Creationism Has A Bad Week

Really good Wall Street Journal article on how the intelligent design crowd continues to be proved wrong...

And I ask again- Why are we still debating evolution in 2006?

WSJ: Two New Discoveries Answer Big Questions In Evolution Theory

Even as the evolution wars rage, on school boards and in courtrooms, biologists continue to accumulate empirical data supporting Darwinian theory. Two extraordinary discoveries announced this week should go a long way to providing even more of the evidence that critics of evolution say is lacking...

...But refutation is in the eye of the beholder. No scientific discovery will end the evolution wars. For one thing, adherents of ID call the fact that scientists are studying reducible-complexity at all a victory for their side. "We're delighted they're engaging in a debate that they say doesn't exist," says Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which pushes ID. Moreover, he says, the hormone-receptor system is not really irreducibly complex.

The trouble for ID is that this isn't the first study to show, step by step, how complex structures could have evolved. Recent experiments have shown how irreducibly complex structures such as bacterial flagella and the lens of an eye could have evolved by co-opting existing structures just as the hormone did. More such research is in the pipeline.

And so is much more huffin' and puffin' by the Earth-is-6,000-years-old crowd.

[PS- A study on catfish shows evolution doing its mysterious work.]