PZ Myers at Pharyngula has discovered Engineer's disease. Engineer's disease is a lot like frustrated white man syndrome (aka libertarianism), in that the individual afflicted develops a simple set of tools to evaluate the world, then assumes they function in nearly every situation. The resulting simplistic worldview is at once charmingly naive, and embarrassingly bone-headed.

All-too-common-dissent finds another crazy creationist engineer. This one opens a molecular biology and genetics text, discovers that it doesn't talk about "Darwinism" (not surprising), and concludes that biology doesn't need evolution.

My hypothesis is that the field of molecular biology is simply not understood by the majority of biologists and thus pretty secure from rational debate by laymen. By claiming that this discipline (which they probably don't understand either) proves Darwinism and that Darwinism is vital to understanding molecular biology, the Creationists can be silenced, humiliated and put in their place by simply invoking superior knowledge.

This is a rather extravagant claim coming from someone who knows no biology and who's impression of the field is derived from one specialist text that I suspect he didn't understand. I'd argue the other way: that there's a trend towards emphasizing molecular biology at the expense of other aspects of biology in undergraduate education. However, even so, it's extremely silly to claim that molecular biology isn't being driven in substantial part by evolutionary ideas, or that molecular biology isn't providing huge amounts of new information in support of evolution.

Ahh, Engineer's disease. It's great. I also liked this comment from the thread.

Thanks Doppelganger. My statement is that ID is the foundation of all of high-tech and thus not some personality cult phenomenon. In fact, your arguments against ID are all ID based! To get a Ph.D. in biology, you have presumably done some ID regarding a thesis. Now if your ID related theories can't account for what IS, then there is no point in using them to derive conclusions about what ID can't explain.

I could devote the brainpower to trying to unravel that, but I keep thinking about Malcom Gladwell and the whole "Blink" thing, and just know I don't need to expend extra effort figuring out such a moronic jumble.