Yours truly thinks the "intelligent design" idea is being given the short shrift by the mainstream media. Yes, some intelligent design advocates want to use I.D. as a Trojan horse to put religious doctrine into public schools -- forbidden by the First Amendment, and wisely so in the opinion of this churchgoer. And some intelligent design advocates believe young Earth creationism, a nutty idea for which there isn't one iota of scientific evidence. But as they mock the notion of intelligent design, the mainstream media are systematically avoiding a substantial question mark in evolutionary theory: it does not explain the origin of life. That organisms evolve in response to changes in their environment is well-established -- anyone who doubts this doesn't know what he or she is talking about. But why are there living things in the first place? Darwin said he had no idea, and to this day science has little beyond wild guesses about the origin of life. Maybe life had a natural origin that one day will be discovered. Until such time, higher powers or the divine cannot be ruled out. Exactly because I think intelligent design is a more important concept than the mainstream media will admit, I really wish right-wing screwballs would stop advocating I.D. -- they're giving the idea a bad name!

Easterbrook is a nitwit ... but you already knew that, didn't you? I'm quite sure I've said as much in the past, particularly when I regaled you with the story of how he pretty much reprinted a timber industry talking points memo in Newsweek on the eve of President Clinton's Forest Summit and then lied about the scientific references "supporting" it.

It's just that now he proves he's an even BIGGER twit than we previously knew. Who'd have guessed that he thinks ID is a "theory" that has any credibility whatsoever? I mean, Easterbrook's whole schtick has been his "serious" evaluations of complex issues (often, scientifically complex issues ... e.g., environmentalism). He's posed himself as an above-the-fray dispenser of truth and common sense. Whether it be the American health care system or the future of America's land, water and air, he's majestically floated in to bop us on the head with his comprehensive evaluations of all the facts. Again and again, he's implied that he's quite the science whiz: a guy with the ability to really "get" these complex issues and then boil them all down for the rest of us, cutting through all the jargon and spin to deliver unvarnished sensibility and nothing else. It was always egotistical puffery -- his work has been slipshod dreck pretty much forever -- but, for some reason, for a long time, a lot of people (editors as well as readers) bought into it.

And thinking about that, maybe he's now done us all a favor: henceforth, no one with half a brain should ever be flim-flammed by him again. The next time he opens his trap about any issue involving science, he can be browbeaten with his endorsement of ID. (But will critics actually do that, or just let it slip into the memory hole? And what about the vast numbers of people -- including editors -- who don't have nearly half a brain?)

In any case, Lawyers, Guns & Money does a reasonable job of criticizing him, I guess. Actually, some pretty funny and biting lines in there. But the writer kind of misses the most important thing of all. So allow me: "Gregg, just because science can't definitively say what caused life to initially start does NOT mean that 'God must have done it' constitutes a reasonable competing theory. (Oh, excuse me, it's not 'God must have done it,' it's 'An intelligent designer must have done it.' Right. Sorry about that. Must be more precise at all times)."

In fact, we can reasonably reply to Easterbrook with a question: "So, Gregg, who exactly designed the designer?" I mean, that's REALLY the crux of it, isn't it? If Easterbrook just can't see how any natural forces could have created the first life forms on this planet, then how come he's so willing to give a pass to the alleged designer of life? Where did that designer come from? At some point or another, advocates of ID -- no matter how they try to squirm out of it -- have got to confront this issue. And almost any answer they come up with must, more or less, amount to the same thing: the so-called "intelligent designer" must either have evolved elsewhere from life that originated spontaneously (as scientists generally postulate happened here) ... or, the designer (or his/her predecessor designers) has existed forever. In other words, the designer is God Eternal.

No matter how you boil down ID, it always comes to this.

By the way, nevermind Easterbrook's absurd central assertion for a minute: notice that what's par for the Easterbrook course here is his glib assertion that science just can't explain the origin of life ... that is, the emergence of the initial life forms. He just drops this whopper in, then moves on so quickly that critics are likely to miss it as they rub their eyes in disbelief at the baloney that follows. But this assertion really IS a whopper. Yes, in the absolute strictest sense of the word, it's true: science has yet to demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of life, in the natural environment, from non-living matter. But if it's true in the strict sense, it's also profoundly disingenuous. The fact is that science HAS demonstrated natural processes that have narrowed (almost to nothing) the gap between non-life and life. To cite but one key example, the discovery of molecules that reproduce themselves ("Prions! Get your prions here!") was one important step. There are more, way more than I'm competent to describe.

And don't forget the silliness -- the pure absurdity -- of Easterbrook's contention, which I would boil down to as: "Science hasn't actually been able to demonstrate the transformation of non-life to life, ipso facto, ID is a reasonable competing theory." This, of course, is exactly the same assertion that ALL the ID advocates make, which doesn't stop Easterbrook from trying to claim a special class for himself as being somehow better than the usual run-of-the-mill IDer. In any case, application of Occam's Razer right about now might be appropriate. It seems far less the leap of imagination to believe that natural processes could turn a non-living compound into a self-replicating, energy-seeking biological entity -- and that our knowledge is incomplete, but the process is ultimately knowable and indeed probably not all that far beyond our grasp -- than it is to believe that, "Well, we haven't seen it in nature yet, SO AN ALL-KNOWING BEING SITTING ON A GIANT THRONE MUST HAVE DONE IT." (Yes, yes, Easterbrook doesn't specifically assert the latter ... but he does, it seems, think it ought to share equal billing with the former. THAT is the silly absurdity of it).

Fucking Easterbrook ... every single time that prick gets a paycheck from a magazine or newspaper, while another more honorable writer goes unpublished, it's a damned injustice.

I'd say that wraps that up.

Update: PZ Myers takes on Easterbook here.

Some time agom when I saw that the New York Times had assigned their Sunday review of Jared Diamond's Collapse to Easterbrook, I just cursed and turned the page. Here's a review of that review, which says that Easterbrook took Diamond to task for not understanding "society's evolutionary arc."