More on Adams/ID

Tim at Balloon-Juice has made a good point about the Scott Adams/ID kerfluffle:

Pharyngula compares Adams to Wally, which doesn’t sound right to me....

Have you ever gotten into it with the idiot savants behind six-sigma and hidden-planet conspiracy theories? I have. Don’t bother; there is no authority you can reference that they can’t find some obscure reason to doubt. These guys are often gifted engineers who’ve spent so long knowing practically everything about their particular specialty that it seems like a short leap to imagine that they know everything about everything. The same guys torment mathematicians and physicists tirelessly with inane theories of Everything.

Scott Adams was apparently a very good engineer and while I wouldn’t put him in the six sigma camp (which he has mocked), the same tendency lets him believe that he knows enough about evolution to stick it good to the people who spend their lives studying it.

The analogy Pharyngula made in his initial post on the subject, to a manager who screws up a project because he doesn't know what is going on, still holds, I think. However, it's worth remembering that bumbling fools in one area often know a lot about some other area.