In responding to a recent New York Times article (already discussed in detail here and here), the Discovery Institute’s John West once again points to the Discovery Institute’s list of “peer-reviewed and peer-edited publications” as evidence that the Discovery Institute really does do science.
That document, like so much that the Discovery Institute puts out, does not paint an accurate picture of what is actually going on. The list has been available in one form or another for quite a while now, and individual entries on the list have been critiqued in a number of locations. I’m going to address the list as a whole here. I will briefly comment on some of the individual entries in the process, but I am not going to take the time to address all of them. For the most part, I will assume, FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT ONLY, that the articles are more or less what they claim to be.
The total absense of peer-reviewed ID literature has been pointed out several times before [e.g., Zimmer’s post]. One important literature search not yet shown is for Dembski’s concepts of “complex specified information”, the “law of conservation of information”, and “specified complexity”.
The answer from IEEE Xplore: zero articles.
By the way, if there really were a “law of conservation of information”, where do the daily weather reports come from?
Previously I’d searched the IEEE ITSOC website. Nothing there either. As far as I can tell, the publications of the primary group of information theory researchers contain no mention whatsoever of Dembski or any related thing. He’s irrelevant to Information Theory.
“law of conservation of information”, Also known as the “news” in todays paper is tomorrows garbage wrapper.
Hey, I can play this game too. :-)
Searching Web of Science for (as topic, unless specified)… “complex specified information”: Pennock RT Creationism and intelligent design ANNUAL REVIEW OF GENOMICS AND HUMAN GENETICS 4: 143-163 2003
“law of conservation of information”: VANDENBLEEK CM, SCHOUTEN JC CAN DETERMINISTIC CHAOS CREATE ORDER IN FLUIDIZED-BED SCALE-UP CHEMICAL ENGINEERING SCIENCE 48 (13): 2367-2373 JUL 1993
“specified complexity”: Charlesworth B No free lunch: Why specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence NATURE 418 (6894): 129-129 JUL 11 2002 [This is a book review, I’ll let you puzzle over what it’s reviewing]
KAZAKOV IE, MALCHIKOV SV APPROXIMATE DESIGN OF PUGACHEV FILTERS OF SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY AUTOMATION AND REMOTE CONTROL 42 (12): 1618-1624 1981
“dembski information theory” (Demski as author):
“dembski wa” (as author):
Berlinski D, Gross PR, Perakh M, et al. Darwinism versus intelligent design COMMENTARY 115 (3): 9+ MAR 2003
Milner R, Maestro V, Behe MJ, et al. Intelligent design? NATURAL HISTORY 111 (3): 73-80 APR 2002
Dembski WA, Meyer SC Fruitful interchange or polite chitchat? The dialogue between science and theology ZYGON 33 (3): 415-430 SEP 1998
Dembski WA Schleiermacher’s metaphysical critique of miracles SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY 49 (4): 443-465 1996
DEMBSKI WA RANDOMNESS BY DESIGN NOUS 25 (1): 75-106 MAR 1991
So, we either have works about IDC, or something nothing to do with evolution. I don’t even want to look at the abstract of the Pugachev filters paper: the title is scary enough for me.
Bob
It seems to me that this business of counting the number of peer reviewed publications as a measure of the significance of one’s scientific “output” is a bit silly. What if one leads the life of a hermit and refuses to publish any results of one’s research, such as was the case with for example Henry Cavendish, the first person to find the value of G, are we to claim that such work is inherently not science? That just seems to be a bit ridiculous.
True. And Darwin didn’t publish for many years until pushed by up and comers developing similar ideas. Still, these are examples of individuals. We’re talking about a large, multi-million dollar “institute” here. And they aren’t hermits either. They publish profusely. They just choose not to do so in any scientifically recongnized venue. Perhaps the world would be a better place if the DI were hermits…
Just curious, Ms. Clouser: What is your profession?
Carol I see your back How did you go with Harold Bloom’s theory the Old Testament was written by Women and the Hebrew Gnostics. ……Must have been a bad marriage. Now about that book your getting some FREE promotion here for. Do me a favor and just don’t mention it.
Now back to ‘Count’ Dembski, his dream of unreason and the Mad “Disinformation Theory on Creationism” on how to Factualize GOD.
