December 2005 Archives

John West of the Discovery Institute has been critiquing Judge Jones’ decision in the Dover ID lawsuit over at the DI Media Complaints Division blog. I haven’t, for the most part, addressed these posts, since other Pandas’ Thumb regulars have more relevant expertise and have been doing a better job at it than I could. His latest post, however, is so far from the bounds of decency and civility that I can’t leave it be. One part in particular, mentioned in passing by PvM in another PT post, hits a new low. In a relatively short passage, West manages to combine a gratuitous personal attack with a view of both what it should mean to be a conservative and on what a lawyer should be proud of that is twisted beyond all recognition.

Read More (at The Questionable Authority):

The idea that evolution is best exemplified in silly or stupid adaptations is an idea with a rich history. Quoting from the late, great Stephen Jay Gould in the essay that provides this site’s namesake (PDF link):

Thus, the paradox, and the common theme of this trilogy of essays: Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design - nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never treat but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

Following in this tradition, professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Don Wise has written a little ditty (WMV video link) on “Incompetent Design.”

He’s interviewed in Seed Magazine, in an article called The Other ID.

BCH

There is an interesting Article on the winning attorneys of the Kitzmiller case, Eric Rothschild and Stephen Harvey.

Rothschild said what he was proudest of throughout this whole trial was his cross-examination of defense expert Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University and proponent of intelligent design.

Rothschild said he knew what he was talking about when he moved to the witness stand, and he owes that to the National Center for Science Education, which thoroughly explained intelligent design to the plaintiffs team.

I need the help from PandasThumb readers:

Anyone who has a reference to news media referring to Judge Jones as a “devout Christian” is encouraged to add them to the comment section. My Google searches so far have been without much success.

You may wonder why am I asking you your help in this matter?

The reason is that on the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News blog, West is arguing that the media is portraying Judge Jones “as a conservative Republican who is devoutly religious”. While I have various news reports in which Jones is described as a Bush Republican appointee to the court, I have failed to find any references to Judge Jones being a devout Christian. Other than a New York Times article, West provides little information as to which particular newsmedia he has in mind.

West’s true colors become apparant quickly however:

West Wrote:

The point here is to challenge the media’s effort to turn Judge Jones into something he’s not in order to defend a biased and sloppy ruling.

While West may believe, as the losing party, that Judge Jones’ ruling was biased and sloppy. I and others have in depth documented the various flaws in West’s claims. Given the well argued ruling, what else is one to do but to attack the character of the Judge.

On the Discovery Instute’s EvolutionNews blog site, West presents his 3^rd part: Dover in Review, pt. 3: Did Judge Jones accurately describe the content and early versions of the ID textbook Of Pandas and People?

Timothy Sandefur has already shown in depth how West erred in his understanding of the legal rules guiding Intervention so I will focus on a comment made by West and show it to be without much legal merrit by looking at the Judge’s ruling on FTE’s (Foundation for Thought and Ethics) motion to intervene:

West Wrote:

Before addressing the merits of Judge Jones’ assertions regarding Pandas, something needs to be said about the legal and ethical propriety of Judge Jones placing so much weight on this early textbook in his judicial opinion. Frankly, it is astounding that Judge Jones treats Pandas as central to his decision given that he refused to grant the book’s publisher, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, permission to intervene in the case in order to defend itself.

First, for the sake of the reader and of West, let’s first look at Judge Jones legal decision to deny the FTE to intervene. After all, understanding the legal rules is essential in understanding (the legal propriety of) Judge Jones’ ruling.

First of all in his March 10, 2005 Order, the Judge outlined the requirements for intervention:

The Judge points out that there are two types of interventions under federal rules:

Judge Jones Wrote:

As FTE submits, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provide for two types of intervention: intervention as of right and permissive intervention. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 24. We will discuss the two types of intervention in turn.

On EvolutionNews, John West attempts in 2^nd part of a multipart series (does anyone remember the multi-part series that was going to address the criticisms of Meyer’s Hopeless Monster paper?) to argue why the Judge in the Kitzmiller case was wrong. West still seems to misunderstand some of the relevant issues.

For an earlier article in which I discuss West’s similar flaws see Activist Judge or just poor reading skills and Sandefur’s Why Kitzmiller is Not An “Activist” Decision and Further Thoughts on West’s Attack on Judge Jones

Utah has a new anti-evolution bill submitted by Sen. Chris Buttars. I’ve put up a brief analysis of the bill at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Steve Story pointed out to me that I had failed to provide a reference to Alschuler, who is a distinguished criminal law expert at the university of Chicago

The Dover Intelligent Design Decision, Part II: Of Science and Religion

Albert Alschuler Wrote:

The Dover court is wrong, however, when it says that anything that “implicates” religion also “endorses” it.

