Bethell the Buffoon

Check out the final exchange about intelligent design between John Derbyshire and Tom Bethell, where Bethell insists that creationism and intelligent design are as different as chalk and cheese. (Part 1 here; Part 2 here.)

In it, Bethell demonstrates once again why he is a blathering buffoon. Bethell tells us that "Structures or signals of specified complexity permit an inference to design without any necessary recourse to the supernatural" without bothering to mention that "specified complexity" is junk mathematics and doesn't permit an inference to anything at all, except that Bethell is rather gullible to accept William Dembski's assurances as gospel.

Bethell then goes on to repeat a common lie of the intelligent design movement: that the SETI Project (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) spends its time looking for "such things as a sequence of prime numbers". Sorry, Tom, that was the movie "Contact". You know, fiction?

In real life, SETI researchers look for look for narrow-band signals, because such signals don't appear to originate from simple systems, and because we believe intelligent beings, if they exist, would use a method of communication similar to ours. Repeat after me: SETI detection doesn't use prime numbers, "specified complexity", or red herrings. Bethell claims he's actually visited the SETI project, so how come he doesn't know this? Is it dishonesty, or simple stupidity?

Next, Bethell shows a profound misunderstanding of information theory when he claims, "Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA was asked how the all-important coding information found its way into the DNA in the first place. It's so complex that a reliance on random events will never get us there." Bethell apparently doesn't understand that in the Kolmogorov theory of information, complexity is the same as randomness. It's easy to get complexity; all you need is a source of random events.

Here's a funny one: early on, Bethell solemnly intones that "Science is not properly based on authority, however." Later, however, in discussing the RNA world hypothesis, he says, "But I'm told that the alternative, the "RNA world," has huge complexities of its own. It's all pure guesswork." Oh. So he's been told that the RNA world hypothesis has problems, and he apparently accepts that without even looking into it. But I thought science wasn't based on authority? Mr. Bethell, meet your opponent, Mr. Bethell.

Mr. Bethell needs a good closer, so to finish up he reaches deep into the creationist playbook and comes up with the Colin Patterson story. It goes without saying that Bethell gets the details wrong; Patterson, for example, did not deny common descent. For the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that Patterson is on Bethell's side. Then the point of Bethell's misremembered anecdote is that we should rely on the authority of Colin Patterson, but not on the authority of all the other biologists who accept that evolution is the best explanation we have for the diversity of life as we see it today.

Altogether, a rather unimpressive performance for Mr. Bethell, who has been denying evolution for 30 years without learning anything about it. Funny -- he behaves just like a creationist.