Recently in Kitzmiller Ruling Category

Back when I was a little baby creationism debater, back in the day when the world wide web was young, there were several gladiators who, every day on the talk.origins newsgroup, sallied forth and took on all comers. These were names like PZ Myers, Wes Elsberry, John Wilkins…that’s right, these guys, now famous, all were originally newsgroup junkies. Eventually I got to meet them all in person. But another gladiator there was, by the name of Aron-Ra, who wielded his challenge to great effect. I never got to meet him…but now there is YouTube.

This is a good read: Wes on Opderbeck and Dover.

Apparently, Michael Behe just doesn’t know when to pack it in. In reply to Travis’s essay in Science, “On the Origin of The Immune System” (see previous PT posts: 1, 2), Behe has posted a letter he sent to Science. Instead of just sucking it up and admitting that his statements in Darwin’s Black Box that

“As scientists we yearn to understand how this magnificent mechanism came to be, but the complexity of the system dooms all Darwinian explanations to frustration.” (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 139)

and

We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system. (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 138)

…were wrong, or at the very least became wrong in the time between 1996 and 2005, Behe is still expressing proud, Kierkagaardian-esque defiance. In this (rejected) letter to the editor of Science, Behe reiterates his proud stand that the work of an entire field, the life’s achievements of hundreds of immunologists, complete with surprising experimental support for a surprising hypothesis (the transposon hypothesis), still has “no answers” to the question of how it evolved, and that Darwinian explanations are “doom[ed].”

Can you believe it’s been three years since Judge Jones issued a devastating anti-“Intelligent Design” ruling?

Ah, the memories of Kitzmas past. Remember “Waterloo in Dover”? “Cdesign proponentsists.”? The “breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision”?

Even though the Creationist Choir says that Kitzmiller v. Dover is “No big deal”, it’s obvious they’re still smarting over their wounds.

Anyway, “Intelligent Design” is so yesterday. Everyone knows Strengths and Weaknesses is the Big New Thing.

Merry Kitzmas, everyone!

Commenting on the testimony of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses in the Kitzmiller trial, someone said (paraphrased) “It was the biology course you never took but wish you had.” Reading the raw transcripts of the testimony one can easily believe that.

But it gets better. I just discovered that Nick Matzke took Kevin Padian’s testimony and integrated Padian’s slides, so one can see what Padian was talking about as he described the paleontological evidence for evolution and the misrepresentations in Of Pandas and People. I don’t recall it having been flagged here before.

That had to have been a heckuva job for Nick, but it was sure worth it. Reading it with the slides right there, the flow of the testimony is beautiful. The integrated presentation is a significant resource for teachers and others in this arena. I commend it to folks’ attention.

Congratulations go out to PBS and Nova for winning the Peabody Award for “Judgment Day”, the episode documenting the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial NOVA/WGBH Educational Foundation, Vulcan Productions Inc., The Big Table Film Company

The centerpiece of this thoughtful, topical edition of NOVA was the recreation, verbatim, of key testimony and argument from a six-week trial in Pennsylvania that served as a crash course in modern evolutionary theory, the evidence for evolution and the nature of science.

We had most of the plaintiffs’ side of the case on hand to view the broadcast last November. We gathered together at Lauri Lebo and Jeff Pepper’s beer can museum near York, Pennsylvania. We were companionably squeezed in there for the broadcast. (Note Prof. Steve Steve near center…)

(Original and two more pics at the Austringer.)

During the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case in 2004 to 2005, Lauri Lebo covered the story for the York Daily Record. Lebo was one of the most consistent journalists writing on the topic anywhere; she certainly demonstrated a facility with the facts of the case and was not afraid to write about what they implied. She has a book to be released shortly, “The Devil in Dover”.

(Originally posted at the Austringer)

On Uncommon Descent William Dembski claims that Richard Dawkins has admitted that life could be designed and thus wonders: “Is ID therefore scientific?”. As I will show this is a logically flawed conclusion.

First of all lets point out Intelligent Design does not claim merely that life is designed but that such design can be detected via scientific methods. In this aspect if differs from science which admits that design always remains a logical possibility, however science also accepts that if such design is ‘supernatural’ no scientific method can detect such design.

Casey Luskin, continues his “assaults” on Judge Jones’ devastating ruling for Intelligent Design while conveniently forgetting the Discovery Institute’s Amicus Curiae to the case.

Luskin argues that, based on an statements made by Judge Jones on the “Lehrer Newshour”, the ruling by Jones should be considered flawed:

Luskin Wrote:

First, Judge Jones admitted that a key question his ruling answered was whether intelligent design was “good science,” and he states that “after six weeks of largely expert testimony, I came to the conclusion that it simply was not good science” (emphasis added). This proves his judicial activism because it shows that, in his mind, a key question was not the constitutionality of Dover’s policy in particular, but rather a broad sweeping question about whether ID is “good science,” something that is totally inappropriate and unnecessary for the federal judiciary to answer in such a case over the constitutionality of a science curriculum.

Why is this claim so ironic? Well, if you read the submissions of the Discovery Institute to the judge, they argue that since ID is science, it cannot be ruled to be unconstitutional. In other words, they insist that the judge resolves the issue of ID being science. When he actually does this and he rules contrary to their expectations, the judge suddenly becomes an activist judge.

The Discovery Institute’s own website demonstrates that their amicus brief was submitted to argue “… about secular purposes for teaching about the scientific theory of intelligent design”” (October 31, 2005)

So what was the argument of the Discovery Institute which forced the judge to rule on the issue of ID being science?

