only discover "tinkerers" or "artisans" and NEVER God. ID can in principle never be used to prove that any of the discovered intelligent causes actually is God and not just intelligent causes other than God.

The problems are thus:
1) Definitions
2) Can it ever be scientific and not just YEC in drag?
3) ID cannot be used to prove or even suggest God exists.

 

[Dywyddyr]

Supporters of ID make it also very clear that ID does not posit a supernatural designer

And yet...

^ a b c "the writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity". Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Ruling p. 26. A selection of writings and quotations of intelligent design supporters demonstrating this identification of the Christian God with the intelligent designer are found in the pdf Horse's MouthArchived June 27, 2008 at the Wayback Machine. (PDF) by Brian Poindexter, dated 2003.
^ a b c William A. Dembski, when asked in an interview whether his research concluded that God is the Intelligent Designer, stated "I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God". Devon Williams (December 14, 2007). "CitizenLink: Friday Five: William A. Dembski". Focus on the Family. Retrieved 2007-12-15.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

 

[Techne]

And yet...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

Kind of ironic since ID cannot be used to argue that the "discovered intelligent causes" are actually God.

 

[Dywyddyr]

That's what happens when you invent a pseudoscience.
You can claim the results "prove" whatever you like.

 

[SciWriter]

THE EVOLUTION REVOLUTION The Darwinian evolution revolution indeed overthrew the notion of the fixity of the species, science once again conflicting with the Creator by showing that man is neither the purpose of creation nor its end point.

In the face of the random winnowing of nature and time, purposefulness becomes a lost wish, all the lower animals escaping the hierarchy of inferiority to man, who, as we now know, is an animal as well. Man emerges clumsily and bloodily by ‘chance’ from brutish animals, and, ultimately, from slime.

Darwin had discovered the truth of evolution, confirmed as fact since then. Due to the prevailing [false] ideas of the time, as well as his theology training, he was hesitant to reveal his findings, but did so, they being confirmed by the geological strata and now even more so by observing evolution in 40,000 generations of bacteria (they freely pass DNA around), and, more importantly, in our own DNA record that matches the fossils, as well as embryos noted as racing through the stages of evolution in 9 months.

Natural selection remains the best theory for the means of evolution, the actual genetics of DNA arriving in the 1950’s. (Could there be more ways?) Evolution by natural selection was a revelation whose time had come. There is a wealth of information supporting it and a dearth of information denying it. The creationist argument that a hurricane can’t cause a 747 jet to be assembled from a warehouse of parts shows the great lengths of their attempts to deny, that being about their ‘best’ argument. That and irreducible complexity (not found). So away goes their ‘God’, too, He being said to be irreducibly complex.

 

[SciWriter]

That said, we are all in this together, us, bacteria, worms, and all. There is no ‘dominion’ by us over all, but even perhaps the dominion of bacteria over us, for we couldn’t last five minutes without them. What about ‘lowly’ worms? Well, they aerate 400 tons of soil a day, or something like that.

No doubt that life is rich, though, yet savage at the same time. There is extravagance engraved all over the place—just look at a dragonfly’s wings gleaming and shining across its jeweled body. There are something like 50 million species on Earth. We are just one such.

 

[SciWriter]

Let us, then, deal with the case that evolution indeed happens and that God directs it, for that must become the fallback ID position. For starters, evolution is not goal-oriented, so we can discard the (biological teleological) argument for the existence of God, which claims that postulating God is necessary to account for purposiveness in nature. Evolution is a blind watchmaker.

To review and elaborate more, though, theistic evolution is the theological view that God creates new species through evolution. The advocates like to reserve a special place for humans, separate from the animals. But this is not a scientifically justifiable stance given the many evolutionary predecessors of human beings. So, animals are ‘brutalized’ and humans humanized to make the alleged gap as big as possible: humans are characterized as the only creatures with reason, empathy, a (rich) emotional life, altruism, culture, identity, and language. Yet all these characteristics have been observed to a greater or lesser extent in nonhuman animals, especially in other primates. The history of the universe has thus been an unfolding of purely naturalistic processes.

The ‘God hypothesis’ provides no additional explanatory value. It is but a refuge of ignorance. One who feels the need to postulate a divine cause is left with the question of what caused God to exist. Perhaps God does not need a cause; but then why think that the universe/stuff needs one? So, it adds nothing.

