Recently in ID/Creationism Category

Ray Comfort starting handing out his bastardization of the Origin today. A day earlier than expected.

If any of our readers witnessed it, please feel free to describe your experiences in a comment.

We have a twofer! In his account of his visit with Stephen Meyer to Norman, Oklahoma, a couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Wells made another totally stupid remark just following the one for which he got an earlier award. This one contains a deceptive analogy that the ID creationists have grown fond of lately. Recall that their recent mantra has been ‘evolution can’t increase “biological” information.’ That’s the shorthand gloss of Dembski’s so-called Law of Conservation of Information.

In the Q&A Wells ‘explained’ to a questioner that HOX genes are remarkably non-specific, and burped up the egregiously stupid remark for which he got the earlier award:

If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse?

To win his second award, Wells went on to write another truly dumb thing.

Intelligent design creationists love to talk about information theory, but unfortunately they rarely understand it. Jonathan Wells is the latest ID creationist to demonstrate this.

In a recent post at “Evolution News & Views” describing an event at the University of Oklahoma, Wells said, “I replied that duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content.”

Wells is wrong. I frequently give this as an exercise in my classes at the University of Waterloo: Prove that if x is a string of symbols, then the Kolmogorov information in xx is greater than that in x for infinitely many strings x. Most of my students can do this one, but it looks like information expert Jonathan Wells can’t.

Like many incompetent people, Wells is blissfully unaware of his incompetence. He closes by saying, “Despite all their taxpayer-funded professors and museum exhibits, despite all their threats to dismantle us and expose us as retards, the Darwinists lost.”

We don’t have to “expose” the intelligent design creationists as buffoons; they do it themselves whenever they open their mouths.

It was a tough call given Casey Luskin’s stupidity about Ardipithecus, but we have a winner. In an account of Stephen Meyer’s talk at the University of Oklahoma last week, Jonathan Wells wrote

Furthermore, the similarity of HOX genes in so many animal phyla is actually a problem for neo-Darwinism: If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse?

Hat tip to John Pieret.

With all the hagiography going on for conservative “intellectual” Irving Kristol, who died on September 18, let’s not forget one of his many idiotic statements: that Darwinism is on the way out because it “is really no longer accepted so easily by [many] biologists and scientists.”

As Glenn Morton has exhaustively shown, the trope that “more and more scientists doubt evolution” is one of the oldest falsehoods in creationism. But then, Kristol believed that not all truths were suitable for all people, an echo of Martin Luther’s view that lying for his god was acceptable.

Anti-evolution idiocy seemingly ran in the family. In 1959, Kristol’s wife Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote a terrible book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, demonstrating a lack of understanding of biology and a warped view of Darwin’s influence. One perceptive reviewer penned that Himmelfarb had “an advanced case of Darwinitis, a complaint that afflicts those of a literary bent and strong attachments to pre-scientific culture, who find in the theory of evolution a disturbing and mysterious challenge to their values”. Kristol wrote a favorable review of Himmelfarb’s book for Encounter, without bothering to mention that he was Himmelfarb’s husband. So much for Kristol’s ethics.

Read more at Recursivity…

As most readers know, William Dembski and Robert Marks recently published a paper in an IEEE journal that purports to show that

In critiquing his [Dawkins’] example and arguing that information is not created by unguided evolutionary processes, we are indeed making an argument that supports ID.

Various science bloggers have critiqued it; see here, here, and here for examples.

Now the Metropolis Sampler has published a more technical analysis of the paper, concluding that

The fundamental lesson here is that the Dembski-Marks approach to evaluating model assumptions is both arbitrary and a poor reflection of scientific reasoning. Model assumptions are not accepted or rejected based on a numerical measure of how many logical possibilities that are ruled out or how far probability distributions deviate from uniform measures. Rather, model assumptions are accepted or rejected based on predictive and descriptive accuracy, domain of applicability, ability to unify existing models and empirical knowledge, and so on.

ID creationists persistently use models that misrepresent theories (or in the case of the WEASEL hoorah, misrepresent what the model is intended to represent), and then conclude (on the basis of syntactic manipulations of the model) that the theories are invalid. Dembski, of course, is a serial offender in this respect, and it’s a pity that he’s inveigled Marks into sharing his delusions.

Denyse O’Leary, she of the multiple blogs and little reliable knowledge of evolution, is offering a prize for the original code for Dawkins’ cumulative selection demonstration program (‘METHINKS …”), described in The Blind Watchmaker, originally published in 1986. The winner actually gets to choose between two prizes, a copy of Stephen Meyer’s new elaboration of the standard ID argument from ignorance, Signature in the Cell, or a copy of Dawkins’ forthcoming The Greatest Show on Earth. (Actually, for the latter prize, O’Leary says she will ask Dawkins’ publicist to provide the prize. Strange to offer a prize she can’t herself deliver.)

