Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water again ...

… another shark appears, begging to be jumped.

One of Ray Comfort’s favorite examples of the invalidity of evolution (besides the banana) is sex. A while back Comfort objected to critical remarks about his book by PZ Myers. Comfort is quoted as saying

“Let’s go back even further (100 million years ago) to pre-pre-elephants that also contained males and females. At what point of time in evolutionary history did the female evolve alongside the male? And why did she evolve? Then explain, if you would professor, why horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats also evolved with a female, at some point of time in evolutionary history. Professor, I know you believe, but please, give us who are healthy skeptics some empirical evidence. Remember, stupid people like me want good hard evidence before we, like you, become believers in Darwin’s theory,” Comfort said.

In other words, if evolution is true who were Cain and Abel canoodling with? Erm, sorry about that. Wrong story line. PZ then smacked Ray around in more detail here. Comfort’s remarks are at the level of the old creationist question, “If we evolved from monkeys how come there are still monkeys?”

However, intelligent design, we are told, is not creationism and is a much more sophisticated and ‘scientific’ enterprise. Or is it? On Uncommonly Dense, William Dembski’s group blog, we find this gem in a post by “niwrad”::

It is unimaginable that reproduction and genitals arose by Darwinian evolution (that is for random mutations and natural selection). First, as a matter of principle: evolution needs reproduction; without reproduction no evolution. Therefore how can reproduction be the effect of evolution if evolution is an effect of reproduction? It’s an impossible causality inversion. Second, for a technical reason: how could the male organs arise independently from the female organs given the cCSI they share? In fact the Darwinian processes work in the single individual. They are blind and unaware of the processes running in other individuals. Random mutations that happen in a genome have nothing to do with the mutations in another one.

“…. Darwinian processes work in the single individual”? It’s hard to conceive of the level of ignorance necessary to make the argument in that post. Apparently the notion of “coevolution” is foreign to the UD poster. But then, it only yields 186,000 hits on Google Scholar.

It’s fun to see UD in bed with Ray Comfort. Somehow I think they were made for each other. And I don’t think it was coevolution: It’s a straight lineage, ancestor to descendant.