In Which The Doctor Decries Deist Dickheads and Design Douchebags

It fits.

I’ve found the link.

I frantically scrabble in the five-inch-high pile of research papers on my desk.

The paper I have just read is about the activity and pattern of the lactase gene across cultures. The authors predict frequency differences in gene expression across cultures, associated with their origins and selective pressures (i.e. the cultural practice of herding animals will be associated with adult gene expression).

The paper I’m looking for has a map of Western and Eastern Europe, and in each country the percentage of lactose intolerant adults and their Paleolithic heritage.

It’s close to the bottom of the pile. It always is. Except if you start looking at the bottom, of course.

Bliss.

The lactase gene map agrees almost entirely with the physical map of lactose tolerance across Europe. This gang of MIT geneticists is walking hand in hand with their European dietician counterparts. Best of all, I predicted they would be. The anthropological, genetic and dietary evidence all fits together.

This is more than just good evidence. This discovery gives me the feeling. Not the same one I have when I think about the Norwegian women’s curling team in the group showers. It is the feeling any scientist will get when pieces of evidence, regardless of how disparate, start to gently encircle the same locus. When the truth, whatever that might mean, starts to converge out of the mists. It seems as if for the briefest moment that reality appears directly in word or thought. It is this feeling, regardless of the empirical basis, that makes us think this is right.

This certitude, this brief pleasing silliness, is important to us here. This is faith, my faith. It is subservient to reason. Wait and see what this certitude can do when it comes from the other side.

But I digress, and before I’ve even started too...

There is no scientific debate on the reality of evolution.

Debate, yes. Plenty. Every two-bit evangelist, crusading pindick and squinty-eyed street corner prophet is yelling about it. Arguments and idiocies crash over the issue, hysterical swathes of babble and blather. Every intellectual half-pint from the President of the United States downwards has had their two bits worth.

Scientific debate is another matter.

We have theoretical problems with Newton’s conception of gravity. However, you will never find a mathematician who is willing to let me drop an anvil on his head because Newtown was wrong at boundary conditions. We have theoretical problems with the theory of relativity. But you will never find a quantum physicist laying me a bet that he can outrun a beam of light. Even in his good Nikes. The arguments are theoretical rather than material.

This is to say: while there is debate within the subject of evolution, and various parts of it fluctuate in popularity and plausibility, there such substance to the area of study as a whole that arguing against it (rather than within it) is considered a complete waste of time. It is quite literally that self-evident.

No peer reviewed journal has ever published a study or hypothesis attempting to disprove the fundamental conceptions of evolution, ever, EVER. Considering there are whole journals whose entire purpose is dedicated to the most tangential balls-backwards hypotheses that the hash-smoking scientists of the world can dream up, and that scientists absolutely love a good bust-up, this absence of dissent is a Clinton-libido-sized achievement.

Let’s not even trek up the towering mountain of confirmatory evidence – vestigial bones, vestigial organs, the ‘goosebump’ response to cold and fear, male nipples, the plantaris muscle, tails and gill slits on embryos, transitional species etc. Obsolete structures and leftover impulses from a thousand thousand generations of glacially slow progress. Things that have no reason to exist, unless they are simply harmless biological trinkets left over from previous speciations, evidence of the march of genes, and of time.

The basic theory of evolution, as we understand it, is true.

To claim it to be otherwise and simultaneously to be any kind of scientist is stand-under-the-anvil, outrun-the-photon stupid.

So what the FUCK is intelligent design? This unending babbling that’s in the news, the constant slack-jawed yammering about “options in the syllabus” and “irreducible complexity”, where is it all coming from? Are there renegade scientists out there, too afraid to come forward because of academic censure, rogues who can prove that somewhere the human species (and every other one, for that matter) has blueprints?

Unfortunately, no.

The whole exercise is a massive fraud, a stage-managed swindle which even the realpolitik grandmaster Karl Rove would admire. To cut a very long story short in the interests of the word limit, hardline Christian groups are using modern political methods to systematically undermine the evolutionary legacy, from Darwin downwards, and they are not idly fucking around when they do it. Their strategy is carefully outlined:

1. Sponsor research from several different angles with foregone conclusions (biology, paleontology, genetics etc.). Do NOT mention the Christian God or any other deity at all. Simply talk about the possibility of design. Create dissent, create doubt, and expand the ‘issue’ until it is an issue.

2. Publicity! Conferences! Seminars! Converts! Television! School boards! Allies! Noise! Tell tales told by an idiot! Sound and fury!

3. Cultural shift. Establishment of a new academic paradigm. Tenure for ‘design’ professors. Expansion of research. General shitting in mouths.

A well-designed, carefully aimed and entirely subversive campaign. Even writing about it scares me.

Fortunately for us (not to mention the future of our species) they are taking on a world they do not understand, and when it comes to professional credence, they are found badly lacking. Much of their work is being giggled at after the completion of Stage 1, and outside the rabidly religious confines of the stupider states of America, there is little likelihood of this cancer metastasising.

If I was going to discredit a whole branch of science, I would not chose a poster-boys like the preposterous pissfuck Michael Behe, whose book “Darwin’s Black Box” has been torn to bloody empirical shreds so many times by geneticists that they constantly run out of original things to say about how dim-witted it is. The continual negative reviews are almost as boring as the book.

Also, I would also hide the associations between my branch of “science” (intelligent design) and the religious batfuckers sponsoring and supporting me (The Discovery Institute). That kind of thing can really take your credibility to the tip.

Lastly, I would string my bow differently. If you read their literature, these Intelligent Design people claim to hate Marx, Freud and Darwin, the heavyweights of the “social sciences”. Precious, stupid fools! They’ve missed the real target, the man who came before, and the man whose scientific principle pulps them to bloody mush.

William of Ockham, 1285-1349, Franciscan monk, logician, nominalist and author of Ockham’s Razor, the principle of parsimony – one should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic.

Why is parsimony so important?

Because when we finally manage to connect amino acid generation to viral or RNA construction, and get to establish even a tenuous grasp on the biological origins of life, William of Ockham will rise towering and righteous from his grave and take a massive steaming zombie shit right across your contemptuous plans and your religious manifestos, you fucking proles.

That’s your bad boy, you Bible-humping fucks, one of your own! A Franciscan monk turned worst goddamn nightmare. At the most realistic level, the modern social scientists could be worked around. But what are you going to do when we turn your God into a physical irrelevance? And the most famous religious philosopher of the 14^th Century decries your stupidities? Instead of attacking the modern materialists, you should have been attacking the principles of materialism. But you’ve missed your boat now. The next generation of rogue geneticists will become your God and wave the life you claim as precious and divine in front of your eyes on the Telescreen in a petri dish. And the God you formed in your own image will be spit-shined and trampled like a political banner used after a protest march, waved frantically then broken, dropped and forgotten as you realise that no-one fucking cares.

I’ll dance on your grave, you dead whores. In my lifetime, I will taste your blood when your retarded ideas die withered and crippled in your wrinkled, festering, backwards heads.

Fuck you, and your God, and fuck the alleged intelligence of his design. If he was in any way intelligent, he wouldn’t have designed bobble-headed cumfarts like you to wave his standard.