I love a good smack down, especially when some IDer looks at something so clearly the product of evolution and claims it must have been designed. So please enjoy this tasty snack from Way of the Woo on how one ID proponent now has egg on their face.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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May 18th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
If the egg had been INTELLIGENTLY designed then the yolk wouldn’t overflow and run down the side when you dip your toast soldier into it! QED there is no God : )
May 18th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
That’s the basic problem with ID. The more you try using it, the less it explains.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Well, truth be told, I don’t really see the “smack-down” in that article. The fact that the target was so easy to hit makes me think that this was more of a bitch-slap than smack-down.
A chicken egg can support much more than the weight of the hen as well, so why wasn’t that brought up? If you stand an egg “on end” and try to compress it, you can’t. Where is the ID in THAT? Especially given the fact that hens don’t sit on their eggs in that fashion.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:19 am
madge, you rock.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:09 am
If the egg was designed to be proof against a predator the predator wouldn’t have any food and we would be up to our necks in chics. Obviously the egg was designed to be food for the higher creatures, thats why a chicken lays so many.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:20 am
I think God designed ID’ers as food for higher creatures. That’s why there’s so many of them, and that’s why they’re completely unable to fend for themselves intellectually. Instead they’re really effective at giving out large quantities of their thought/idea/word-stuff, for all thinking creatures to shred.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:54 am
MANY if not most reptiles lay leathery eggs not hardshelled. They are quite different in nature.
For example snakes like your typical north american cornsnake lays a clutch of 15-20eggs for an large adult. Most of the eggs will be glued together into a solid leathery mass. The shell is super thin , thinner than your typical harshell egg but streangth is much much higher. There easy to cut to help facilitate hatching (egg tooth). But there extreme durable to be torn.
Another point is some reptiles are live bearers and pythons coil around and incubate there eggs for 60 days till hatch.
The monkey tailed skink is a live bearer and the young stay close to the mother for quite some time.
All these argument’s on ID , God , evolution..heck we still don’t even know how magnets work…LOL
Reptile Breeder
May 19th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Guess the yoke’s on the designer, then!
*slinks away*
May 19th, 2008 at 2:21 am
LOL! With regards to Craig, is there such a thing as an IDer that’s *not* an easy target?
May 19th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Brought to you by the same “structural engineers” that think that fire can’t melt steel (see 9/11 conspiracies).
May 19th, 2008 at 4:57 am
The egg was designed, therefore an all-powerful creator exists. How do we prove that this creator does exist? Behold this humble egg…
As it was said: “Better to be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”
May 19th, 2008 at 5:49 am
God also made humans, who made chicken coops. Thus protecting the egg in a much larger usually wooden egg of sorts. Therefore, god exists.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Simmon’s (one of the few DI dudes who IS an actual biologist) whole post boils down to: “Look at how complex the egg is. It must be designed! Oh, buy my book at this linky… ”
And people are so dumb that they will actually buy this crap. I did like this line, though:
>>>”All life support systems are self-contained, like a space shuttle.”
May 19th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Craig:”Well, truth be told, I don’t really see the “smack-down” in that article”
i have to agree, i fail to see how this article is clear proof of evolution on any level, it is just the same typical finger pointing that usually goes on.
Lars:”I think God designed ID’ers as food for higher creatures. That’s why there’s so many of them, and that’s why they’re completely unable to fend for themselves intellectually. Instead they’re really effective at giving out large quantities of their thought/idea/word-stuff, for all thinking creatures to shred.”
you really must make your mom proud.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:58 am
Thanks Phil. I’m humbled.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:26 am
@Justin
Check http://www.howmagnetswork.com/
Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean no one else does.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:41 am
So if the egg was IDed then this would appear to solve the riddle of which came first: the chicken or the egg. But then why would the IDer design an egg first instead of simply poofing into existence the egg layer along with the egg layer’s paramour? Further, if the egg were IDed first, who, or what, sat on said egg to incubate it to the point where it would hatch? Also, what would protect the egg from IDed egg-eaters who, presumably, were IDed into existence at the same instant the egg was and, naturally enough, were just a bit hungry. A big ol’ fat egg, hard shell or not, just laying on the ground wouldn’t last 5 seconds.
