The spokesperson for the modern intelligent design movement wrote a review on a NY Times article concerning some genes in fish which might give evolutionists ideas on how fins turned to feet. This prompted P.Z. Myers who uses evolution often to try and discredit the existence of God and creationism in general to respond to the review. Myers writes…
“Stop, Casey, and think. Here’s this fascinating observation, that we keep finding conserved genes and conserved regulatory regions between mice and fish, which ought to tell you something, and your argument against a specific example is that it isn’t rare? It really tells you something when your critics’ rebuttal to a piece of evidence is that you’ve got so much evidence for your position that they’re tuning out whenever you talk about the detais.”
Here is what Casey Luskin who is the spokesperson for the modern intelligent design movement wrote in his review…
“The real story isn’t quite that interesting. According to the Nature paper, a particular region of DNA associated with a Hox gene cluster in the coelocanth genome showed sequence homology with a stretch of Hox gene-related DNA in tetrapods. Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was found between Hox-gene-associated DNA across these organisms isn’t very surprising.”
“The authors aren’t sure exactly what this particular segment of DNA does, though it’s probably a promoter region. In mice the corresponding homologous region is associated with Hox genes that are important for forming the placenta. Ergo, we’ve solved the mystery of how the placenta evolved. Right?”
“Not really. Again, all that was found was a little homologous promoter region in Hox-gene related DNA in these two types of organisms. Given that we don’t even understand exactly what these genes do or how they work, obviously the study offered no discussion of what mutations might have provided an evolutionary advantage.”
“No evolutionary pathway was proposed, or even discussed. So there’s not much meat to this story, other than a nice little region of homology between two shared, functional pieces of Hox-gene-related DNA. But of course, such shared functional DNA could be the result of common design and need not indicate common descent or Darwinian evolution.”
Casey Luskin is correct in this regard, there isn’t much to the discovery. No knowledge on how these genes work or why they work. All this paper claims is “homology” which isn’t hard evidence for evolution. Why? For one, similarities between organisms that evolutionists don’t believe are closely related!
Next Myers attacks intelligent design referring to it as “creationism”…
“The Intelligent Design creationist explanation requires that every extant species was specifically and intentionally stocked with a set of genes hand-chosen by a designer. God magically inserted IgM into each vertebrate species, except that he missed the coelacanths, and he magically inserted IgW into each and every shark, ray, coelacanth, and lungfish, but he intentionally left them out of every tetrapod and teleost.”
Of course the modern intelligent design movement denies any reference to God, because to them that wouldn’t be scientific. But they don’t define what an intelligent agent or agents is, thus anyone guessing what they mean by that would be considered an ad hominem argument. But when you use intelligent agent or agents within your framework in which you call science, it is reasonable to challenge or question who or what that is! Of course Myers assumes its God and labels it creationism because the courts outlawed it being taught in the public schools. Myers then also assumes how a mind (in this case, God) would create nature which is interesting.
Myers uses uniqueness as proof for a creator, because evolution uses “homology” for its framework or another words God wouldn’t have created that way so it was evolution. However, he is wrong! For example, a car company often times uses the same parts in different cars. Does that mean cars are not intelligently designed rather they naturally evolved? No! You can tell that Ford models are similar. The Ford company doesn’t make each model drastically different from other models that it produces in that same year. Conversely, most of the genetic code for all living things is universal, because for one, it indicates a lone designer not many different designers. Also, it has a purpose, this makes the code optimal for protecting against errors!
Here is a challenge for Myers! What scientific research has produced hard evidence that an intelligent designer would only produce each species using totally different parts? Didn’t you believe that creationism couldn’t be tested therefore not a science then how could you come up with such a conclusion on how God would create? Didn’t you believe only evolution could be tested therefore a science? Myers uses evolution exactly like a spiritual cult does in order to try and disprove in what he doesn’t want to believe in, and that is God! This is why his argument is a bluff of complexity rather than logical. Science has not disproved God neither has P.Z Myers version of evolution disproved God!