During the summer between my sixth- and seventh-grade education in public school, I became enamored with Greek mythology, and read the great classic, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. When I entered seventh grade, on the first day of school, our English teacher asked us what books we had read over the summer. I responded with Edith Hamilton’s classic.
The Hydra was a hideous serpent-like creature with nine heads who terrorized the population, and its blood was toxic. The worst thing of all was that, as Hercules quickly discovered, once you bashed in or chopped off one the heads, two more instantly grew in its place! Fortunately, Hercules’ trusty charioteer and companion came with a torch and cauterized the Hydra’s severed head stumps so that no more heads would propagate.
This is a perfect analogy for the battle those of us in the ID community are facing. We point out the mathematical, probabilistic, evidential, and other transparent problems with Darwinian orthodoxy, and each time the Darwinian Hydra grows two more heads. For example, we point out the problem of irreducible complexity, and the Darwinists come back with scaffolding and exaptation or cooption, both completely speculative and unsupported by any evidence or even level-headed reasoning.
Eventually, however, I’m confident that the Darwinian Hydra’s severed head stumps will be cauterized, by the advancement of legitimate science unfettered by Darwinian irrationality.