Alschuler is talking about a part of the endorsement analysis presented by Judge Jones where Jones considers the letters and editorials introduced, as prima facia evidence of endorsement.

Judge Jones Wrote:

Accordingly, the letters and editorials are relevant to, and provide evidence of, the Dover community’s collective social judgment about the curriculum change because they demonstrate that “[r]egardless of the listener’s support for, or objection to,” the curriculum change, the community and hence the objective observer who personifies it, cannot help but see that the ID Policy implicates and thus endorses religion.

As the Judge argues, the letters and editorials provide substantial additional evidence that the community perceives the ID policy as endorsing a particular religious view.

Wired News has just announced the Sexiest geeks of 2005. Chris Mooney and Judge John Jones III made the top 10. Prof. Steve Steve attributes his loss to anti-panda discrimination due to the bad press surrounding Of Pandas and People, which he tells us emphatically he was not on the cover of. Steve Steve still plans to make the cover of the 2006 Studmuffins of Science calendar.

Tom Bethell, ignoramus extraordinaire, has had a problem with evolution for thirty years now. But in all that time, it seems he hasn’t bothered to learn much about it. In his latest screed “>screed in the Washington Times, Bethell resorts to the usual creationist tactics: lies, distortions, omissions, and misrepresentations.

Continue reading at Recursivity, and leave comments there.

You know the Intelligent Design Movement is in a bad way when Senator Rick Santorum is running away from it like Brave Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and when – put down your drinks – Rush Limbaugh says that ID proponents are being disingenuous.

Dembski commented on a discussion on the BBC between himself and Ken Miller and attempts to address two issues raised by Ken Miller. As I shall show, in both cases Dembski fails.

Dembski Wrote:

(1) The main weakness of evolution is that it is science (yes, Miller actually did say this and went on so long about it that the BBC host could not give me my closing comment as he had intended to) and (2) ID’s main fault is that it proceeds by negative argumentation.

This is going to be interesting. Dembski, who is a philosopher, mathematician and theologian may not be too familiar with the scientific evidence for evolution. As far as how he is going to argue against (2) is beyond me. It’s self evident that ID’s approach is by negative argumentation. In fact when Dembski was asked for details for Intelligent Design he responded

Dembski Wrote:

“You’re asking me to play a game: ‘Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.’ ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories.”

In a Press Release at Reasons to Believe (RTB) Dr Ross and Dr Rana comment on the recent ruling against Intelligent Design. RTB has never be a proponent of Intelligent Design, recognizing it for what it really is.

Creation Scientists Applaud PA Judge’s Ruling Against ‘Intelligent Design’-Dressing Up ID Is No Substitute for Real Science

The recent efforts to map various genetic characteristics of humans are beginning to yield insights into what makes us Homo sapiens at the most basic levels. John Hawks draws attention to a paper published this week in PNAS. The paper uses statistical analysis of the distributions of linkage disequilibria in single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to detect genes under recent selection pressure, and finds that at least 10% of human genes have been under such selection. (The percentage is an under-estimate because the coverage of SNPs is skewed to higher frequencies.) Many genes under recent selection cluster into four main groupings: “host-pathogen interactions, reproduction, protein metabolism, and neuronal function”. That last, of course, is real interesting! They offer some tentative explanations for the groupings:

We outline several predominant biological themes among genes detected with this strategy and suggest that selection for alleles in these categories accompanied the major “out of Africa” population expansion of humankind and/or the radical shift from hunter–gatherer to agricultural societies .

See Hawks’ blog entry for a more discussion and the paper itself, which is free online.

RBH

On evolutionnews Rob Crowther quotes “a legal scholar” who is offering an interesting legal analysis of the Ohio situation.

Crowther informs us the scholar is Gonzaga University law professor David DeWolf.

Crowther hardly does DeWolf justice here. In addition to being a law professor, DeWolf was also the lead counsel for the Discovery Institute’s Amicus Curiae brief in the Kitzmiller case. In addition, DeWolf is one of the authors of “Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Curriculum”.

Neither the Amicus Brief nor the “Teaching the controversy” fared to well in the Kitzmiller decision. In fact, the Amicus Brief may very well have been the reason why the Judge decided to rule that intelligent design is not science.

