Scientists Figure Out How Bees Fly

corbettw writes "Researchers at CalTech have discovered how bees fly, putting one more nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design. From the article: 'People in the ID community have said that we don't even know how bees fly ... We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.'"

Comments

Straw man

[FredThompson]

Let's get something straight, OK?

Intelligent design /= anti-science.

There's an old single-frame cartoon where two scientists are looking at some equations on a blackboard and in the middle is the phrase, "a miracle happens" which prompts one scientist to question the other scientist's proof.

People who state the straw man that Intelligent Design is anti-science are guilty of the hypocrisy they say their opponents have.

If anything, belief in Intelligent Design should increase as the complexities and intricacies of the physical realm become more apparent. The more complex, the less the probability of something outside the ruleset happening. The more complex the ruleset, the lower the probability it came into existence spontaneously.

Denial of that is to deny math.

There are closed-minded irrational people on either "side" of "the debate." Both have their own instances of "a miracle happens." Statements like, "putting a nail in the coffin of ID" don't do anything other than show the speaker is an elitist snob from one "side" of "the debate" and has their own form of closed-minded, biggoted, boorish behavior and thoughts.

Think of string theory of...no, wait, this is even easier...think of Chemistry 101 and Physics 101. Both teach some very elementary ways to model the same physical phenomena. Does that mean one is right and the other wrong? No, it means they are 2 different ways of modeling. Perhaps another way to view it is those are views of the same phenomena from 2 different angles.

Plato has a very famous cave analogy from which we can take another illustration by examining just the starting premise, that the people live their lives seeing only shadows cast on the cave wall. One day, a person turns around and sees the light from the sun then understands the shadows from another point of view.

Intelligent Design, in its simplest form, really means order and complexity don't spontaneously happen. It doesn't mean science is invalid, just the opposite.

The bumblebee bit seems like it became a catchy phrase which had some truth at the beginning (couldn't explain with scientific tools we had) and was then turned into dogma, glommed onto by all sorts of people.

The idea that discovery of a way to model bumblee bee flight lessons the validity of the concept of Intelligent Design is emotional and irrational, not logical.

Re:Perhaps because...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Why do so many religious guys don't get it?

Maybe because thanks to standardized testing, the next statement:

Science never claimed to explain everything. Never.

Is completely incorrect as far as most people are concerned. Answers on the tests in high school science class are either right or wrong, never giving points for original thought.

Not only that, science also has said what it will never be able to explain or predict - so not only did science not claim to explain everything, science mentions several things which it will never be able to explain: For example what happens in a black hole or what was before the big bang.

But that's NOT the way it's presented when you go to court to exclude other explainations from the classroom.

Science does claim to explain and predict a lot of things - and without it we wouldn't post here on Slashdot, we would still sit in cold caves worshipping sungod and moongod.

Not quite true- because there was a competing scientific method that wasn't exclusive that would have probably come up with the same ideas.