Over at Uncommon Descent they are taking advantage of the brouhaha over the New York Post’s ‘gunned-down chimp’ cartoon (which many have taken as a racist slur against President Obama) to take their own pot-shots at evolution and in the process they have served up another example of the two faces of intelligent design.

This particular snark (“Is this Darwin’s legacy?”) is brought to us by UK weather-guy/meteorologist Andrew Sibley:

Where does the idea that human beings are related to apes come from? It comes straight from Darwinism. There is some irony that the left loves both Darwin and Obama, but Darwinism leads to racism and fascism where the African is considered less evolved and closer to apes than the Caucasian. It is time for the left to address honestly the dark side of Darwinism.  [Emphasis mine]

Interestingly Sibley put a link at the bottom of the post to another blog to which he contributes and on that blog we find a similar post by Sibley with a similar title (“Darwin’s legacy?”) and based on the same cartoon ruckus. The difference is this version is on a more overtly Christian/creationist blog and so we get this change:

Where does the idea that human beings are related to apes, whether black or white, come from? It comes straight from Darwinism. On the other hand, the Genesis account, that is often ridiculed, gives a table of nations (in chapter 11) in which all people on the earth are asserted to be descended from Noah and his family, and before that back to Adam. In other words, the Bible speaks of the common ancestry of all humans, being created separately from the other animals, in God’s image. [Emphasis mine]

So here we see, just as was so clearly documented during the Dover, PN intelligent design trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover), that while intelligent design creationism proponents will often present a facade of being a somewhat secular critique of mainstream science (to avoid Constitutional stumbling blocks), at other times and circumstances they will reveal their sectarian, religiously motivated, core.

In the Uncommon Descent version (the ID version) Sibley simply smears “Darwinism” (evolutionary theory) with the time honored creationist libel that evolution is inherently racist, without any alternative explanation for the origin of our species, the variation within it, or the host of detailed anatomical, behavioral, biochemical and genetic similarities we have in common with the other apes (never mind the fossil intermediates). What we also do not find is any mention of Genesis, or Noah or humans being “created separately from the other animals”. No, that would expose the subterfuge that is intelligent design “theory”.

The candid version, the openly creationist version, is saved for the other site where Sibley feels he can let his creationist hair down. Sibley, by the way, is a central figure in the UK’s Creation Science Movement, self described as “…the oldest creationist movement in the world”.

It makes one wonder whether the true identity of ID proponent’s intelligent designer might not be Janus the Roman god with two faces.

This business also brings to mind what I and others have been saying for some time about ID creationism, that it is little more than all the same old creationist antievolutionist arguments minus all the more testable claims about a 6,000 year old Earth and a global flood. And with all that pesky Biblical stuff pushed off to one side their argument can basically be distilled down to the following:

‘Evolution sucks, therefore god did it‘.

To forestall the inevitable indignant objections, yes I know that many, if not most, of the leaders of the ID creationism movement are not young earth creationists, but many are (hi Paul) as is much of their constituency. It matters little; whether they are young earth creationists or some variation of old earth creationist, they are religiously motivated antievolutionists, i.e. creationists.

Oh, and to answer Mr. Sibley’s question, the idea that humans and other primates share a common ancestor comes from the evidence.