FROM OUTER SPACE TO SALIVARY GLANDS, is there any topic beyond the ken of Dr. Michael Egnor, prolific blogger for the Discovery Institute? A scant 24 hours after rehashing the hoary ‘Argument from Incredulity’ in a blog piece on SETI research, he has developed a novel argument in his offering for today, Spit-Brain Research (18 September).

Dr. Egnor’s remarkable fugue is his response to some recent research published by UCSC, Extra gene copies were enough to make early humans’ mouths water (9 September). The paper notes findings that

Humans have many more copies of this [salivary amylase] gene than any of their ape relatives, the study found, and they use the copies to flood their mouths with amylase, an enzyme that digests starch. The finding bolsters the idea that starch was a crucial addition to the diet of early humans, and that natural selection favored individuals who could make more starch-digesting protein.

The paper goes on to offer a hypothesis (my emphasis below):

Other primates eat mainly ripe fruits containing very little starch. A new ability to supplement the diet with calorie-rich starches could have fed our large brains and opened up new food supplies that fueled our unrivaled colonization of the planet, Dominy said.

Dr. Egnor doesn’t quibble with the new data; he loftily concedes, “The spit-brain paper no doubt contributes to the literature on salivary amylase.” His objection is entirely to the hypothesis that an enhanced ability to digest starch by early hominids may have contributed to the evolution of our more complex—and hence, more energy–hungry–brains.

And the hypothesis may indeed prove to be wrong–if counter data is found, or a conflicting hypothesis developed which better explains the existing data. But Dr. Egnor offers neither fresh data nor any indication of how his preferred hypothesis—Intelligent Design—explains any of the existing data, but instead presents a singular approach we at DC have dubbed the ‘Argument from Disgust’, or the “Eewww, biology is icky and yucky” riposte, as follows:

Much of recent evolutionary self-satire involves the origin of the human brain. How did an organ of such staggering complexity and biological novelty arise? For evolutionary biologists, no speculation (except design) is too outlandish. Evidence: a paper in Nature Genetics offers a new theory to account for the human brain: spit.

And that’s it.

The sum total of Dr. Egnor’s objection comes to nothing more than: How could “an organ of such staggering complexity and biological novelty” possibly have any dependence on messy old biological secretions?

Next thing you know, those godless Darwinists will be claiming that Storks don’t deliver babies to cabbage patches, but that somehow these sweet little critters arise from some unspeakably messy process like “natural conception”. And what a manifestly absurd and distasteful a notion that is!

For the aficionado of Discovery Institute blogs–and I must confess, they do fill the entertainment gap which arose when Muhammed Saheed al-Sahaaf, the celebrated Iraqi “Information Minister”, vanished from our screens–it’s not too hard to read the subtext here. The fear is palpable that science—or “Darwinism”, as the DI prefers to style it—somehow diminishes human uniqueness, somehow detracts from the lofty and most noble work of God—oops, of the ‘Intelligent Designer.’

But this is a singular and, if I may suggest, a rather weak and anemic concept of the Creator. Plenty of scientists find no conflict between deep faith and rigorous science. A particularly topical example of one such would be Professor Richard Colling at Olivet Nazarene University, though he is not likely to appear in a Discovery Institute blog as he doesn’t fit their paradigm of persecution by “Darwinists”; Professor Colling has instead run afoul of Biblical literalists.

To the ‘Argument from Incredulity’, Charles Darwin addressed these remarks (‘Origins of Species’, Chapter 6):

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?

But to Dr. Egnor’s novel ‘Argument from Disgust’, one can scarcely do better than paraphrase his own words and note that it “can’t be satirized. It can only be described.”