Evolution is an immensely slow, wasteful, pitiless, and cruel process—hardly the most elegant process of creation open to a goal-oriented, omnipotent, and benevolent God. If humanity is the final goal of creation, whence the 3,500,000,000! years since the origin of life, or the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang? What is the point of this immense amount of time if human beings and their world are the pinnacle of the almighty’s creation?

Does God cause mutations to direct evolution? Well, they sure seem ‘random’, plus a lot are bad and many are neutral. The vast majority of mutants are selectively neutral or negative with regard to the evolution and survival of homo sapiens, and, thus, their evolution is “wasteful” if measured against the goal of producing human beings. Such a wasteful process is hardly consonant with a goal-oriented, omnipotent, and omniscient God.

The case against theistic evolution continues… The honorable Graybeard presiding, Austin P. Torney continuing as lawyer for the prosecution (since his name contains the letters “attorney”)…

“I call the recent family tree to the witness stand; but, wait, oh my God, there are some others, too, many of them extinct!”

The testimony: There is no progressive trend in evolution toward the development of human beings; evolution can be seen as a huge tree with many branching points, not a direct line to humans; we are just a not-yet-extinct part of one of the very many branches of the enormous tree of life.

I now call upon the extinct.

Testimony: What was the point of all these extinct animals, if the goal of creation is man and his surrounding nature? To what purpose were the dinosaurs? What was the point of the trilobites? These groups of animals did not even contribute to the origin of humans. The development of life has been interrupted by innumerable extinctions, some with so many different plant and animal species dying out in the same time period that they have been called mass extinctions.

Judge Graybeard, having worked for ten minutes straight now, calls a recess for a long lunch…

 

[Yazata]

Intelligent Design is defined as:

http://www.intelligentdesign.org/whatisid.php

It's interesting to compare that definition with the 'tenets of scientific creationism' from the Institute for Creation Research's website:

http://www.icr.org/article/tenets-creationism/

The ICR's 'tenets' seem to just be a listing of theological assumptions derived from a literalistic reading of the Genesis story. The ID definition that you quoted seems a lot more sophisticated than that.

Frankly, I'm not sure if 'creation science' and 'intelligent design' are significantly different religio-philosophical positions, or whether these are just two alternative names given to roughly the same fundamental ideas.

Obviously Intelligent Design is relevant where an intelligent cause needs to be detected for example anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) etc.

The design arguments are analogies. The assertion is that all observations that strike us as design-like, typically the presence of functional form in nature, should be understood as instances of intentional design by conscious artisans analogous to ourselves.

That analogy isn't difficult to justify in areas such as forensic science, where there's often no reason to think that observed evidence wasn't left behind by a human being. The difficulties in forensic science typically concern identifying which human being it was, and figuring out what the evidence reveals about the circumstances in which it was deposited. In detective work, there's no reason why we shouldn't bring our knowledge of human beings to bear.

SETI is tougher, because the analogy is a lot looser. We have no experience with extraterrestrial intelligence, so we don't know what their artifacts are going to look like. Nor can we be sure what kind of phenomena are possible naturally, without extraterrestrial intelligence being involved. Quasars created some excitement when their precise radio periodicity was noted, but that was ultimately explained as being due to the rotation of neutron-stars I believe.

ID, in theory, can be an empirical physical science and can get you to an intelligent cause.

The problem is that as we move further and further away from our Earthly human context, the ID analogy becomes more and more speculative. I don't think that we have to go very far before we reach a point where it might be more intelligent to say 'I don't know what accounts for that'.

Supporters of ID make it also very clear that ID does not posit a supernatural designer

I suspect that's a little disingenuous.

Obviously many of the people in this creationist/ID camp are arguing for precisely that. The ICR's 'tenets' of scientific creationism' that I linked to above make it perfectly clear that as far as they are concerned, this is all about a supernatural designer taken straight from the first chapters of Genesis.

A more circumspect ID theory is possible, of course. But it's still hard to imagine how universal features like the laws of nature could have been intentionally 'designed' by a conscious artisan, without that artisan being supernatural in some very strong sense. It's even kind of difficult to imagine how all the species of life here on Earth could have been designed by anything that exists within the scope of nature.

