Courtesy of the National Center for Science Education
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or Paperback
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Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
This is a great step for defending evolution, mainly because it attacks the intelligent design agenda with the same weapons they use – fighting fire with fire, so to say. They make their case by ‘picking apart’ evolution on details that the general public doesn’t bother fact-checking on. One of these topics is the ‘irreducible complexity’ of certain organs – the eye is a perfect example. Getting actual experts to explain the topic in an understandable way is a great start. What is more impressive though, I think, is that this is an internet video – available on YouTube – available for everyone to see – and at least decently publicized. It also doesn’t shy away from making its purpose clear – it states at the very beginning that it is intended to discredit a specific ID argument. I believe that the ID agenda has only gotten as far as it has because the scientific community has been too shy in its response and counter-attack, and these kinds of videos are a great step in that direction. Now, if we could only make a full-length movie about these topics…
The trouble is that it only explains the anatomy of the eye. Someone like Michael Behe would describe the structure of rhodopsin, declare it irreducibly complex and wrongly claim victory. What you’d need to show is how G-protein coupled receptors (of which rhodopsin is one, sense receptors are another) arose, and became modified for their various functions, and I think that would be extremely difficult to do in a short video.
Sorry; it’s too late for me…I meant …smell receptors…(it’s actually 9 pm here).