Most fans of Intelligent Design content themselves with sticking pins in wax images of me, but there are some still doggedly trying to help me see the light. One of these latter very kindly sent me a DVD titled Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
I watched the DVD in an idle hour over the weekend. It’s not badly done: Some cool molecular-biology animations and earnest explanations by familiar names from the I.D. movement. There is, though, a bit too much New Age-y footage of seascapes and birds, and WAY too much slo-mo. Also, Charles Darwin’s voice isn’t right. They’re very fair to the old boy in presenting his theory, but his voice-over sounds like the Brit Villain in some 1980s thriller. Altogether, though, not a bad production.
Content-wise, the movie just puts forward three or four of the standard I.D. arguments: lots of stuff about the darn bacterial flagellum, of course, plenty on biogenesis, and yes, here comes Mount Rushmore. No counter-arguments are presented, and some of the statements are false. It is not the case, for example, that nobody has been able to come up with an evolutionary pathway for that wretched flagellum, there is one here: I can’t judge whether it’s plausible or not, but it is still false to say no-one’s come up with one. Similarly, statements that “[natural selection] faces a formidable challenge,” and that “for a growing number of scientists, [intelligent design] represents a paradigm,” are untrue. If the number of scientists who cleave to I.D. is growing, how come I just keep seeing the same old half-dozen names? Nor is the fundamental logical problem of I.D. addressed — the problem that you’re “explaining” complexity by positing a higher level of complexity — the Designer. That just fails Occam’s Razor right away.
It’s a nice DVD, and if you are new to the topic it will introduce you to some of their arguments, though only from their side. Until they actually *D*O* *SO*M*E* *S*C*I*E*N*C*E*, though, I still don’t see any reason to take I.D. seriously as a scientific endeavor.