Now the question is, can ID and ID supporters ever conclude or prove that ANY of their discovered intelligent causes is actually God?

We enter the fog of the unknown long before we get into the hypothetical territory that's supposedly inhabited by the gods. I'm inclined to think that distinguishing unimaginable natural events from unimaginable supernatural events from unimaginable divine events is beyond our human capabilities, almost by definition.

It appears to me that ID can only ever discover intelligent causes that are "tinkerers" or "artisans" and NOT God as God is understood in classical theism.

I think of that as the 'Independence Day Problem'. The reference is to the 1990's alien-invasion movie. The point is that no matter how stupendous and inexplicable a heavenly lightshow is, we still don't know whether whatever is causing it is a suitable object for our religious worship. Just being something that's far beyond our experience isn't the only thing that's necessary. (In Christian traditional terms, I'm sure that the devil can work magic and impress us too.)

The problems are thus:
1) Definitions
2) Can it ever be scientific and not just YEC in drag?
3) ID cannot be used to prove or even suggest God exists.

Yes.

ID proponents are trying to do whatever they can to introduce the idea of invisible supernatural universal-scale designers into mainstream science.

I think that their intentions are two-fold:

1. To subvert scientific naturalism.

2. To create a situation where it's a very short leap from that reformed non-naturalistic "science's" theories of univeral designers to the deities of their own revelations and religious traditions.

 

[spidergoat]

Proving an intelligent cause would go a long way towards the legitimacy of God as the designer. However, they can't even get that far.

 

[SciWriter]

Testimony digested from Coyne:

Evolution unites us with every living thing on the Earth today and with myriads of creatures long dead, giving us the true account of our origins, replacing all the myths that satisfied us for thousands of years. It shows us our place in the whole splendid and extraordinary panoply of life. This can be deeply frightening to some, but ineffably thrilling to others.

We are now observing species splitting into two, finding ever more fossils, such as dinosaurs that have spouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs, and reptiles turning into mammals—all demonstrating the “indelible stamp of our lowly origins” of the processes first proposed by Darwin, which completely vanquished the concept of natural theology within only a few years by the publication of his hundred-page book, ‘On the Origin of Species’, that turned the mysteries of life’s diversity from mythology into genuine science. It is that life on Earth evolved gradually, beginning with one primitive species that lived more than 3.4 million years ago, which then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species. The mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.

Groups like whales and humans have evolved rapidly, while others, like the coelacanth, the “living fossil”, have not changed much in hundreds of millions of years. In a creationist explanation of life, organisms would not have common ancestors, but would simply all result from an instantaneous creation of forms designed anew to fit their environments. Beyond the live animals and fossils used to show similar genes, and the embryonic phases of inherent and older forms we can now look at the genes themselves by sequencing DNA to construct the evolutionary relationships.

The apparent design in nature is explained by the purely materialistic process that doesn’t require creation or guidance by any supernatural forces, for individuals of a species vary genetically in their ability to survive and reproduce in their environment. There’s a real difference in what one would expect to see if organisms were consciously designed rather than if they evolved by natural selection; natural selection is not a master engineer, but only a tinkerer. It doesn’t produce the absolute perfection achievable by a Designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what it has to work with, keeping the organism’s structure habitable all the while. It produces the fitter, not the fittest.

What conquers our ignorance is research—not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a Creator. We are apes descended from other apes, and our closest cousin is the chimpanzee, whose ancestors diverged from our own several million years ago in Africa. We don’t stand apart from the rest of nature, however disconcerting that may feel.

There is evidence from many areas—the fossil record, biogeography, embryology, vestigial structures, sub-optimal design, DNA, and so on—all of that evidence showing, without a scintilla of doubt, that organisms have evolved. We don’t find mammals in Precambrian rocks or humans in the same layer with dinosaurs. Despite a million chances to be wrong. Evolution always comes out right. Special creation does not; it goes wrong in every area, and not just in the area of evolution. Many people can’t or won’t accept evolution, for it raises profound questions of purpose, morality, and meaning that are emotionally hard to face as the consequences of our evolution from apes—and so they can’t, then, deal fully armed with what we are. Like all species, human beings evolved from the working of blind purposeless forces over eons of time. That is the real story of our origins: naturalistic materialism. The ‘Origin of the Species’ might now just as well supplant the Bible in defining the wonders of nature.

