Step Aside, Creationists: Darwinists Figured Out How Bees Fly

With an air of triumph, LiveScience announced that Caltech scientists have won one against ID:

Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being [sic] rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science [sic] for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
    Now scientists have put this perplexing mystery to rest.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Exactly who has said that bee flight is inexplicable to science was not named.  Reporter Sara Goudarzi spoke of bee flight mechanisms as “more exotic than thought,” and that they “work like racing cars” – even that engineers might learn how to design hovering aircraft by observing them.  So how does this relate to a putdown of intelligent design?

… They are also pleased that a simple thing like bee flight can no longer be used as an example of science failing to explain a common phenomenon.
    Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years [sic] to promote the idea of a supreme being [sic] by discounting science [sic] because it can’t explain everything in nature.
    “People in the ID community [who?] have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” [Douglas] Altshuler [Caltech] said.  “We were finally able to put this one to rest.  We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

This story was picked up verbatim by Fox News and MSNBC, complete with the pretty picture of a bee hovering at a flower.  The research revolved around fairly mundane lab work, observing bees with high-speed cameras and robotic sensors, in different concentrations of oxygen and with varying payloads to analyze their aerodynamic principles.  They mainly discovered that the insects use principles different than those of airplanes and helicopters.  There was no mention of how these flight mechanisms evolved.  It was even subtitled, “Robotic wings mimic insects’ rapid beat and could inspire new designs.”  Presumably this would involve the work of intelligent engineers.
Update 01/13/2006:  The author was contacted about this paper and a copy was received for review.  The paper said nothing about creationism or intelligent design.  Apparently he made some off-the-cuff remark at the end of the interview about ID proponents claiming science could not explain how bees fly, and the reporter made that the title and theme of her article.

This article is very perplexing.  Who were they talking about?  Steve Meyer, did you ever say that?  Paul Nelson?  William Dembski?  Did you ever define intelligent design that way, as an argument from ignorance?  Phillip Johnson?  Jonathan Wells?  Michael Behe?  President Bush?  Pope Benedict?  Any of you creationists ever say that science could never understand how bees fly?  Duane Gish?  Henry Morris?  Isaac Newton?
    We don’t get it.  We have no idea what these guys are talking about.  Everyone in the ID community we know respects and loves observational, testable, repeatable science.  No problem.  What we would really like to hear, dear LieScience reporter, is how these racing-car hovering flight mechanisms that are the envy of engineers originated.
    So here goes Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: “Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.”  If LieScience doesn’t understand how they won this award, they need to study up on Straw Man in the Baloney Detector.