Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, has written a truly clueless whine about "Darwinism". It's a mess.

For example, Darwinists often argue that Intelligent Design can’t be true because we know the earth is over 10,000 years old. That would be a great argument, supported by every relevant branch of science, except that it has nothing to do with Intelligent Design.

I have never heard anyone on my side of the debate make this argument. Never. Now maybe some few people who aren't familiar with the issues might say something like this (someone like, for instance, Scott Adams), but we all know that Designists, while some are sympathetic to young earth creationism, avoid pinning any of their concepts to testable claims.

And please, Mr Adams, learn something about the terms of the debate. Using the word "Darwinist" puts you in the creationist camp and demonstrates that you haven't been paying attention to what the scientists actually say.

Intelligent Design accepts an old earth and even accepts the fact that species probably evolved. They only question the "how." Creationists have jumped on that bandwagon as a way to poke holes in Darwinism. The Creationists and the Intelligent Design folks have the same target (Darwin), but they don’t have the same argument. The average person who has a strong opinion on this topic doesn’t understand that distinction because the political agenda of the creationists makes things murky.

Mr Adams has also blindly accepted the claims of the Designists. If it's about "how", then how do the Intelligent Design creationists suggest it was done? Well? Can you list some of their specific hypotheses?

Of course not. They don't have any idea "how". Intelligent Design creationism is exclusively about poking holes in "Darwinism"—just as Adams acknowledges is the creationist goal.

On the other side, Intelligent Design advocates point out a number of flaws in the textbooks that teach Darwinism. Apparently both sides of the debate acknowledge that the evidence for evolution is sometimes overstated or distorted in the service of making it simpler to teach. If you add to that the outright errors (acknowledged by both sides), the history of fossil frauds, the subjectivity of classifying fossils, and the fact that all of the human-like fossils ever found can fit inside a small box, you have lots of easy targets for the opponents. (Relax. I’m not saying Darwinism is wrong. I’m saying both sides have lots of easy targets.)

The "flaws" that the Designists point out are false. I suspect that Adams is merely parroting Wells' claims from Icons of Evolution, a book of abominable scholarship that has been thoroughly refuted. The nonsense about hominid fossils is a silly canard:

…there are thousands of hominid fossils now. Lubenow (1992) found that there were fossils from almost 4,000 hominid individuals catalogued as of 1976. As of 1999, there were fossils of about 150 Homo erectus individuals, 90 Australopithecus robustus, 150 Australopithecus afarensis, 500 Neanderthals, and more (Handprint 1999). Foley (2004) lists some of the more prominent fossils.

I should also point out that the argument would be irrelevant even if no hominid fossils had ever been found: Intelligent Design creationism isn't just about humans, you know. Their examples are all of so-called problems in the eukaryotic or chordate lineage—you're going to have to take into account a half billion years worth of fossils, and all of the molecular evidence, not just the bones in our particular lineage.

The other problem for people like me is that the "good" arguments on both sides are too complicated for me to understand. My fallback position in situations like this has always been to trust the experts – the scientists – of which more than 90%+ are sure that Darwin got it right.

Umm, OK…so Adams begs incomprehension. If that's the case, why is he making the argument? I guess because, as he says at the beginning of his essay, ignorance "doesn’t stop anyone from having a passionate opinion." Give that man a mirror!

Also, as yet another example of the obnoxious nature of the "Darwinist" label, look at that last sentence, which is false. Every competent scientists knows that Darwin got huge chunks of the story completely wrong. He had the wrong explanation for inheritance, for example.

The Intelligent Design people have a not-so-kooky argument against the idea of trusting 90%+ of scientists. They point out that evolution is supported by different branches of science (paleontologists, microbiologists, etc.) and those folks are specialists who only understand their own field. That’s no problem, you think, because each scientist validates Darwinism from his or her own specialty, then they all compare notes, and everything fits. Right?

You know, it's apparent that Adams is just making these claims up as he goes along…

Who says all of these scientists are so narrow that they understand only their own field? My specialties are developmental biology and neuroscience, but that means I have to know a fair amount about genetics and molecular biology and membrane biophysics and general cell biology, and because of my broader interest in comparative biology and evo- and eco-devo, I've picked up quite a bit of background in evolutionary biology as a whole. Adams doesn't have a clue what individual biologists know about the field, and he's falsely pretending that they are as ignorant as he is.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The Intelligent Design people allege that some experts within each narrow field are NOT convinced that the evidence within their specialty is a slam-dunk support of Darwin. Each branch of science, they say, has pro-Darwinists who acknowledge that while they assume the other branches of science have more solid evidence for Darwinism, their own branch is lacking in that high level of certainty. In other words, the scientists are in a weird peer pressure, herd mentality loop where they think that the other guy must have the "good stuff."

No. This is just bullshit. What we have is a lot of well-educated scientists who are aware of how their "narrow field" fits within the broader spectrum of biology and who are aware of the broadly based foundation of evolution, against a few crackpots…and yes, there are crackpots in every discipline.

He also has it all backwards. I'm a developmental biologist, remember; I think my field has absolutely razzle-dazzle incontrovertible support for evolution, even better than, for example, those population geneticists. And the population geneticists are sitting over there blown away by how strongly their field supports evolution. And the geneticists and molecular biologists and paleontologists are all saying, "Wow. We've got the best evidence ever."

Adams is so out of touch with what's going on in science, it makes a fellow want to kick him. Where's Dogbert when you need him?

But let me give you a little analogy. One time in my corporate career I was assigned to lead a project to build a 10 million dollar technology laboratory. The project was based on the fact that "hundreds of our customers" wanted a place to test our technology before buying our products. I interviewed several managers who told me the same thing. Months into the project, I discovered that there was in fact only one customer who had once asked for that service, and he had been satisfied with another solution. The story of that one customer had been told and retold until everyone believed that someone else had direct knowledge of the hundreds of customers in need. If you guessed that we immediately stopped the project, you’ve never worked in a big company. We just changed our "reasons" and continued until funding got cut for unrelated budget reasons.

Adams is babbling about a body of falsely held subjective evidence in his example. A better one would be if he were told to build a multi-million dollar technology laboratory that used electronics…and a small group of nay-sayers who claimed that electrons didn't exist, that Ohm's Law was a fabrication, and that transistors contained tiny little demons who controlled gates, caught his attention. He listened to their arguments, and then because he didn't actually understand what the engineers were doing, and had never personally studied semiconductor technology, decided to call everything his staff was doing into question, and started making inane suggestions. It would be a terrific way to blow a few million dollars and get a some highly trained personnel to quit in exasperation, wouldn't it?

Maybe Adams isn't a Wally. He actually sounds more like a pointy-haired boss.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO ALL DILBONIANS:

Comments are paged. Look above the text box and you will see something like "Page 1 of 10 pages 1 2 3 > Last"; click on the page numbers to go to that set of comments.

It's obvious that you aren't bothering to read most of the comments, and you're both getting repetitious and looking ridiculous as you complain about things that have been answered multiple times already.

ANOTHER HINT FOR DILBONIANS:

This post is like, old. Here's a more recent entry in the Dilbert-Pharyngula wars.

I know this is kind of complicated stuff for you guys. If you need more hand-holding, let me know.