 

[lightgigantic]

Intelligent Design is defined as (intelligentdesign.org):



From uncommondescent (citing intelligent design.org):



An agreement on definitions for the following terms is needed:

A) Intelligent and intelligence (there is no agreed upon definition for this term)
B) Cause
C) Natural selection
D) Chance
E) Natural law
F) Information
G) Complexity

Obviously Intelligent Design is relevant where an intelligent cause needs to be detected for example anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) etc.

ID, in theory, can be an empirical physical science and can get you to an intelligent cause. Supporters of ID make it also very clear that ID does not posit a supernatural designer (for example here) although this is often disputed and it is claimed that ID is just young earth creationism in disguise (cdesign proponentsists...).

Now the question is, can ID and ID supporters ever conclude or prove that ANY of their discovered intelligent causes is actually God? Or can it only ever claim it to be just another intelligent cause among other intelligent causes in the universe or multiverse?

It appears to me that ID can only ever discover intelligent causes that are "tinkerers" or "artisans" and NOT God as God is understood in classical theism. The intelligent cause may be some clever intelligent cause that tinkered with the genome of some ancient species, or tinkers with other causes to make "irreducibly complex" structures with large amounts of "specified complexity", or perhaps a contingent master mathematician tinkerer that is the per accidens first cause of a universe (which happens to be ours) that played a little bit with a few constants for some purpose.

ID can only get you to an intelligent cause and it cannot be God. ID can ONLY discover intelligent causes that may tinker with the system here and there. In other words ID can only discover "tinkerers" or "artisans" and NEVER God. ID can in principle never be used to prove that any of the discovered intelligent causes actually is God and not just intelligent causes other than God.

The problems are thus:
1) Definitions
2) Can it ever be scientific and not just YEC in drag?
3) ID cannot be used to prove or even suggest God exists.

Op from a thread some time back

Juno Walker at Letters from Vrai has responded to my post Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education. Dr Massimo Pigliucci published an essay in The McGill Journal of Education in which he made the absurd claim that effective science education would dissuade students from a belief in Heaven. I pointed out in my post that Heaven wasn’t exactly a proper subject for the scientific method and that the assertion that science education was even applicable to a belief in Heaven was fundamentalism — a kind of atheist fundamentalism. The conflation of methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism — science and atheism — is no more acceptable pedagogy than the conflation of science and creationism. Atheism and creationism are philosophical inferences, and, irrespective of the truth of either faith, neither is consistent with the scientific method. The scientific method — methodological naturalism — is the data-driven study of nature. It’s based on natural, not supernatural, claims. The irony is that the McGill Journal of Education published Dr. Pigliucci's atheist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education, but would never publish a creationist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education.

IOW the notion that one can call upon methodological naturalism to assert god/ID doesn't exist is absurd, namely because the cause exists beyond the purview of its scope for investigation.

 

[wynn]

ID proponents are trying to do whatever they can to introduce the idea of invisible supernatural universal-scale designers into mainstream science.

I think that their intentions are two-fold:

1. To subvert scientific naturalism.

2. To create a situation where it's a very short leap from that reformed non-naturalistic "science's" theories of univeral designers to the deities of their own revelations and religious traditions.

I agree.

The science that esp. Christians use to back up their claims, is very bad science.

Then there's also that preaching strategy "But you're a scientist, you're supposed to believe in science, and science is what we, the Christians, are giving you."
And if one tries to teach them a bit about actual science, they get offended, accuse one of "atheism" and such ...

 

[wynn]

IOW the notion that one can call upon methodological naturalism to assert god/ID doesn't exist is absurd, namely because the cause exists beyond the purview of its scope for investigation.

But calling upon methodological naturalism to assert God/ID exists is not absurd??

 

[lightgigantic]

But calling upon methodological naturalism to assert God/ID exists is not absurd??

Not quite as absurd (but imperfect nonetheless) since the arena of methodological naturalism and the associated apparatus are but sparks of the splendor.

 

[wellwisher]

When I was growing up, I learned about the creation stories in the bible, while also being interested in science. At a young age, evolution made more sense in terms of the physical evidence.