1. By numbers -failed 2. Postmodernist mumbojumbo- failed 3. By Ancient Greek philosophy - failed 4. Conning Salvador T. Cordova to shout down facts - Success 5. Salvador T. Cordova shouting down facts - failed 6. Conning The Great Theistic Religions - failed 7. Conning Experts in his field - failed 8. Publishing the proof of GOD - failed 9. Selling a bunch of Creationist books - success 11. Publishing Religious and political diatribes- success 12. Pointing out to the whole world an interesting result of their fallacy; that not all people who claim to be Christians actually believe in Christianity.- success 13. Pointing out to the whole word that “Mad Scientists” who claim they see god in material things, may not actually beleive in God at all. 14. Next move.… Impersonating “Mad King George”
Now since you don’t actually get this at all Carol. Have a look at something you may just get, the Damage that you and your truly beligerant haters of TRUTH are doing.
Kung Fu Monkey .
Man, poor Carol Clouser. That’s what I’d call “taking it in the poop chute.”
How about Isaac Newton? His delay in the publication of the Principia led to a conflict of priority with Leibniz over the discovery of the calculus. But his ideas, of course, were solid.
In contrast, William Dembski—called the “Isaac Newton of information theory” by his acolytes—has not published any peer-reviewed technical papers on ID because his ideas are frankly crackpot.
Really, if there were a “law of conservation of information,” where do the daily weather reports come from?
What serious professional journal would publish such transparent nonsense as this? The truth is that the ID movement invokes information theory because it is a legitimate mathematical subject that impresses many people, while at the same time is understood by very few. Not only are Dembski’s arguments irrelevant to information theory, IT invalidates many ID arguments, especially Dembski’s.
As I understand it, Carol’s profession is that of PR and editor/publisher for a Landa person who is a fundamentalist Bible reader. Carol swears this guy has the answer to any and all problems between reality and the Bible, and it seems Landa has demonstrated that the Bible *is* a completely literally true account of history of the universe. The kind of mental acrobatics needed for this to be true, however, are so over the top everyone else lacks to see it this way (like “the days mean ages, but they aren’t consecutive but overlap and, even though fish predate fishes by untold millions of years, they belong in the same day-age”). I’ve never heard Landa’s explanation for the flood, or the flat earth, or the cud-chewing rabbits, but I’m sure they would be equally fascinating.
Carol will probably say her profession is not actually PR - so I will admit here it might just be her hobby.
Hope that helps,
Grey Wolf, doing this from memory so might be very wrong
Let me explain why I asked about your profession, Ms. Clouser:
I would never question what constitutes a measure of “professional activity” in an profession that I am not a member of. If you are a scientist, I am surprised you would not recognize the importance of scientific publication.
When I was younger, (and had an healthy back and pelvis) I used to ride and train horses. My instructor used to tell me: You can say that you school your mount to X level, but it doesn’t mean diddly-squat until a registered judge scores you at that level. Scientific work done in secret or in isolation doesn’t mean diddly-squat until it has passed muster in the scientific community. Any scientist or science teacher that doesn’t know this should not be in the profession.
But, as Grey Wolf remembers, you are not a scientist. Your ignorance is excused, but your excusing Dembski and his ilk from this requirement is out of line.
I understand that the DI’s count is grossly inflated. Now, let’s leave out the books, the “peer-edited” stuff, the duplication, the philosophical and other nonscientific items, etc. As has been pointed out, Darwin and Newton really needed only a single, non-peer-reviewed publication to stake their considerable claims.
So when boiled down to the kernel of valid items, do we find ANY actual science in support of ID? I should think one single valid scientific study would be all they’d need. Do they have that many?
Re: counting papers.
Silly or not, this is a commonly used measure of productivity in the modern world of science. Tenure committees use it, granting agencies use it, and - more to the point in this case - the Disco Institute itself regards it as important enough to inflate their pathetic numbers by double-counting and fudging definitions.
I believe the motivation is to puff up their bogus “theory” in the eyes of folks who don’t know better. But with these guys, they may just be lying to keep in practice.
As has been pointed out, Darwin and Newton really needed only a single, non-peer-reviewed publication to stake their considerable claims.
