Daily Archives: 03/12/2011

A refutation of William Paley’s design argument (Garvey, J.C. Kipling, J.R. et al 2011) William Paley, the 19th century Intelligent Design Creationist, tried to put the scientific clock back 500 years to the time when Francis Bacon was burned at the stake for denying that the world was flat, by using the example of a self-replicating watch found during a walk on the heath. His “argument” (which was never peer-reviewed in the proper way) has been rightly dismissed many times on the basis that a watch is quite different from the biological systems known to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection. But in these days when Fundamentalist attempts … Continue reading →