Amazingly, Witt continues his fallacious arguments and further undermines the Discovery Institute’s official position as submitted to the Court in its Amicus Brief

What is the creature on the left? If you said, “cockroach”, give yourself a lump of coal. But if you said, “termite”, give yourself a PEZ dispenser with your favorite cartoon character. It is in fact a specimen of Mastotermes darwiniensis, a large and primitive termite that lives in Australia (they get all the cool critters). It looks like a roach because termites evolved from roaches, and this particular genus contains primitive members that still resemble their roach cousins in many respects. On the flip-side, roaches of the wood-eating genus Cryptocercus have many termite-like features, including obligate gut flora and parental care of nymphs. The termites that we’re familiar with – the little white things that eat houses – are simply the nymph stage of an otherwise roach-like insect, and Cryptocercus nymphs look an awful lot like termites themselves.

A biologist going by the name of “Mr. Darwin” has a great post up about the evolution of termites from roaches, and the various lines of morphological, molecular, and fossil evidence we have. And there is a cool picture of cute little Cryptocercus nymphs feeding from their mommy’s anal secretions. Go check it out.

On Seattle based Discovery Institute’s EvolutionNews (sic) Blog, Jonathan Witt continues the confusion by not only apparantly distancing himself from the Discovery Instute’s Amicus Brief filed in the Kitzmiller case but also by showing his unfamiliarity with the actual ruling by Judge Jones:

Witt Wrote:

To get around the substantive differences between intelligent design and biblical creationism, Judge Jones had to fixate on motive (both real and imagined); he had to assume that if he can identify one motive, he has magically ruled out the possibility of another motive playing a crucial role (in this case, the desire of ID scientists to follow the evidence wherever leads, even if it means upsetting a few Darwinists); and he had to mischaracterize ID as a religion-based theory when instead it’s a theory based on scientific evidence that, like Darwinism, has larger metaphysical implications.

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber points to a new Steven Fuller article in the Times Higher Education Supplement (where there’s also a paper by Brighouse himself). Although Fuller’s remarks are intended to be only peripherally about Intelligent Design, they contain a number of odd statements that suggest the author’s strange views of both science and ID. (For example, according to Fuller, Newton’s life “teaches that the Bible can provide a sure path to great science.” He leaves unexamined other possible lessons that could be drawn, including the obvious ones that genius often transcends the limitations of its time, or that deistic motivations are irrelevant in the presence of empirical validation.)

Fuller makes a big deal about ID’s use of analogies in place of evidence, suggesting that this represents some kind of conceptual breakthrough:

Casey Luskin has announced that (in effect) the January 3 debate on the evidence for intelligent design, which Bill Dembski previously accepted, is off. Luskin wrote

Discovery and its fellows are delighted to debate Dr. Princehouse and/or Kenneth Miller or whomever and want only to do so in a neutral forum with reasonable and MUTUAL agreements on topic, location, timing, and the other modalities associated with civilized debate. One side does not simply announce a place, and a time a few weeks’ hence, and demand that the opponent show up. Otherwise it looks like a publicity stunt.

As of this writing, however, Dembski has not notified Princehouse of his withdrawal, so we don’t know if he’ll be there or not.

Nevertheless, the show will go on. The Department of Biology at Case Western Reserve University will sponsor Ken Miller’s appearance at Strosacker Hall on January 3 at 7:00 p.m. If Dembski doesn’t appear, he doesn’t appear, but we’ll all be there and we’ll be sorry he missed the party.

Note that the event will be webcast: details to follow.

RBH

“ID is rapidly going international and crossing metaphysical and theological boundaries,” Dembski wrote. “The important thing is ID’s intellectual vitality.”

Source: Link

Seems that Bill understands that ID never really was science…

Or in the words of DeForrest Kelley (Dr McCoy)

[PvM:You may have to cut and paste the link since the site does not allow direct linking.]

1. He’s Dead Jim 2. He’s Dead Jim 3. He’s Dead Jim 4. He’s Dead Jim

On the Discovery Institute’s blog, West revisits the statement by Judge Jones and reaches some poorly argued conclusions:

West Wrote:

Take the following remarkable passage from his opinion:

the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us. [p. 63] (emphasis added)

My favorite essay arguing against intelligent design isn’t one of Gould’s, or Dawkins’, or Sagan’s. Rather, it’s one that has portions I disagree with, but the eloquent prose simply can’t be beat:

“The analogy which you attempt to establish between the contrivances of human art, and the various existences of the Universe, is inadmissible. We attribute these effects to human intelligence, because we know beforehand that human intelligence is capable of producing them. Take away this knowledge, and the grounds of our reasoning will be destroyed. Our entire ignorance, therefore, of the Divine Nature leaves this analogy defective in its most essential point of comparison.