This science belief did not conflict with my perception of the stories of the bible. The reason was, I saw the bible stories as being more like fables, which had a moral lesson. To me the stories of the creation were not about the reality of a three talking pigs or a big bad wolf that liked to cross dress (in human clothes). Rather it was deeper; moral lessons, with these moral lessons teaching us about the science of human subjectivity. Evolution would teach me about outer reality, while the bible about inner reality, which filters our perception of outer reality.

Atheism, which I was a member in my teen years, so I could become my own unique self, tended to stay shallow and focus on the talking three pigs angle to the bible creation stories. Most did not seem to have the where-with-all to grasp the deeper science of human subjectivity.

Later in life, since those with shallow perception tended to stay literal, I assumed there had to be something better than the current models, since it appealed way to much to the shallow minded. The new evolution had to be in touch with the hard data, but needed to be something deeper.

Here was some of my early thinking. Let me apply natural selection and selective advantage to genetics itself. If life evolved to where it could control genetics, this would offer selective advantage in terms of surivial and adaptation. This premise was not allowed by the current model, which assumes genetic random leading the process. Life was allowed to adapt to anything, but science drew a line in the gentic sand, for some reason, which seemed more political than rational.

One observation that was consistent with natural selection and genetic control are sharks. They are at the top of the food chain (natural selection ) yet have barely changed in tens of millions of years (very tight genetic control over a very wide range of parameters). This suggested that selective advantage and genetic control was possible.

That being the case, the next step was a explain a chemical mechanism. I never expected to face an uphill fight against the shallow minded, who saw anything different than the dogma as meaning creationism. I assumed science was teaching deeper than that. But there I realized there is no rule in science, that the minds of scientists, needs to be calibrate, like the other science tools they will use.

 

[Dywyddyr]

Atheism, which I was a member in my teen years, so I could become my own unique self, tended to stay shallow and focus on the talking three pigs angle to the bible creation stories.

You blame others for your lack of thought? Interesting.

One observation that was consistent with natural selection and genetic control are sharks. They are at the top of the food chain (natural selection ) yet have barely changed in tens of millions of years (very tight genetic control over a very wide range of parameters). This suggested that selective advantage and genetic control was possible.

Or gross ignorance on your part.

Maybe you should have learned something about science, rather than simply
"also being interested in science".

 

[wynn]

Not quite as absurd (but imperfect nonetheless) since the arena of methodological naturalism and the associated apparatus are but sparks of the splendor.

If methodological naturalism is imperfect,
then why do theists insist in it?

 

[lightgigantic]

If methodological naturalism is imperfect,
then why do theists insist in it?

they do?

 

[billvon]

Let me apply natural selection and selective advantage to genetics itself. If life evolved to where it could control genetics, this would offer selective advantage in terms of surivial and adaptation.

Yes, but if and only if such control was a) deterministic (i.e. one could desire a trait, change the DNA and have it be expressed) and b) advantageous (i.e. such changes were always advantageous.) This is very difficult, which is why it has taken us so long to be able to make even the simplest of genetic changes in animals.

The simplicity of natural selection is why it is responsible for 99.99999% of the genetic change manifested in life today (with our own feeble efforts responsible for the remaining tiny percentage.)

This premise was not allowed by the current model, which assumes genetic random leading the process. Life was allowed to adapt to anything, but science drew a line in the gentic sand, for some reason, which seemed more political than rational.

?? What was on the "other side" of the line?

One observation that was consistent with natural selection and genetic control are sharks. They are at the top of the food chain (natural selection ) yet have barely changed in tens of millions of years (very tight genetic control over a very wide range of parameters). This suggested that selective advantage and genetic control was possible.

No, it suggests that they evolved into a niche, and the niche remained unchanged for tens of millions of years. Hence any significant change away from the ideal phenotype for that niche would be rejected by evolution.

However, there have been a wide variety of changes within the basic design of the shark. The hammerhead shark evolved a very unique head shape to better detect prey, for example, and the megalodon (a 50 foot long shark species) went extinct after its food source (whales) became more scarce.

That being the case, the next step was a explain a chemical mechanism.

A chemical mechanism for what?

 

[wynn]

they do?

Oh yes. Especially ID'ers and Creationists.