Top 10 ID stories of 2024

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The Discovery Institute have once again listed their top 10 stories of the year. For 2024, they are:

  1. The 2024 Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to the discoverers of microRNA.

  2. There isn’t as much opposition to ID as there was previously. Or, put another way, ID is no longer relevant. That almost everyone on their list of prominent IDers is just as old as their former detractors seems to have escaped them.

  3. Richard Dawkins said he is a cultural Christian.

  4. We still don’t know much about the evolution of flowering plants.

  5. Alan Feduccia still disagrees with the majority view of bird evolution.

  6. Two origin-of-life researchers published an opinion piece about OOL research being difficult, fragmented and full of competing hypotheses. (They didn’t mention ID).

  7. Water fleas don’t experience constant selection pressures and haven’t evolved in the last ten years.

  8. Ronald Reagan, who died 20 years ago, used an ID argument in 1988.

  9. William Amos couldn’t get his work published several years ago. (But we discussed it!)

  10. Two evolutionary biologists (and anti-vaxxers) have come out in favour of ID.

What isn’t included in their top 10 stories of 2024? Anything by ID advocates! There is no mention of any ID research, no mention of any new ID books, no mention of any ID breakthroughs. It’s all about the work and views of other people.

Intelligent Design is (still) dead.

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A primary ID prediction was that ID and theistic science would have a profound impact on the practice of science by 2025. There are still more papers in homeopathy than ‘ID science’.

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And the fact that even more of them voted for Trump in 2024 versus 2020 makes that blatantly obvious.

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The top of the list is essentially an own goal. This is because, in ID parlance, microRNAs are low-information moieties that control numerous aspects of growth and development. Their low-information nature means that the many facets of living things controlled by microRNAs are quite accessible to the reach of what IDers would call blind, unguided evolution.

Lurking in the back of my mind is some adage about babies and bathwater …

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“Intelligent Design is (still) dead.”
And all things are (still) permitted…
After Meyer’s tour de force, Return of the God Hypothesis, what more is to be done? LOL

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Can’t quite tell whether that was intended ironically.