As I understand it, science in the 21st century operates much faster. In addition, work by people like Darwin and Newton were discussed in correspondence between scientists of the day (I remember a tale of Priestly writing a letter to Benjamin Franklin after his discovery of “de-phlogisticated air”, later to be named oxygen) The amount of scientific work being done today is exponentially larger, and in specialized areas. It takes specialists in those areas who are familiar with the existing work to pass judgement on new findings. Gentleman-scientists who are generalists are a thing of the distant past.
Add to that the phenomenon of public education and the speed at which information can be communicated. It’s just not a valid comparison. Darwin’s and Newton’s base ideas have stood the test of time and massive amounts of new data. ID seems unable to even start; unable to leave the realm of philosophy (I apologize to any philosophers-it may not even qualify as that) and “play” in the arena of science.
Carol, the Discovery Institute and ID advocates claim that ID is good, tested science.
How else to tell, besides looking for the results of the experiments in which their hypotheses were tested?
ID advocates have made the claim. We are merely checking it out for veracity.
As opposed to Einstein, whose five papers in 1905 not only set physics on its ear, but also provided suggested experiments to disprove what Einstein said. One of his papers proposed that gravity could bend light – preposterous! In 1919, several scientists confirmed that light bending does occur around our Sun, during an eclipse. That was 14 years from hypothesis of theory to successful testing. In contrast, “intelligent design” was invented for a high school textbook in 1989. Today, 16 years later, there is not even one testable hypothesis provided for intelligent design.
Why shouldn’t intelligent design advocates get at least the same respect, and scrutiny of course, as Einstein? Are their ideas to holy for analysis? Or are they too crackpot to consider?
If their ideas ARE science, why would we not find them tested in experiments published in peer-reviewed journals?
Religious ideas don’t appear as experimental results in peer-reviewed science journals, either. Do you begin to see a trend?
I like the publication count metric, since it implies that HEP experimentalists are the best scientists evah!!! (unless the metric is diluted by dividing the publciation number by the number of authors per publication)
I think what’s probably more relevant is the number of confirmed scientific results under ID’s belt (hint: I am thinking of an integer between -0.1 and +0.1 )
Something like a demonstration of how the DNA strand of aa amoeba has the entire human genome encoded in it or something to that effect would be such a ‘result’, but I really don’t see that happening.
bleh.
I know very little about Cavendish. His gravity experiment gets a mention in introductory physics and there’s a famous lab named after him at Cambridge. That about sums up what I know.
But I’m always pretty skeptical about this hermit-researcher business, so let’s see what I can find. He was reputedly a recluse (BTW, he did collaborate with at least one other scientist, John Michell). But even the reclusive Cavendish published 20 papers over his lifetime of about 80 years. http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/bio[…]vendish.html That’s an average of one paper every four years cradle-to-grave and it’s from a scientist widely considered to be an outlier on the introvert/extrovert scale.
How many scientists are allegedly working on ID? How long have they been at it? If they’ve been at it for 10 years and are all as reclusive as Cavendish, then they should each average 2.5 papers by now. If their grand total so far is 28 papers, then that implies there are at most 11 of them, or that some are even less prone to publishing than Cavendish. Otherwise, you’d expect a more impressive list of results.
So there you have the ID research program in a nutshell: 11 pathologically shy hermits working in a vacuum, publishing very little. But we will assume generously that like Cavendish they have done important experiments and just never got around to telling anyone. Am I supposed to be impressed?
Another question is, why *not* publish if you have the results? Real, working scientists can’t wait to get their results peer-reviewed and published as soon as there are enough reliable data to put in a journal publication. It isn’t just a matter of “counting papers” – it’s a matter of having your work vetted by others who may be more knowledgeable than you are, to look for holes but also to get valuable feedback and suggestions from other experts. Running results by your peers is not a technicality or formality; it is a necessary part of furthering your work. (Assuming your assertions aren’t bogus, of course…)
Dembski once said something like he chooses not to publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals because “you often have to wait two years to get things into print.” This, of course, is rubbish to anyone who knows the system. Some journals are slower and some are faster, and the actual turnaround depends on what sort of revisions the reviewers ask for (and how long you take to do them), but two years is way over the top for mainstream scientific journals. My experience has been three to six months between submission date and print date.