The comment thread is strangely reminiscent of the recent “birther” rhetoric in the U.S. A commenter called “kibitzer” replicates the birther script almost flawlessly. For example

It is simply unconscionable that over 20 years after the program has been out and used to argue for Darwinism, Dawkins still has not made this code publicly available.

and

But the program has been much discussed on the Internet in the last decade. So where is the code?

and

Then provide the original code. Repeat after me: WE WANT TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CODE, WE WANT TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CODE, WE WANT TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CODE …

and

Of course, as programs go, Dawkins’ WEASEL is trivial and it’s easy enough to reconstruct something that’s close to it. But given the controversy surrounding it, let’s see the original program. Why is that so difficult?

and

We’re all beating our gums. Please, let’s see the original code. Why is that so much to ask? To paraphrase Ben Stein, Does anyone have it? Anyone?

Controversy? Only in the fevered imagination of Bill Dembski, who has now infected Robert Marks.

Hat tip to Glenn Branch.

By Joe Felsenstein, http://www.gs.washington.edu/faculty/felsenstein.htm

In a previous thread here, and in other blogs, there have been many people arguing that William Dembski and Robert Marks’s recent “pro-ID” paper isn’t really pro-ID, that it is equally compatible with theistic evolution or even nontheistic evolution. William Dembski has now replied at his Uncommon Descent blog to these comments.

He argues that

The key contention of ID is that design in nature, and in biology in particular, is detectable. Evolutionary informatics, by looking at the information requirements of evolutionary processes, points to information sources beyond evolution and thus, indirectly, to a designer.

and

Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian processes generate the information required for biological complexity internally, without any outside source of information. The results by Marks and me are showing that this cannot be the case.

Dembski and Marks’s argument is (in effect) that smoothness of the adaptive landscape means that information has been built into the situation, and that natural selection does not create new information, but instead transfers this existing information into the genome. To Dembski, the Designer acts by creating this information.

There is no requirement that this creation of information happen multiple times. A Designer (or just the laws of physics) could set up the world so that it is one in which adaptive surfaces are smooth enough that natural selection succeeds in bringing about adaptation. That setting-up could have happened back before the first living organisms existed.

Should other supporters of ID be happy with such a picture? It certainly does not argue for the fixity of species, or against large-scale evolutionary change. But I suspect that many theistic evolutionists would find it consistent with their views.

Evolutionary biologists may prefer a different definition. Intelligent Design only differs from existing theories on evolution if it involves a Designer who intervenes at least once after the origin of life. If ID advocates want to argue that there is something wrong with evolutionary biology, they should put forward a theory that makes some different prediction about what happens during evolution after that origin.

Dembski draws the distinction as involving where the information comes from. Evolutionary biologists will probably prefer to focus on whether there is evidence for interventions by a Designer.

By Joe Felsenstein, http://www.gs.washington.edu/faculty/felsenstein.htm

William Dembski and Robert Marks have published what Dembski describes as a “peer-reviewed pro-ID article”. It is in the computer engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans in the September 2009 issue. In a post at his Uncommon Descent blog (where a link to a PDF of the article will also be found) Dembski describes it as critiquing Richard Dawkins’s “Methinks it is like a weasel” simulation and that “in critiquing his example and arguing that information is not created by unguided evolutionary processes, we are indeed making an argument that supports ID.” But what does it really say about ID?

The article does not mention ID directly, but defines a quantity called “active information” in search problems. Basically, it measures how much faster the solution can be found by a search in a problem’s space than by looking for the solution by drawing points from the space in a random order — how much faster one finds the solution than a monkey with a typewriter would. In Dawkins’s Weasel case, a monkey with a typewriter finds the solution after about 10⁴⁰ tries, while one version of Dawkins’s program would take only about 728 tries. The active information is the log of the ratio of these numbers, about 124 bits.

In effect, the picture the article paints is that information is out there in the shape of the fitness surface — the way fitnesses change as we move among neighboring genotypes. So, on this view, natural selection does not create information, it just transfers it into the genotype. The information is out there already, lying around. Dembski and Marks at one point say that “the active information comes from knowledge of the fitness”. If the fitness surface is smooth, as in the Weasel case, natural selection will readily be successful. D&M would then regard the information as provided by a Designer in advance.

In that case natural selection works. If a Designer has structured our genotype-phenotype space so that fitness surfaces are often smooth, if mutations do not typically instantly reduce the organism to a chaotic organic soup, if successful genotypes are often found to be close in sequence to other successful genotypes, then the Designer is not designing individual organisms — she is leaving natural selection to do the job. Dembski and Marks’s argument would then at most favor theistic evolution and could not be used to favor ID over that.

One can wonder whether one needs any particular Designer to structure reality in that way. The laws of physics do not make all objects interact intimately and strongly. When I move a pebble in my back yard, the dirt, grass, trees, and fences do not instantly reorder themselves into a totally different arrangement, unrecognizably different. If they did, of course natural selection would not be able to cope. But as they interact much less strongly than that, only a few leaves of grass change noticeably. I can cope, and so can natural selection. Does the smoothness of fitness surfaces come from this weakness of long-range interactions in physics? If so, then Dembski and Marks’s argument ends up leaving us to argue about where the laws of physics ultimately come from, and most evolutionary biologists will not feel too worried.

