I'm still getting tiresome complaints from Dilbert fans—they insist that I just don't understand Scott Adams, he's a humorist, I'm obsessed with him, etc., etc., etc. They don't seem to realize that they're all responding to the same post, and they're all saying the same thing over and over. And now Adams has yet another post on ID, and he's just digging himself deeper.

You'd think that a "humorist" would realize that if a joke falls flat, repeating it half a dozen times more won't rescue it.

His latest iteration takes two different tacks. I'll hit them both up.

1. He suggests that we use Intelligent Design as a bad example—that we should "welcome such a clear model of something that is NOT science". That's fine; we do this all the time, and I have used creationism as an example of how not to do science. It's missing the argument, though. There has never been any restriction on using counterexamples, and no one objects. The issue, though, is that the creationists want to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design as a legitimate alternative to evolution. This is unjustified, and his suggestion does not address the actual issue.

I would also add that what is specified in curriculum standards is content, not pedagogy; Adams is making a pedagogical suggestion in a debate about content. There's a difference between suggestions about how something should be taught, and what should be taught—teachers are well aware of it, but the difference seems to elude Mr Adams.

2. He has another irrelevant example.

Imagine that lightning suddenly carves into the side of the Washington Monument the words "I am God. I created you. Darwin was a nut." And let's say there are hundreds of witnesses who all have video cameras and capture it from multiple angles…Here’s the question: Should teachers be allowed to tell science students about the lightning messages?

I'll ignore the details (lightning bolts leaving jokey messages would make me suspicious that it isn't a god at all) and consider just the principle: an unambiguous and naturally unexplainable manifestion of a deity. The answer to his question is easy. Yes. We should have lots of discussions about it.

His hypothetical is painfully irrelevant, however, and what damns Adams is that he doesn't seem to realize it. Intelligent Design creationists have presented NO EVIDENCE for their assumed designer. None. This situation is not at all comparable to what the IDists offer because they have not presented the video tape or the photographs of the markings on the monument.

Here's a question for Adams: Imagine that some people wearing tinfoil hats announce that they have received extraterrestrial communications explaining that the Blorgs of Neptune were responsible for our creation. They have photos of spaceships (that look remarkably like blurry pie plates) and a medium who goes into trances and speaks with the voice of Humpharumphoo, leader of the Blorgs.

Should the Blorg theory of human origins be required instruction in all high school biology courses?

Would it be acceptable if they also pretentiously declared that there are technical difficulties in the unguided synthesis of guanine under certain atmospheric conditions, using lots of technical jargon? Does Mr Adams believe that phenomena incompletely explained by chemistry are sufficient evidence for Blorgism?