”.…the Discovery Institute and ID advocates claim that ID is good, tested science.”
Except when they are cross examined under oath. Then they say that is not science unless you change the definition of science, and that it has not *actually* been tested. They also testify that there are no scientific peer reviewed papers on IC, and only one that “kind of sort of” supports ID.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dov[…]l#day11pm132
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dov[…]l#day20pm921
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dov[…]tml#day15pm3
The Discovery Institute is blatantly and unrepentantly lying.
Where are you, Ms. Clouser? Surely you have a response to all of these various comments? Or perhaps the individuals you are trying to defend have something to say? I’d be interested in hearing from the “other” side on this…
The history of science is replete with examples of researchers who either refused, delayed or hesitated to publish their work. I used the example of Cavendish because it is an extreme case of refusing all his life to publish the great experiments he performed on gravity. (His papers on gravity were publicized by his family after his death.) While it is true that a paper must be peer reviewed to be considered by the scientific community, and by extension the world, as “scientific”, the absence of publication cannot in and of itself render a work “unscientific”. But this is what this article is implying, that ID cannot be “science” since they are not publishing much of anything.
In other words, the public is not impressed by this type of argumentation. The argument must revolve about the substance of the claims, not the nonsense of counting papers.
I don’t mind discussing my background or “profession” but why can this discussion too not proceed on the basis of substance rather than personalities, stereotypes and other nonsense? Why are some folks here attracted to distracting matters of no impoprtance? Are they running out of substantive arguments?
What holes? We’re talking about ID here, not Evolution, which is nothing but a bunch of holes: gaps in the fossil record, lack of explanation of the origin of life… etc.
(I’m just trying to be funny, sorry)
Ms. Clouser
As a member of the public (I’m a woodcraftsman, not a teacher or scientist or a publisher or anything), I have to say that in fact, I AM impressed with the argument of publication (or complete and utter lack thereof). If ID has some sort of science, anything at all, I’d sure like to see it in something other than a pop-science book. Anybody can publish a book, and not one single word in the book has to be true or even supported.
As for the final paragraph of your latest statement, in order for there to be a discussion on the substance, there actually has to BE some substance to discuss. Where is it?
NEWSFLASH
http://www.kansas.com/mld/eagle/liv[…]13337930.htm
Your profession is important; to critique how the scientific community judges the value of scientific work is arrogant if you yourself are not an expert. I would not pass judgement on legal matters if I was not a lawyer. I’d ask the members of the profession. Science is not validated by public opinion, but by scientists in their accepted forum.
Ms. Clouser doesn’t like the metric of peer-reviewed publication counting. What other metric should we apply?
No, I suppose not. But the absence of the “work” itself sort of does.
Well, no. It’s just that you can’t expect scientists to take it seriously, or schools to teach it, if “there’s no there there”
Oh my god. Read “city of god” by e.l. doctorow
I saw a bumper sticker this morning which read, “Christians: can’t live with ‘em, Can’t feed ‘em to the lions anymore”
Ha! Doing my part to promote randomness.
I really grow tired of the other side. Honestly, they do a hit and run here every so often. They run in, wave their arms frantically about some nonsensical idea or criticism of mainstream science (the latest being that the validity of a scientific idea cannot be measured by its publication acceptance rate), then when more logical minds begin to reply with reasoned (and admittedly often deservedly disparaging) responses, they flee back into the ether of the internets ;)
On the other hand, when one of ours goes to the blogs of “the other side,” posts, no matter how reasoned, are deleted and their authors banned.
A note for those new here: the other side is not interested in scientific discourse. They want a stage, or perhaps more aptly, a pulpit. The refusal to publish in scientific journals; their preference for books as a means of publication; the hit and run blog postings and the banning of dissenting opions on their own blogs are all symptoms of the underlying disease.
Carol The DI is not just a US phenomenon http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2005120[…]051207160603
$200/hr is not self-deluded. If it’s anything, what it ought to be is criminally fraudalent, but it is certainly not self-deluded. However, if the marks want to be gulled, cullied, and diddled out of their money like that, who am I to complain.
