Mike Gene is known to some as “The Smartest Guy In Intelligent Design”: This may seem like an oxymoron but is actually quite plausible since he is one of the few high-profile ID advocates who had the good-sense to avoid associating with the Discovery Institute and their gaggle of nit-witted followers. The DI, creators of the “Wedge” document, are the people responsible (in part) for loosing the Dover trial, and drafting the new Florida legislation that promises to usher in a whole slew of Doveresque legal theater.
Mike Gene keeps a lower profile than many of the “big names” in ID – unlike Michael Behe and William Dembski he has never been a tenured researcher at a famous institution. He’s never even published a single paper. Even the name “Mike Gene” may be a pseudonym. According to an interview he gave to a fundamentalist-Christian podcast called “Darwin or Design” he stated that this obfuscated identity is intentional and serves to shield his important professional research work from the unwelcome hostility of all those anti-ID folk, however it could just as easily be a ruse to conceal the fact that Gene is unqualified for the role he has assumed.
Mike’s main contribution to the ID kerfuffle is the theory of “front loading” – finding out just what this theory is requires you to buy his book: “The Design Matrix”. In what might appear to be an an excessively bonkers act of self-defeating candor Gene admits that his theory is not science, should not be taught in schools and does not meet any known standards of experimental rigor required for it to become science in the forseeable future. Despite this, Mike seems to have kept a substantial gang of enthusiastic followers who are all keen to big-up his project.
To save you the bother of finding out: “Front Loading” appears to be the notion that things did indeed evolve just like that nasty atheist Richard Dawkins claims, except that God (or some other unspecified first cause) knew it would be that way. An argument for Front Loading often goes something like this: Look kids, a protein which is critical for brain formation is used by a yeast-cell. But since yeast has no brain these proteins must have been put there in anticipation of large-brained creatures such as ourselves.
That’s more or less where the argument ends, except of course for the titular “Design Matrix” – the (unproven) idea that one can detect design by counting up and tabulating the number of features present in an artifact which resemble designed objects and from this infer a probability of design. I’ve heard this approach summed up as somewhere between plain-nonsense and naive wishful thinking, but even this is light-years ahead of the crypto-creationist junk which passes for reasoning amongst the ID community.
I’ve been reading what I always assumed was his blog – “Telic Thoughts”, a site which I had been lurking and occasionally commenting (until my account got suspended). These days I just lurk – I find that fifteen minutes creationism can get my blood pumping faster than the strongest double espresso. But shock of all shocks, Mike Gene has just announced that he’s going to resign from his own blog – and I guess he’s handed the passwords over to his chums Denyse Oleary and Bradford.
Mike’s stated reason for giving up the blog is that all-time favourite of politicians: The need to spend more time with his family. At the risk of being snarky, I’d suspect that the smartest guy in ID may just have been smart enough to figure out that ID is really going nowhere, and the only thing a smart guy can do is quit.