And, of course, this doesn’t even begin to address why did the chicken cross the road.
I wonder if I can get a grant from the Discotute to find answers to these questions. In the mean time, I’m off to fry up some eggs for breakfast.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Faust – the article was about pointing out a fallacious argument. There’s plenty information out there that proves evolution.
I suggest this as being a good place to start: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/
May 19th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Since the IDiots invoked Godwin’s Law with “Expelled”, can we all just agree that they have lost the argument and move on?
May 19th, 2008 at 8:32 am
“Since the IDiots invoked Godwin’s Law with “Expelled”, can we all just agree that they have lost the argument and move on?”
In short, no. They haven’t stopped with Expelled. They are continuing with their Wedge strategy. They continue to hammer at local school boards and state governments. “Academic Freedom” is the new mantra and who could be against that? Politicians?
Besides, the ID folks don’t think they’ve lost the argument. If they did, they are continuing to argue anyway and some people in pretty powerful positions might believe them. That’s why we can’t just move on, as much as we’d like. We have to bring everybody else with us.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:36 am
The problem with Godwin’s law is that the person who loses the argument is the very last to realize it.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:59 am
That part of “Expelled” was, I think, some level of feel-good revenge for pro-Christianity folks who are sick of religion being blamed for armed conflicts by militant atheists. It was the weakest part of a weak film, much like similar wild-eyed anti-religion rants are likewise ludicrous on the surface.
What’s funny about Godwin’s Law/Expelled to me is all those articles I’ve seen about how the Catholic Church and Hitler were supposedly in cahoots. These are used to damn religion, of course. One will cruise through Digg or Reddit every couple of months.
Of course, I’m guessing most militant atheists have gone through life blissfully unaware of the “priest block” in Dachau. Might confuse the ol’ simplified worldview, ya know.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:14 am
One point which the egg argument brings up (and which I alluded to in my response to the linked post in the OP) is the nature of mammal eggs and embryos. I’m not talking about the platypus here. I’m talking about placental mammals. In particular, if we are not descended from egg-laying animals, why do we grow yolks at a very early developmental stage?
May 19th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I worry a little about all the responses to the linked post from well-meaning people saying things like, “If I had designed the egg, I would have made it so that…” This seems pretty easy for an ID’er to dismiss, IMO: you aren’t God, so how do you know what the design was for? Maybe allowing predators to get some eggs is part of the design. Not that I subscribe to this, mind you… I just think we won’t win any arguments by claiming humans could have done it better than God.
I was pretty religious as a youngster, and I remember that the “wonders of nature prove existence of God” argument worked pretty well with me. Interestingly, over time (and while studying physics) I decided that I didn’t need the God part to appreciate the wonders of nature. I think the impulse to marvel over the cool things that exist in the Universe is a positive one, and I’d rather try not to squelch it in these debates.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:27 am
I see no particular harm in the sort of responses you mention, they’re hardly going to be used as a argument against the proponents of ID, they’re simply a poke made at a similar level of complexity as the arguments in question that are being made fun of.
A silly statement should not necessarily be countered by a silly argument, but it sure can be fun when made among those who are able to make the distinction.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Actually, Madge, there is design in the egg. That little white thing on either edge of the yolk is what keeps in in the center of the whites.
And again, IDer’s are talking design. Evolutionists are talking construction. That’s like arguing who builds a house, the architect or the contractor.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Another argument against I.D.: If there was an actual intelligent designer up there, I would NOT have been designed in such a way that my blood pressure shoots up to dangerously high levels whenever I read about Intelligent Design.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:44 am
A minor gripe: the use of “their” as a singular pronoun. Perhaps Dr., you meant to be PC with this usage; perhaps you had a brain freeze. In case one, recasting is better (e.g., “egg on the face,” or “egg on his face – a standard usage, if not PC); in case two, you may be forgiven. In either case, you might correct the mistake (as I’m sure your editor has done for you before the release of your publications, no?).
And, I’ve just finished and heartily enjoyed a plate of ham and eggs (over easy) and toast (using French bread), a glass of OJ and good coffee. I’ll have watermelon for dessert. I just LOVE to eat eggs cooked like this for breakfast.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
@ Matt Garrett
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
My apologies if you’re a Poe.