You assert that the construction of the animal machine, the fitness of certain animals to certain situations, the connexion between the organs of perception and that which is perceived; the relation between every thing which exists, and that which tends to preserve it in its existence, imply design. It is manifest that if the eye could not see, nor the stomach digest, the human frame could not preserve its present mode of existence. It is equally certain, however, that the elements of its composition, if they did not exist in one form, must exist in another; and that the combinations which they would form, must so long as they endured, derive support for their peculiar mode of being from their fitness to the circumstances of their situation.”

These come from an 1814 essay by Percy Bysse Shelley, analyzing the claims in William Paley’s Natural Theology, a text which explores arguments very similar to those used by modern-day ID advocates. So similar, in fact, that although some of the minor details have changed, Shelley’s refutation of it can be easily used today.

As this essay demonstrates, and as recently highlighted in this post, it behooves us to know our history—and none know this better than those who teach the subject. University of Iowa history professor Douglas Baynton wrote an interesting letter to the Washington Post this past Saturday, offering a unique perspective on the “controversy” regarding Intelligent Design by using 19^th century geography texts to speculate about how a course using intelligent design might look.

(Continued at Aetiology)

[Note: I’d planned to post this Tuesday, but didn’t want it to get lost in all the Dover issues. I think, given the decision and the role the history of the ID movement played in that, it’s even more relevant today that this history is considered.–T]

Barbara Forrest, the official chronicler of the history of the ID movement and one of the stars of the Kitzmiller decision, will be talking with Ira Flatow today on NPR’s “Science Friday”.

The show is broadcast live at 2 pm EST. Listen in then or later via podcast.

(Today is also the annual Birds and Birding show on Science Friday. What a bonus!)

Update: Commenter Michael Hopkins provides the link.

Someone sent me this in email. Says it all, doesn’t it? If anyone has seen the original posted on a newspaper website or something, please post the link.

Some kind of trophy for the most absurd reaction to the Kitzmiller decision must go to Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics And Religious Liberty Commission. In this article in the Washington Post, Land is quoted as saying:

“This decision is a poster child for a half-century secularist reign of terror that’s coming to a rapid end with Justice Roberts and soon-to-be Justice Alito,” said Richard Land, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and is a political ally of White House adviser Karl Rove. “This was an extremely injudicious judge who went way, way beyond his boundaries–if he had any eyes on advancing up the judicial ladder, he just sawed off the bottom rung.”

It seems that Dembski has decided to ‘decisively’ move the goalposts of ID further out and although in earlier writings he did mention the possibility of ‘front loading’, he also considered such possibilities to be unlikely and ‘deistic’ in nature.

Now he may have clarified his position:

Dembski Wrote:

Let’s cut to the chase: Is the designer responsible for biological complexity God? Even as a very traditional Christian and an ardent proponent of ID, I would say NOT NECESSARILY. To ask who or what is the designer of a particular object is to ask for the immediate intelligent agent responsible for its design. The point is that God is able to work through derived or surrogate intelligences, which can be anything from angels to organizing principles embedded in nature.

For instance, just because I hold to both Christian theism and ID doesn’t mean that God directly designed and implemented the bacterial flagellum by specifically toggling its components. It could well have happened by a process of natural genetic engineering of the sort envisioned by James Shapiro. The design would be no less real, but God’s role in the design would be distant, not proximal.

Philosophers have long distinguished between primary and secondary causes. The problem is that under the pall of methodological naturalism, secondary causes have been identified with purely materialistic processes. But it’s perfectly legitimate for secondary causes to include teleological processes. I develop all this at length in THE DESIGN REVOLUTION.

Anything from angels to organizing principles, I clearly see the scientific value of ID here. And the logical conclusion from Dembski’s admissions about front-loading is that natural explanations would be able to explain the origin of such features as the bacterial flagellum. Thus, lacking any further evidence, science would be unable to reach a conclusion of ‘intelligent design’ as the evidence would be hidden beyond our observations. In other words, Intelligent Design has moved itself further into the realm of scientific vacuity.

