Two theories, and one loud pretender

MSNBC offers a two-fer.

First, a tale of two theories.

One scientist came up with a new way of explaining how biology works. A generation later, the other one came up with a new way of explaining how physics works. Today, after a century of scrutiny, both explanations still pretty much hold up. But in popular culture, physicist Albert Einstein is idolized, while biologist Charles Darwin's legacy is clouded with controversy.

And thereby hangs a tale...

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Second, a piece on why scientists dismiss "Intelligent Design".

In his highly influential book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," science philosopher Thomas Kuhn presented the idea that science is not a gradual progression toward truth, but a series of insurgencies, with scientific theories constantly usurping one another. That is sometimes true. And proponents of intelligent design love Kuhn's argument.

After examining ID's two main arguments, the answers to the original questions — what does ID offer? And what can ID explain that evolution can't? — is not much and nothing, leading scientists say. "The most basic problem [with ID] is that it's utterly boring," said William Provine, a science historian at Cornell University in New York. "Everything that's complicated or interesting about biology has a very simple explanation: ID did it."

And just to make matters worse, where Intelligent Design does make predictions, they're wrong.

In 1975, Japanese scientists discovered a bacterium that can eat nylon. That is, a bacterium with specialized enzymes that break down and extract nourishment from a molecule that didn't exist before 1935.

The discovery of nylon-eating bacteria poses a problem for ID proponents. Where did the CSI [Complex Specified Information] for nylonase—the actual protein that the bacteria use to break down the nylon—come from? There are three possibilities:

• The nylonase gene was present in the bacterial genome all along.
• The CSI for nylonase was inserted into the bacteria by a Supreme Being.
• The ability to digest nylon arose spontaneously as a result of mutation. Because it allowed the bacteria to take advantage of a new resource, the ability stuck and was eventually passed on to future generations.

Apart from simply being the most reasonable explanation, there are two other reasons that most scientists prefer the last option, which is an example of Darwinian natural selection. First, hauling around a nylonase gene before the invention of nylon is at best useless to the bacteria; at worst, it could be harmful or lethal. Secondly, the nylonase enzyme is less efficient than the precursor protein it's believed to have developed from. Thus, if nylonase really was designed by a Supreme Being, it wasn't done very intelligently.