BWE,
What exactly is the your question that I am supposed to answer?
Carol Wrote:
and
I wrote:
Referring to:
And, after you answer those two, I have another one:
Do you think that ID is valid science with evidence that seems to hold up under scrutiny?
BWE,
I don’t care for the condescending tone of your questions. My posts speak for themselves. Read them carefully and focus on the substance, not the personalities.
I am sorry if I seem condescending. I am truly interested in what you have to say. I personally have a specific background which has molded my opinions. My education left me with little doubt that evolution as it stands, is the correct way to understand a certain kind of occurrance. Obviously, other people with different educations have different opinions. When I read you posts, I find that you sincerely talk about the original form of the bible a lot. You made a pretty bold claim to match credential for credential a while ago and that struck me as odd. Then you made a claim that ID papers were doing science, and since I do science too and I was unaware of any science from the DI, I looked it up. I read a few of those papers and there wasn’t any science in what I saw. What I saw was political science term papers about science. Now, that is not condescending, it is sincere. I obviously missed your point. And, if you have an expert background, you could use it potentially to support your case.
In case you are wondering, my credentials are not all that stellar. They are actually pretty ordinary:
BA -Graphic Design -Cornish College of Art 1978 BA -Political Science -University of Washington 1982 MS -Marine Biology -University of Washington 1987
So, my questions are, 1. What is your background? 2. How are ID experiments designed? 3. Do you think that ID is valid science with evidence that seems to hold up under scrutiny?
I am perfectly willing to be wrong if that is what you are telling me. I do not have a phD, nor am I an expert on anything other than various rockfish above 40 fathoms off the pacific Northwest. (Well, I know quite a bit about trawling).
So, I am unclear on where we stand and whether this is a debate, an argument or whether we both think roughly the same things and I am too dense to understand. (My wife would no doubt opt for the third category)
Good luck BWE but I don’t think Carol knows the difference between a spade and a manuo-pedal excavationary implement she just came here to promte her book.
No, i think she wants to say something. I mean, who among us would read her book? It’s about the bible. I don’t care much about the bible and I doubt many people who read this stuff do either. I mean, we are posting because of some nascent urge to force our opinions on others right? DOn’t you think she is doing the same? I only wish I had a book to promote while I posted here. My book would be about the rational pursuit of altered states of consciousness to commune with god. Maybe it could be about the futility of the rational pursuit of altered states of consciousness to commune with god. Or about the futility of god in general. Or about the sublime experience of diving in puget sound with eight foot octopi. ANyway, I think she is just having trouble articulating something that she really feels is important. Like when, as a passenger, you realize that the driver cares more about her makeup than the car in the merge lane and you search for words but the ticking of the clock confuses you and you miss the opportunity to say something relevant and get stuck with only an empty curse after the fact.
While we are on the subject, I’d like to know what Carol’s teaching experience is (secondary school) since she had clear opinions on that. Just curious since the thread my interchange with her was addressing the “controversy” in high school science classes.
I suppose Carol is technically correct. Counting papers doesn’t necessarily map one-to-one with assessing the validity of the science, and a single breakthrough paper may have more science in it than a hundred papers replicating known results. But we might also usefully visualize papers as being like ripples around where good new ideas got dropped into the mix. If there is even a kernel of good science involved, then given time the ripples will spread a long way. ID has had what, 15 years? And in that time, they have produced 32 papers if you misrepresent what they say, and zero papers if you do not? By now, this is meaningful. The actual science becomes increasingly questionable as time passes without ANY papers, tests, testable hypotheses, research, research budget, or results.
On a somewhat different note, I have a question about the material bwe quoted in post #61959, about horseshoe crabs. It does seem strange to me that species (with normal genetic variation) seem to defend their identity so doggedly. Are horseshoe crabs today really different species in all but morphology from a very different species 200 million years ago? Or is this an example of the species statis Gould hammered away at for so long? Are horseshoe crabs not qualitatively different from any other species, staying in statis from formation to extinction, and different only quantitatively, by surviving for so very long?
What IS the mechanism(s) causing species stasis despite lots of genetic variation?
Flint asked
Ask sponges.