May 19th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
@ Matt Garrett… To use your analogy, the IDists are claiming the architect is also the contractor, but they don’t have any evidence to back that up: no tools with his fingerprints, no photos of him working at the site, nada. Instead, since they personally cannot or will not understand how the contractor could have built the house, they say the structure itself is evidence of the architect doing it.
In contrast, there is abundant evidence that the contractor actually did the job: used tools, crumpled receipts, video of the crew raising the roofbeams, you name it. But for the committed IDists, that will never be enough to convince them.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Madge! Toast soldiers! I thought I was the only one who did that?!? I cut then into strips and did it in my egg. It is yummy! LOL You must be British?
May 19th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
@Will. M: Actually, the use of “they” and “their” as singular pronouns has a long established history, and has been in continuous use from Chaucer through Shakespeare and Jane Austen to J.D. Salinger. It’s perfectly good English, and long predates the very idea of PC.
It fell from favor for a while because it was disparaged by Victorian grammarians and dictionary writers who competed with each other to produce the most “correct” language guides and in the process made up out of whole cloth and/or inappropriate parallels to Latin a litany of bogus grammatical rules that plague us to this day, including “whom”, to not split infinitives, and not to end a sentence a preposition with.
Personally I used to be strongly opposed to “they” and “their” as singular pronouns precisely because I believed them to be a sign of an author being ostentatiously PC. Once I learned the history and was able to get past my prejudice, I accepted it as sometimes being the most elegant formulation. I now try to reserve my derision regarding PCness for those who use ugly articialities like “s/he”…
May 19th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Doc says: “@Justin
Check http://www.howmagnetswork.com/
Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean no one else does.”
Yes, Doc, the properties of a magnetic field are very well understood, but just exactly what it is and where it comes from is not understood at all. If you place a magnet over some small bits of iron, the bits will jump up and attach to the magnet. Work was done there. The potential energy of the system (the magnet –> magnet + iron bits) was raised, but there was no energy input into the system. Where did it come from?
I asked this exact question of a physicist at LLNL (who was a member of our rocket club) expecting some sort of convoluted quantum physics answer. Instead I got, “if you can figure that out, you’ll get a free trip to Stockholm and a large check from the Nobel foundation!”
- Jack
May 19th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Wright, you naive constructolander! So maybe you’ve seen a hammer, and you claim to have seen a nail, and you make up some just-so STORY that someone would HIT that nail.. frighteningly agressive! And even IF that were true… it is only MICRO-construction! Call again if the nail and the hammer and the wood turn into a refrigerator! All those silly stories of random kinetic energy being able to make something so beautifully fitting like a nut and a bolt!!! You CAN’T deny the FACTS!!! The chances of some metal being so perfect fitting by some random hitting with a hammer is 1×10^369, as professor Hehe calculated!!! And how do you explain the hammer huh? How could they make stuff before the stuff was there!??! It’s all pretty fantasy stories, but if you knew anything about MATH you would KNOW that it violates ALL the laws of THERMODYNAMICS! And even if you are CRAZY enough to BELIEVE that nonsense… WHERE YOU THEEEEEREEEEEE!?!?! PLUS!!!!! IF your DOGMA is true… HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN SHAKS+HUTS?!?!?
May 19th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
@slang… Oh no. Such impeccable logic. And you end your withering, white-hot assault on my feeble dogma WITH ALL CAPS!!!
My insistence on the Architectists presenting actual facts just… dries up and blows away.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
About singular “their”: this page lists instances of its use by historical authors going back to the fourteenth century.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Intelligent design?
Trees take their clothes off in the summer and put them on again in the winter. Does that seem intelligent to you?
;c)
May 19th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
I wrote that backwards ….. :c(
May 19th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Are we still talking about messy design amongst imperfect life again? Fine, let’s see evidence of this so-called designer. How does It work? What energy does It use? How can we test for It? How is It less complicated than the natural explanation of evolution?
Lastly, what color pumps does It wear? (What, shoe prints from giant pumps would go a long way in explaining certain lakes. Maybe note so much “Intelligently” designed, but rather accidentally carved from Designer footwear, no.)
May 19th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Did anyone notice one other gaffe from Simmons?
