God the Plagiarist

One of the difficulties of being strapped for connectivity is that there’s lots I’ve been meaning to say but have been too lazy to say without wireless. And then along comes a post that makes me think, at first blush, that it has been said. Glen Whitman over at Agoraphilia said “Pointing out flaws in creationism is like shooting fish in a barrel,” and went on to discuss why God recycles. He uses the fact that chimps and humans share 99% of their DNA sequence to argue that God, though omnipotent, is lazy. Not the world’s most powerful argument, as I think he would agree, but fun nevertheless.

I wanted to ask another question, one that I remember asking last time the oh-so-unsophisticated-compared-to-us-intelligent-designers Duane Gish and his merry band of polyester-brained friends rattled my cage. Why is God a plagiarist?

As I recall, one of the legal tests for plagiarism, especially in heavily fact-based works, is that deliberate errors were copied too. That’s why, apocryphally, copyrighted maps contain non-existent or egregiously misplaced towns; if another map contains the same errors, it is plagiarised. Encyclopedias too.

Anyway, it is not the similarity of the genetic code that bothers me, but the widespread presence of the genetic errors often called pseudogenes. These are relics of past copying mistakes, now relieved of any direct function. While others may wonder about the reason pseudogenes continue to exist, I take them as evidence that God is a plagiarist.

There may be only so many ways to code two reasonably similar apes, but not cleaning up at least one of them to remove the mistakes from your last botch job smacks of more than idleness.

Not that I really care.

And in similar vein, the Pastafarians remind me of another argument from way back when. Why do the Creationists (and the IDiots) believe that only one Creator, or Intelligent Designer, was at work? If creation is a matter of faith, why only one true faith? If, as a Kalahari Bushman, I fancy that one day a female preying mantis shat the world, perfectly formed, what is wrong with that?