piled high and deep

sometimes it gets discouraging.

i just saw a guy on tavis smiley's show who said he's a scientist who's found evidence of the validity of "intelligent design."

he said he did some sort of computer analysis of the human genome that indicates it's too complex to have evolved by a random process.

i would've liked to hear more details, but in response to further questions he simply repeated the assertion in different words.

just before the end of the segment, tavis posed a 2-part question whose second part asked the guest to speak on any possible weaknesses in his findings. he only answered the first part. i don't know whether he purposely ignored the other part or just ran out of time.

during my school days a fellow student told me the academic degrees b.s., m.s., and ph.d. stand for bullshit, more shit, and piled high and deep.

he had a point. if you know how to answer quiz questions, you can get some impressive letters after your name, but if you don't learn to ask the right questions you're not really a scientist.

the question tavis's guest needs to ask himself is "how do you explain all the failures?"

OF COURSE the genome of a successful species looks designed: its genome functions like pre-loaded software—an operating system that has made it successful—so our intuition finds a pattern of cause and effect similar to those that in everyday life correspond to the use of intelligence. but intuition isn't always right: the development of modern species took not a few thousand years but billions, and, for every species existing today, scores have fallen by the wayside and died out. most of the failed organisms never even became species: they died from harmful mutations without offspring or after only a few generations because they weren't competitive in the struggle to survive and reproduce.

apparently the "intelligent designer" designed by trial and error.

how darwinian.