The domesticated chicken (especially the white ones) has been tinkered by humans. Ostensibly, the only real “Intelligent Designer” of chickens is man. Same with cauliflower, corn, melons, dogs, cows, and pretty much everything raised and harvested.
Without the mutability of each of those species (the potential for evolution) then there would be no agriculture. Without agriculture, you wouldn’t have toast soldiers to liberate your yolks. Thank the universe for imperfect and malleable creatures.
May 19th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Supernova, I think you are perfectly correct, and that’s exactly why ID isn’t science. You can explain literally anything by saying “that’s the way the designer designed it.”
Jack, when you use a magnet to pick up some paper clips, the energy comes from you! You need to move the magnet into a position where it can pick up the paper clips. This requires doing work on the magnet. It requires slightly more work to move the magnet into position than it would to move a non-magnetic object of the same mass into the same position. I am confident this is true due to conservation of energy, not that I can remember ever studying it in any physics course. But I think it would make a great experiment for an introductory E&M course to demonstrate this. Problem for the reader (extra credit): Devise an experiment to demonstrate this. Maybe something where you suspend a nail from a string tied to a sensitive spring balance, move it into position while measuring the force required, then magnetize the nail and repeat.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
It seems that the evolution camp has a lot more education to do within its own ranks which is a point that is almost always overlooked. As Pinker quite rightly points out, most of the people who claim to believe in evolution actually believe in something else:
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p. 343
“Though most educated people profess to believe in Darwin’s theory, what they really believe in is a modified version of the ancient theological notion of the Great Chain of Being: that all species are arrayed in a linear hierarchy with humans at the top. Darwin’s contribution, according to this belief, was showing that each species on the ladder evolved from the species one rung down, instead of being allotted its rung by God. Dimly remembering their high school biology classes that took them on a tour of the phyla from “primitive” to “modern,” people think roughly as follows: amoebas begat sponges which begat jellyfish which begat flatworms which begat trout which begat frogs which begat lizards which begat dinosaurs which begat anteaters which begat monkeys which begat chimpanzees which begat us. (I have skipped a few steps for the sake of brevity.)”
May 20th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Jack, in addition to what Buzz Parsec said there, your physicist contact there perhaps thought you were asking a more complex question, was having you on, or you’re just making it up.
As to the energy, there’s equal and opposite forces on the magnet and the filings. The filings are lifted and the magnet falls, acting to conserve both energy and momentum within the system. The magnet (and system as a whole) would drop a little to give up some potential to the kinetic energy of the moving filings, which lose that mostly to heat and sound as they impact and stop. Your arm trivially compensates for those minute extra forces, and your body dynamically adjusts balance across time to keep you upright, the filing’s trip lost in the noise compared to typical muscular forces.
Think of it another way, holding a magnet away form a very large ferrous block. A strong magnet will pull your whole body toward an adjacent block, rolling across a short gap on a skateboard if you like. To figure where the energy to move you and make an impact noise comes from, you have to work in a larger frame, accounting for the elasticity of the ground on which the block sits, the pressure waves generated, and what else ends up being displaced as a result. Like conserving momentum when you accelerate in a car, or stand up out of a chair.
Not eggsactly Nobel prize stuff these days.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:02 am
Is this Expelled stuff still going? Man. I never hear or read anything about it anywhere besides these threads. In fact if it wasn’t for this blog I would have never known it existed. Does that count as irony?
May 20th, 2008 at 5:17 am
Tom Marking
>>>”Though most educated people profess to believe in Darwin’s theory, what they really believe in is a modified version of the ancient theological notion of the Great Chain of Being: that all species are arrayed in a linear hierarchy with humans at the top.”
Except uh, that evolution does not say that humans are the top of any sort of “heirarchy”. People may think in anthropocentric terms, but believe it or not, evolution doesn’t care. Humans are by no means the end result of evolution, and humans are no more or less likely to survive any more than any other currently successful species.
But don’t let that stop you from talking nonsense about it everytime it comes up, or every time that the vaccuity of ID is brought up. You never did tell us what the “scientific theory” of ID is…
May 20th, 2008 at 8:26 am
I think what Jack meant to ask was what is the underlying mechanism of magnetism itself and not the conservation of energy when a magnet is brought near iron filing by a human hand. I think this is the same question as what makes gravity work in the first place.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:19 am
“Except uh, that evolution does not say that humans are the top of any sort of “heirarchy”. ”
Well, duh. Except if you polled 90 percent of the general public who believe in evolution you would find that they actually believe in the hierarchy model. This should give some idea of how well evolution is being presented by its proponents in the education system.
