Science/Technology blog

Well, well, well, well.

I hadn’t expected it. I really hadn’t. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the “design inference” has been “of great value” in medicine and results in “the best medical research,” I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To refresh your memory, I will point out that, intrigued by Dr. Egnor’s assertions about how useful the “design inference” was to medicine and biology, I asked him on numerous occasions:

1. Explain, specifically, how the design inference is “of great value” in medicine. Please support your description with concrete examples, preferably documented in the biomedical peer-reviewed literature that show how the design inference makes one a better physician or contributes to treatments for disease.
2. Explain, specifically, how the design inference has been of “enormous help in scientific research in general and medical research.” Please support your description with concrete examples documented in the biomedical peer-reviewed literature that show “best medical research” that is based on the “search for patterns recognizable as design.” In other words, show us examples of medical research either based on or strongly influenced by the design inference, and how the design inference led to or facilitated the discovery of a better treatment for a disease or a better understanding of the pathophysiology behind a disease.

Those are two pretty reasonable questions, if I do say so myself, given how, with the supreme confidence of a surgeon who regularly cuts into people’s skulls to operate on their brains, Dr. Egnor had repeated his assertions of how useful the “design inference” supposedly is for science. And, after nearly three weeks, Dr. Egnor has finally responded with a post over at the Discovery Institute Whine Blog entitled, Orac’s Challenge: Do Scientists ever use the Design Inference in Biology? (Hmmm…let me think…)

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…