Not bad for a days work though. Boy do I wish Dembski had testified at the Dover trial.

I find it fascinating that Dembski on the one hand seems to be arguing that complex specified information requires a supernatural origin while on the other hand arguing that CSI can in fact be explained by natural law alone. Whether or not a supernatural designer was responsible for the front loading is a question science cannot answer. Which is exactly why Intelligent Design makes for poor science and good apologetics. As such, I start to understand more and more why Dembski has returned to apologetics.

Given the recent scientific progress, it may not come as a surprise to see ID proponents retreat to front-loading.

With the recent resounding defeat of Intelligent Design in Dover, ID supporters may actually have to try and do some science to support their claims. On the basis of past efforts, the prospect does not look good for them. Richard von Sternberg, the Intelligent Design-friendly editor who was responsible for publishing Meyer’s woeful review paper, has recently had a paper published with anti-Darwinian James Shapiro (who has said he is not an ID supporter).

Shapiro JA, von Sternberg R. Why repetitive DNA is essential to genome function. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2005 May;80(2):227-50.

In this they try to address the bete noir of creationists, both young earth and intelligent design varieties, “Junk” DNA. The fact that the vast majority of the genome is probably parasitic junk is hard to reconcile with an intelligent designer, so a lot of effort is expended to show that all that DNA must be doing something essential. Sternberg and Shapiro try to show that one major class of non-coding DNA, highly repetitive DNA, is essential for genome function. However, all they end up demonstrating is shoddy scholarship.

Back in January I seem to remember the Thomas More Law Center declaring “A Revolution in Evolution Is Underway.” But today, according to the Associated Press, “Santorum says will break ties to law firm that represented school district on intelligent design.” Now, Santorum was on the TMLC board, and encouraged the Dover Area School Board early on – see for example his January 23, 2005, op-ed in the Allentown [PA] Morning Call, entitled “A Balanced Approach to Teaching Evolution,” (helpfully now hosted on the Discovery Institute website) wherein Santorum wrote, “The Dover Area School District has taken a step in the right direction by attempting to teach the controversy of evolution.”

But, I guess that’s what poor Thomas More gets for repeatedly citing Santorum and his attempted amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act – Santorum’s name came up 36 times in the trial transcripts, in fact.

Science has just named its top breakthrough for 2005. You get one guess after this hint: it starts with “E.” That’s right, it’s evolution, and it is based on all of the remarkable advances in evolution in 2005, such as the comparison of the human and chimpanzee genomes, which just happens to have been featured in the Kitzmiller trial. I’m still hoping Science reprints a chunk of Jones’s opinion, like they printed the McLean opinion in 1982.

Update: The full issue is now online. Holy moly, Jawless Fish Have Form of Adaptive Immunity. That’s big news if you’re into that kind of thing.

Not long ago, as previously noted on the Thumb, Cal Thomas made noises in USA Today wondering whether “Darwinists” would show up for a debate on the merits of ID as a scientific enterprise.

That canard was rebutted by Patricia Princehouse of Case Western Reserve University and Ohio Citizens for Science, who said in a letter to USA Today:

The question is, will the designists show? Calls go out every day to present scientific data at scientific conferences. The designists are always busy that decade. Meanwhile, the scientific data supporting evolution continue to pour in on a daily basis and produce spinoff applications that create new medicine, more productive crops, cleaner water and better living for billions of people worldwide.

The Darwinists show up to work every day in thousands of labs around the globe. Mr. Thomas and Mr. Beckel, your guys are the ones who don’t show.

January. Cleveland. The “science” of ID. Put up or shut up.

In response, some of the expectable wingnuts came out of the woodwork, but finally Bill Dembski accepted the challenge to “put up or shut up”. While some of the formal details are not yet agreed on, Dembski has agreed to the time, date and venue:

Strosacker Hall on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, 7-9 pm January 3, with Ken Miller to represent the “Darwinist” position. We plan to webcast the event: details will follow as we have them. Miller will be there regardless of details.

We look forward to seeing Dembski’s affirmative evidence for the intelligent design conjecture. (I myself am hoping to see some validation data, reliability assessments, and calibration runs on Dembski’s design detection methodology, “specified complexity”. Anecdotes about political operatives and science fiction movies are a pretty thin empirical base for a putatively paradigm-changing methodology.)

RBH

I’ve got about 30 minutes to kill, so I might as well give some general thoughts on the IDists’ reactions to the cataclysmic Dover decision.