“But don’t let that stop you from talking nonsense about it everytime it comes up, or every time that the vaccuity of ID is brought up. You never did tell us what the “scientific theory” of ID is…”
You must have me confused with someone else. I don’t support ID and I don’t think it’s a scientific theory.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:12 am
What the public believe in is irrelevant. The average Joe doesn’t know what’s scientific. That’s why we have scientists doing the science. As for how evolution is presented, one large problem is the fundies trying to water down science education in favour of religious indoctrination, mounting massive PR campaigns and producing mockumentaries like ‘Expelled’. Which is why it’s important to fight anti-science at every turn. Of course, public opinion is a political arena, and nothing to do with science. If there was no interference from external political pressures, maybe evolution WOULD be better presented within the education system.
Which makes me wonder why you brought up your point in the first place. Bringing up your average Joe again, he or she may look at your post and think that there is some kind of problem with evolution…
>>>”You must have me confused with someone else. I don’t support ID and I don’t think it’s a scientific theory.”
Funny, because your posts here (and on other threads) to me tend to sound like posts from IDer’s and Creationists. What would average Joe think?
May 20th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
To Buzz Parsec and tussock -
I hope you’re still reading this to accept my thanks for the explanation. Conservation of momentum I get, but to invert Buzz’s example, what if you had a magnet rigidly suspended over a frictionless surface (like an air hockey table). Place some paper clips on the puck and push it gently over towards the magnet. Are you saying that the energy to lift the paper clips up to the magnet comes from the momentum of the clips on the puck? The puck will have less momentum after the clips leave since the system mass is less, but there still seems to be a connection missing.
Oh, and tussock, the physicist was Dr. Lynne Kissle, who worked in crystallography at the time before he did a stint at DoE headquarters a bit later. My actual question was how can a the field of a permanent magnet be permanent? You can use it over and over and it never diminishes presuming you don’t knock it about and misalign the individual Fe crystals. How does this work? Where does the attractive force come from?
- Jack
May 21st, 2008 at 6:22 pm
@ Matt:
No. There are no “evolutionists” in science, only evolutionary biologists. And evolutionary theory describes functional traits, as they are what evolutionary processes works on.
Such traits as your yolk strings.
@ Tom:
This has nothing to do with what the science says, but to hammer home how stupid it is; statistical evidence, please. My personal sampling of the web contradicts Pinker’s claim, as most science bloggers know the difference between the non-teleological process of life and the former religious notion.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:57 pm
The magnetic field is well understood on a classical EM and quantum field theory level. For the former I suggest reading “Classical Electricity and Magnetism” by Panofsky & Phillips. Short version – the magnetic field complements the electric field when charges moves.
The Lorentz force that a charge can feel when it moves in an external magnetic field is actually a low-velocity relativistic effect (which we usually don’t recognize as such). In that respect it is analogous to when masses in general relativity moves along geodesics in a space curved by external masses, magnetism is also a compensation felt when particles move along paths of least action. (Except that gravitation looks like a force, while magnetism is a bona fide force.)
And if you ask me why particles move along paths of least action as in all of classical mechanics, well perhaps a Nobel prize winner will one day explain this fundamental phenomena.
Permanent magnets are complex systems. Typically they consist of ferromagnetic materials. (There are a large number of different magnetisms in materials.) A ferromagnetic material is a paramagnetic crystal that arranges itself into magnetic domain due to a competition between quantum exclusion and electromagnetic forces. And a paramagnetic crystal is essentially a crystal with an atom with an unpaired electron which spin and orbital momentum sets up a magnetic field.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t make the least action principle out as totally mysterious as it is based in my own current ignorance. Presumably it is a consequence of energy conservation, much as charges (and so fields) are a consequence of conserved quantities. (Which in turn goes back to symmetries of nature, by way of Noether’s theorem.)
In other words the permanence of the magnetic field is a consequence of the permanence of electric charges (particles).