Geoffrey Simmons is tapping the ID audience to buy more copies of his book Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can't Explain. His latest contribution to the Evolution News & Views site is a throwaway excerpt from his book guaranteed to astound the easily astoundable ID crowd. Simmons' operant behavior is to express amazement at anything more complex than tic-tac-toe. In fact, he is one of the preeminent voices for the Theory of the Amazing. His raison d'etre is to blindly marvel at life and doubt that it can ever be understood with the unstated corollary: why try when a default explanation exists that doesn't require knowledge of math, chemistry, and physics?Velvet worms are thought to be descended of insects, but the evidence for this is scanty; they look a lot like worms, and they have remained unchanged for millions of years. They live along fallen leaves in tropical forests and have two nozzles, one on each side of their head, which can fire off a very quickly drying glue at their prey. These two sprays crisscross back and forth, as if lassoing the victim. Once the victim is securely ensnared, the worm bites a hole in its body, injects digestive juices, and then slurps up the dissolving victim. Curiously, this glue does not dry within the worm’s body, and its digestive juices are well contained. Imagine the difficulty if the intermediate glue dried within the velvet worm, clogging the nozzles, or dried too slowly, allowing the victim to get away before becoming ensnared.Yes...imagine that. Indeed, much of ID requires a lot of imagining and not much learning. Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge," but I doubt he meant we should live in a world where people spend their time imagining the difficulty of a problem and not a solution to the problem. Fortunately, we have the capacity to observe nature and infer its governing laws. Then we can test these with experiments and confirm our hypotheses or move smartly along. Geoffrey Simmons would instead have you observe nature and marvel at its beauty. But delve no farther because it's unimaginable that you will ever figure out how it works.
About Simmons, P.Z. Myers said it best:
This is a man who thinks the fact that he isn't drooling and feces aren't dribbling down his leg is a miracle from god.Oh yeah...regarding those velvet worms, they've been around for at least 425 million years. I wonder what Simmons thinks they've been doing all that time?
1 comment:
"But delve no farther because it's unimaginable that you will ever figure out how it works."
It should embarrass a person who claims to be scientifically-inclined to make an argument as thin as here made against Dr. Simmons. The above quoted sentence, of course, is not what Dr. Simmons asserts.
Dr. Simmons challenges you or any evolutionist to explain how these various irreducibly complex systems could have arrived by undirected (random) mutation and natural selection.
His book offers scores of examples.
Instead of addressing the argument he actually raises in his book, you post a straw man argument, a diversion.
Dr. Simmons never asserts that we won't figure out how some of these processes work. He challenges you (and others) to explain, using your own neo-Darwinist theory, how these processes came into being from previous non-existence.
Your blog is devoid of an answer. Rather, it ends with a slimy ad hominem.
Not exactly a proud moment in the blogdom of evolutionist advocacy.
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