Thoughts in a Haystack

Unsatisfied with the damage he first did to one foot, Dr. Michael Egnor has taken careful aim at the other and loosed another barrage. Demonstrating an utter lack of comprehension of the saw that one should 'leave bad enough alone,' Egnor has compounded his previous error by again taking on Jeffrey Shallit at Recursivity (even committing typos in giving the title of Dr. Shallit's previous post). And, again, Dr. Shallit needs no help from me. But there is one attempted point of Egnor's that I think is worth commenting on: his illicit use of analogy.

As I have argued before:

Arguments by analogy or metaphor, when used correctly, are both valid and illuminating. For example, a crucial argument made by Charles Darwin in support of evolution was the analogy between 'artificial selection' by breeders and 'natural selection' by the environment. But such arguments must be internally valid and consistent, as well as carefully crafted so that the analogy truly corresponds to the points purportedly being made.

Egnor thinks he has struck some sort of unanswerable blow by blovating:

If the scientific discovery of a 'blueprint' would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?

Because the genetic code is not a "blueprint," doctor, that's why. Blueprints (which, in the age of Computer Aided Design, have trod the path of the dodo) are drawings made by known agents that consist of manufactured products called "paper" and "ink" with a known source that have a known conscious purpose in a peculiarly human activity called "construction."

All you are missing to make your analogy perfect, doctor, is everything. We know, for example, that genes are "manufactured" by the ordinary processes of chemistry within the bodies of living things, the vast majority of which have, as far as we can tell, no conscious purpose at all, much less a conscious purpose to manufacture DNA. In other words, unlike blueprints, the production of DNA operates by natural law, independent of conscious intent and without conscious purpose on the part of the producer. Blueprints, unlike DNA, have never been known to be spontaneously produced by the chemistry of, say, bacteria. Nothing supports the appropriateness of the attempted analogy, except Dr. Egnor's preconceived biases.

To claim that DNA is purposefully designed for some conscious purpose by analogy to known human artifacts is simply to beg the question on the issue Egnor is trying to prove -- the existence of a designer. But I've been through that before too.

Oh, but wait ... that's all Intelligent Design Creationists have going for them in the first place ... smoke and mirrors ... isn't it? Never mind ...
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