NOVA has released a Press Release outlining the exciting new program. For more information visit NOVA Judgement Day Companion site or the Pressrooms at pbs.org/pressroom or Pressroom.wgbh.org The show will air on November 13, 2007 at 8pm ET/PT on PBS.

Check your local listings and spread the news

The date is nearing when the PBS/NOVA program “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on trial” will air and not surprisingly the Discovery Institute is not pleased. On EvolutionNews, Robert Crowther, director of media and public relations, complains that:

Robert Crowther Wrote:

The trailer for the program shows that PBS has turned to the usual suspects to advance their agenda.

Yes, such people as “Father of Intelligent Design” Philip Johnson or Steve Fuller did participate and what is even more ironic is that many more Discovery Institute people were asked to participate but they declined.

Yes, they declined!!!

In the post about my review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, many complained that they couldn’t access the full text without a university subscription or paying a huge fee. I have checked Elsevier’s policies on this. Authors are not allowed to post the published PDF to their websites (you have to get that from Elsevier), but they can put up the unformatted, submitted preprint version of their articles, as long as they include the reference and DOI to the published version. So here is the reference: Nicholas J. Matzke (2007). “The edge of creationism.” Trends In Ecology and Evolution, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 24 October 2007. ScienceDirect, doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2007.09.004.

…and the full text is below the fold. Note that the unpublished version has a few minor differences from the published version. For example, it has more emphases which were kind of my way of jumping up and down on the smoking ruins of Behe’s core arguments in The Edge of Evolution.

Gordy Slack was on the radio in the Bay Area yesterday and the show is now online. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet but I’m sure it was good, since Gordy is quite a thoughtful guy. Gordy is also doing a reading at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Ave. SF, CA, on Monday, 7/16. 7:00 pm – I might go myself if I get the chance…

Fri, Jul 13, 2007 – 10:00 AM Author Gordy Slack Listen (RealMedia stream) Download (MP3)

(Windows: right-click and choose “Save Target As.” Mac: hold Ctrl, click link, and choose “Save As.”)

The show welcomes author Gordy Slack for a conversation focusing on his book, “The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design and a School Board in Dover, PA.”

Host: Dave Iverson

Guests: Gordy Slack , author of “The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design and a School Board in Dover, PA.”

From NOVA Upcoming Summer & Fall 2007 Programming:

NOVA shows on PBS on Tuesdays @ 8 pm ET/PT (check local listings):

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (w.t.) November 13, 2007 at 8 pm ET check local listings

One of the latest battles in the war over evolution took place in a tiny town in eastern Pennsylvania called Dover. In 2004, the local school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to their high school biology students. The statement suggested that there is an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution called intelligent design, the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore had to have been designed by an intelligent agent. The science teachers refused to comply with the order, and alarmed parents filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the separation of church and state. Suddenly, the small town of Dover was torn apart by controversy, pitting neighbor against neighbor. NOVA captures the emotional conflict in interviews with the townspeople, scientists and lawyers who participated in the historic six-week trial, Kitzmiller, et. al. v. Dover School District, et. al., which was closely watched by the world’s media. With recreations based on court transcripts, NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as “What is evolution?” and “Does intelligent design qualify as science?” For years to come, the lessons from Dover will continue to have a profound impact on how science is viewed in our society and how to teach it the classroom.

Produced by NOVA WGBH Science Unit and Vulcan Productions, Inc. Additional production by The Big Table Film Company.

The PNAS Early Edition webpage has just posted a series of papers from the December 2006 National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium, “In the Light of Evolution: Adaptation and Complex Design,” organized by Francisco Ayala and John Avise. The series of papers, on topics ranging from color vision to beetle horns, is now available (I will post the list below the fold). Eugenie C. Scott (aka Genie) was invited to speak at this meeting about evolution education and the history of opposition to it, and the speakers wrote papers to be published in PNAS and a forthcoming NAS volume.

Genie brought me on as a coauthor on the paper she was asked to write. This became:

Although many have read the transcripts of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial (HTML version | PDF version) and found them interesting, reading the transcripts does not give the full sense of what it was like to be in the Kitzmiller courtroom. In real life, in addition to the witness answering questions, the lawyers and witnesses were constantly referring to exhibits that were digitally projected onto a large screen on the right wall of the courtroom. Usually the exhibits were just documents, but when the science witnesses testified, their powerpoint presentations contain fossils, flagella, and everything else in between. I think it is safe to say that the testimony is much easier to understand when read with the demonstrative exhibits available (the exhibit lists and a few exhibits are available online).

However, it takes a lot of work to convert the slides to web format, add captions, embed them in HTML, etc. But as a first step, I and others at NCSE have done this for Kevin Padian’s testimony (testimony+slides | just slides).

I have been forgetting to mention that Darwin descendant Matthew Chapman‘s book 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin^®, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania has just appeared in the bookstores. Here is the publisher’s website with background material, an interview with Chapman in New Scientist, the Amazon page, a review, and Chapman’s February 2006 article on the Kitzmiller trial in Harper’s.

This just in:

I was recently interviewed by Karl Mogel for his podcast show The Inoculated Mind. Topics include flagellum evolution and Kitzmiller v. Dover, and Casey Luskin’s inability to admit error. Have a listen if you get a chance.

Tomorrow, Talk of the Nation/Science Friday is doing a show with Edward Humes, author of Monkey Girl (blog, website), Randy Olson, director of Flock of Dodos, and yours truly, author of this spiffy blogpost.

We are in the second hour, so it should be on from 12-1 Pacific time. Apart from the radio, NPR is streamed live from many websites, and the Talk of the Nation archived shows are put online a few hours later.