Well, this is an interesting feeling. I am sitting in Starbucks, in downtown San Francisco, slurping a Frappucino, blogging on my laptop, across the street from the KQED studio (KQED is the San Francisco public radio station that I listen to every day), waiting to go on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny. Could you get any more stereotypically-NPR-junkie-ish than this? I mean, apart from being in Minnesota at a Garrison Keillor event?

The show is obviously on Judge Jones’s Intelligent Decision on Intelligent Design. KQED’s audio is streamed on the web, so catch the show if you can. Apparently Casey Luskin will also be on. I imagine he has a few issues with the decision…

Whenever NPR needs a reliably ignorant voice from the Religious Right, they turn to their man at the Heritage Foundation, Joe Loconte. His most recent contribution, Intelligent Design Has a Place in the Classroom, is typical.

Contains No Original Ideas: Loconte’s main argument just echoes the testimony of Michael Behe at Dover, saying that intelligent design today is just like the Big Bang 70 years ago: originally resisted by scientists because of its religious implications, then ultimately accepted because of the evidence…

Read more at Recursivity, and leave comments there.

Last summer I travel to Fairbanks, Alaska to attend the Evolution 2005 conference at the University of Alaska. During my travels, I visited North Pole and stopped by Santa Claus’s house. Santa was there that day and eager to hear my Christmas list.

I can’t say exactly what all I asked for because otherwise it won’t come true. However, the jolly old man came through for me earlier this week. Yes, Dover, there is a Santa Claus.

On my way out I feed Donner, who was looking a little warm in the surprisingly hot Alaska afternoon.

I have many more pictures from my Alaska trip and will post the rest of them when I catch another break.

William Dembski, somewhat startled by the Dover ruling is looking for a positive note and seems to have found one which I can share:

This galvanizes the Christian community,” said William Dembski, a leading proponent of the theory and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think-tank that promotes intelligent design research. “People I’m talking to say we’re going to be raising a whole lot more funds now.”

Nothing would impress me more if these increased contributions could finally lead to a scientifically relevant contribution of Intelligent Design.

Although, as the Beatles said it so well with their song “[Money] can’t buy me love”, the same may very well apply to scientific relevance. In the same article, Zylstra provides us with a comment which may help us understand Dembski’s return to apologetics

Zylstra Wrote:

“The strength of intelligent design is as an apologetic - that God is the creator, but not a scientific explanation.”

This gem is too precious to be lost during the reaction to the Dover Decision.

Do you know how the Discovery Institute likes to say the Designer might not be God, but perhaps a Space Alien or Time Traveller?

Here’s a typical instance from Phillip Johnson:

“It certainly could be God, a supernatural creature, but in principle it could be space aliens of high intelligence who did the designing,” he says.

Well, look out, Phil - here comes Discovery’s Jonathan Witt, with what can only be described as a Freudian Slip.

The purpose of this thread is collecting the many remarkable/amazing/unbelievable quotes and reactions to Judge Jones’s decision yesterday in Kitzmiller v. Dover.

I’ll start with a tidbit indicating that there might even be some trouble brewing at the Discovery Institute, from nothing less than a Discovery Institute board member, Mike Vaska:

One question I received from a reporter yesterday asked, essentially, if the fight against intelligent design is over with yesterday’s decision. MSNBC has an article along a similar theme today, and those interviewed in the article say the same thing I did: it ain’t over by a long shot. (PZ has some similar sobering thoughts on the topic). While I do think the decision handed down yesterday will make it more difficult for anyone contemplating introducing ID into the classroom, as suggested in the MSNBC article, all that means is that the focus will have to shift a bit. I suspect we’ll see more of “teach the controversy” and less push to teach intelligent design–something the Discovery Institute has already moved to, anyway.

Additionally, while ID has been the major thorn in the side of pro-science groups, it’s obviously not the only bad science out there: just the best-funded. As discussed a few days ago, we still have huge challenges to deal with regarding science education in this country–and ID is but one facet of that. We still have groups that regularly spew misinformation about HIV/AIDS, vaccination, global warming, etc.–and certainly, the evolution deniers won’t be going away. Answers in Genesis is working on their “creation museum”, the Discovery Institute is still crying about the decision, and certainly ID proponents around the country are going to regroup and work on a revised strategy. This isn’t something that’s going to go away, and it’s not time to rest on our laurels.

My central passion is working on teaching good science, and getting both students and the general public