Ahab Has A Blog.

There's a lot of similarity between the proponents of Intelligent Design and those who manipulate Google's system for ranking websites. In addition to commiting garden variety fraud, they employ similar methods to perpetrate their assault on reality.

Google farmers, as I call them, create a large number of sites - and sometimes purchase existing content enterprises on particular subjects - and interlink them into vast self-supporting galaxies of web pages. Google's automated systems can't see what is quickly apparent to any savvy surfer; the sites are wastelands. No one visits them, except by stumbling across them on Google searches. They have only the slenderest of connections to the net of information known as the WWW. But on their own, they form a substantial enough constellation of interlinking sites that Google's artificial intelligence cannot readily determine that they have no value, that they are, in essence, total artifice erected for the sole audience of Google's search robots (and then they sell advertising to anyone who stumbles one click into their empire of nonsense).

And so it goes with Intelligent Design. It has no value as a scientific theory whatsoever. But by "publishing" articles that are "reviewed" and "referenced" and "cited" by co-conspirators in the assault on Reason, they create the appearance of an actual "movement" and "controversy" in academia. I'm no defender of academia, but there's a reason it's caused not a ripple in academic circles. It's shit.

It's as if someone recommended replacing Newtonian gravity with "God makes things fall" - it explains nothing, it's not science, and in fact its an insult to the splendor of God's creation to subsitute appreciation of its magificence with a fatuous "God did it."

Evolution ranks among the most spectacularly successful theories in the history of science. It explains why we have different blood types, why bacteria become resistant to our best drugs, why viruses become less virulent over time, why there are no elephants in America (people ate the mammoths), why donkeys and horses have sterile offspring (they are just past the cusp of becoming different species), how dogs can be "overbred" (exploding populations stress underlying genetic weaknesses) and, in the most amazing prediction of the history of science, it predicts the discovery of DNA, the mechanism by which traits are inherited from parent to child, and by which these traits can change.

But "Intelligent Design", the latest fad in ignorance, soldiers on in the face of overhwhelming evidence, using the same techniques as spammers. ID and spammers; cut from the same cloth. If you believe Intelligent Design, I've got a 12 inch penis.