Some pompous egotist named Amitai Etzioni has solicited responses from the contributors to the Panda's Thumb to his comments on the teaching of intelligent design. His latest blog entry, though, was not encouraging. The man is a phony. Take a look at this:

According to the above comments, facts are based on “careful, controlled experiments.” But no fact about evolution is the result of an experiment. Need I say more?

This is trivially false and easily refuted. For example, in my next science post (to be made tomorrow, I hope, if I get an hour or so free) is on a very nice article from the Carroll lab on the role of cis regulatory sequences in the evolution of wing patterns in a fly lineage. The fact of evolution they are addressing is the idea that color patterns in the wing have been a consequence of modifications of regulatory regions of the yellow gene. The experiments that led to that idea were combinations of sequence analyses, syntheses of modified DNA sequences, and expression of the custom gene fragments in flies.

This is only the most recent experiment in my readings. There have been many, many others. Etzioni has just outed himself as someone completely ignorant of the field he is judging.

The writer immediately retreats to rely on what the “vast majority of scientists” tell him. But evidence, as his previous line correctly points out, is not a democratic process. And by the way, the scientists that claim that they conducted experiments to prove their point? They didn’t.

See above. This is an incredibly offensive statement, actually; scientists who say they have done experiments, who have published descriptions of those experiments in refereed journals, and whose experiments have been replicated haven't actually done any experiments? What the heck is he suggesting? He has just called all evolutionary biologists liars.

And I am not talking about creationism when referring to Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design claims that what we see around us strongly suggests that some wise, superior force was at work—not that it did its job on the run.

And, ummm…have they done any experiments to demonstrate the existence of this "wise, superior force"? No, they have not.

Face the facts: the evidence in favor of evolutionary theory is thin and speculative. Students should understand this and so should those who graduated from school some time ago.

The man who has just demonstrated how oblivious he is to the actual content of the discipline of evolutionary biology does not get to declare it "thin and speculative." He is a fraud and a fool.

Thus We Hold: Students should be exposed to the ideas of both evolution and Intelligent Design.

Scratch the "thus." Building an argument on patently false premises invalidates its conclusions.

There. I've responded to the man. I wonder if this is what he wanted?