RBH
I would have to guess that this is, in fact, punctuated equilibrium. What pressure is there to make it change? I chose that article because it was the first one I came across. If you are going to make that claim, you would need to set up some proceedures for demonstration. Including actual genetic variation over time.
Punctuated equilibrium is more of an observation than a hypotheses, a better crab would have had to develop. These guys are pretty darn efficient exploiters of their niche. Also, there are a lot of different populations of horseshoe crabs that exhibit different characteristics. I think there are some distinct species maybe in asian or australian waters. If memory serves me correctly, there used to be fresh water varieties and several different marine species and that the ones we have today are actually evolved although not so much as say a cat is from an early amphibian. Also, they are chelicerates rather than true crabs so you really need to follow a different family tree and you might find a spider or scorpion somewhere that you could follow the mitochindria back to something similar. I think that some of the species used to have segmented opisthosomas (the part that isn’t a head). But nothing like that was addressed in the paper and the stability of the species was never related to its success at exploiting its niche.
Carol, are you there?
From what I understand, the Landa book attempts to argue that Genesis creation is scientifically accurate by referring to the OT in its original Hebrew. Original language? Okay, great. I’ll happily grant that Torah scholars probably have a better grasp of what the bible really says than KJV-clutching American fundies do.
But claiming that statements like “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” are scientifically accurate is a whole other kind of grasping. The vagueness of poetry is one of the pillars of myth. Science, on the other hand, abhors vagueness because it is useless in practice. Regardless of translation, the bible does not contain cosmological equations, and the Big Bang Theory is not fairly summarized as: “In the beginning, BOOM!”
P.S. There are nimrods in India these days claiming that certain passages in Hindu scripture indicate that ancient humans had mystical knowledge (divine revelation) regarding quantum physics. This phenomenon is not new. It is not unique. It riddles the history of every religion. It is desperation in the face of discredit.
“I won’t answer your questions because you were mean to me !!!! (sniffle) (sob) Boo hoo hoo!!!!”
I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this excuse.
It ranks right up there with the “Ralph Kramden response”: “You think I won’t tell you? You think I won’t TELL YOU? Well, JUST FOR THAT, I’M NOT GONNA TELL YOU !!!!”
AC,
For your information the original Bible does not begin with your quote. Instead it reads: “In the Begining of God’s creation of heaven and earth… When the earth was.… Then God said…” Thus the first era describes the appearance of light only. You ought to read up on this in such good books as…well, you know.
Nobody claims that the Bible is a science primer. To claim that is to desecrate the document, in the eyes of believers. So don’t expect it to sound like one. Instead, the issue is, does science conflict with the Bible? Is the Bible inconsistent with the discoveries of science, particulary if it’s interpreted literally? The common perception is that the answer is, yes. Landa’s achievement is that he demonstrates that the correct answer is very reasonably, no.
Carol, So, my questions are, 1. What is your background? 2. How are ID experiments designed? 3. Do you think that ID is valid science with evidence that seems to hold up under scrutiny?
I am perfectly willing to be wrong if that is what you are telling me. I do not have a phD, nor am I an expert on anything other than various rockfish above 40 fathoms off the pacific Northwest. (Well, I know quite a bit about trawling).
So, I am unclear on where we stand and whether this is a debate, an argument or whether we both think roughly the same things and I am too dense to understand. (My wife would no doubt opt for the third category)
Actually, the YECers do.
Other Biblical scholars, of course, think Landa is full of cow crap. He, of course, thinks THEY are all full of cow crap. And NONE of them has any objective way to determine which interpretations are cow crap and which aren’t. Other than their say-so.
That is, uh, probably why scholars have been arguing over Biblical interpretations for thousands of years before Landa was even born. And will very likely still be arguing over it thousands of years from now (assuming Christianity or the Bible still exist then).
(shrug)
Lenny,
I do enjoy your comments, one question though: don’t your shoulders get tired with all the shrugging?
Seriously, science can’t speak to religion generally, but good scholarship certainly can shake most common biblical interpretations. The conservatives are fighting a battle they cannot win.
I lift shoulder weights. (shrug)
;>
Now Beckwith has deleted the rest of the comments from his blog.
What an a$$hole.
But they’re still on Google cache.
What a stupid a$$hole.