Cornell ID advisor on Intelligent Design

Mark Psiaki, Associate Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering which is part of the Cornell University and advisor of Cornell’s IDEA club provides us with some insights into the minds of ID activists. I will leave most of his claims without comments as they speak best for themselves.

Mark Psiaki wrote:

The principle of irreducible complexity does not give one all of biology, but if true, it serves to divert the biologist from wasting time by trying to answer a question to which there is no scientific answer.

Guest Post: Follow-up to last night’s panel discussion on ID/Evolution

How more upfront can one be about the scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design?

Of course Irreducible Complexity is flawed in many ways such as 1) it limits itself to Darwinian pathways 2) it concludes that IC systems are not just evidence against Darwinian theory but also in favor of Intelligent Design (false duality) 3) Darwinian pathways to IC systems have been identified.

Psiaki also seems to understand that IC is merely an argument from ignorance although for some reason he believes it to be on par with Quantum Theory’s Heisenberg principle.

The theory of intelligent design, or put better, the assertion that there exists irreducible complexity in certain biological mechanisms or biochemical processes, is similar. It makes few predictions. Its principle prediction is that there will never be found a naturalistic descent-with-modification (i.e., natural selection) explanation for how these irreducibly complex systems came to be.

Or would argue that if such explanations are found, that these systems were not IC after all… Moving the goalposts has become quite popular amongst ID activists.

This is a negative prediction, and many evolutionary biologists don’t like its negativity. It is a prediction, nonetheless. It does not give power to predict about the sex ratios in certain populations, as Prof. Reeve would like it to, but that is not a problem, because it did not claim that it would make such predictions. Although it doesn’t make the usual predictions that certain biologists might like, its prediction is an important one

It’s not that biologists do not like negativity, it’s that such an argument has limited scientific relevance as it basically argues that our ignorance should be a reason to not do science anymore.

IC is merely the claim that there are certain systems in biology which cannot be explained by Darwinian mechanisms.

Mark Psiaki is an associate professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University. On his personal pages, we find his Christian Conversion Story as well as some commentary (sic) relevant to Intelligent Design.