Benjamin Wiker, a senior fellow of the Disco ‘Tute, has made a cottage industry of linking Darwin to Hitler, evolution to Nazi ideology, and that meme is perpetuated by a variety of ID creationist flacks.

Wiker’s view depends in large part on the supposition that German evolutionary thinking about evolution actually followed Darwin. However, as a recent book review in PLoS Biology points out, what reached Germany was not the English version of Origin of Species, it was a translation by German paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn that was a main source of German notions of Darwinian evolution, and those notions were a distortion of Darwin’s views. Bronn had a substantially different conception of evolution than Darwin, and Bronn’s translation apparently incorporated a good bit of his own conception rather than being a straight translation of Darwin. Bronn even added an extra chapter to OoS incorporate his own ideas.

According to Gawker, Ben Stein will no longer write a column for the New York times because he has become a spokesman for a scuzzy credit score reporting company.

Ben Stein’s TV ads for a scuzzy “free” credit product have finally caught up to him: The New York Times has fired Stein as a Sunday business columnist for violating ethics guidelines.

Stein was pilloried online for his endorsement of the bait-and-switch operation, which offers a free credit score but charges an outrageous $30 per month to see the credit report behind the score. As Reuters blogger Felix Salmon pointed out, consumers can get a free online report under federal law.

There’s more at Gawker.

A religious movement in Nigeria aims to establish a government, which I can only describe as a paradise for the Discovery Institute.

If their name is uncertain, however, their mission appears clear enough: to overthrow the Nigerian state, impose an extreme interpretation of Islamic law and abolish what they term “Western-style education”. …

In an interview with the BBC, the group’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, said such education “spoils the belief in one god”.

“There are prominent Islamic preachers who have seen and understood that the present Western-style education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam,” he said.

“Like rain. We believe it is a creation of god rather than an evaporation caused by the sun that condenses and becomes rain.

“Like saying the world is a sphere. If it runs contrary to the teachings of Allah, we reject it. We also reject the theory of Darwinism.”

Sounds familiar, dunnit?

Fellows of the Discovery Institute seem to be over represented in fringe groups, Paul Nelson is a Young Earth Creationist, the Godfather of Intelligent Design Phillip Johnson and DI fellow Jonathan C. Wells have signed on to AIDS denial and Guillermo Gonzalez has signed on to a climate change denialist list.

Topically, given the debate about science communication that has been happening in the wake of of “Unscientific America”, in a recent article William Dembski dives into the whole Global Warming Denialism thing [1].

Ironically, at that same time in the 1970s, scientists were concerned not that the earth was warming but that it was cooling. The scare back then was global cooling!

Unfortunately for Dr. Dembski, this is a complete myth. There was no global cooling scare in the 70’s. While this is an indication of the level of fact checking involved in the article, more important is the subtext in this article, which makes more clear than ever the real concern of the Intelligent Design movement.

And this is the naked, unadulterated envy (and fear) of the power of scientists.

Some new polling data on the lack of acceptance of evolution.

The Discovery Institute is touting a poll that they commissioned from Zogby which claims that 52% of the American public believe that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.”

An Ipsos/Mori poll in the UK shows that only 33% of the American public thinks that “scientific evidence for evolution exists”. This compares with 51% in Britain and 8% in Egypt. While the poll considered additional countries, over at a simple prop I’ve tabulated results for Britain, the US and Eqypt (as a representative Muslim country) and made some comments on the issue of theistic evolution. Leave comments there or here (though I will probably not be reading the thread here).

I will send an autographed copy of the book Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails), by me and Paul K. Strode, to the first person who can correctly find a quotation that accurately describes evolution by natural selection and predates Darwin, Wallace, and even Erasmus Darwin by hundreds of years. To enter, just post a comment. To win, you will have to state the quotation, its author, and the approximate year. I have a specific quotation in mind, but I will consider others, as long as they clearly describe natural selection.

For the table of contents and other information about the book, go here.

In a day or so, I will declare the winner and explain why the quotation is so interesting. In the meantime, below the fold, more about Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails).

Update at the bottom

In the context of some flailing against theistic evolution, Denyse O’Leary has finally scraped the bottom of the barrel. On Uncommon Descent she writes

I just got done reading a book published in Turkey called Evolution Deceit, which helps me understand why Turkey alarms many materialists - but more on that later.

“Evolution Deceit” is by Adnan Oktar, who publishes under the name Harun Yahya and is a Turkish creationist. It’s a standard issue creationist diatribe; nothing new to see there. That O’Leary cites it as a reason to be alarmed about Turkey is entirely appropriate, but not for the reason O’Leary wants us to believe. In fact it’s an indication that the creationist pathology infests more countries than just the U.S.

Recall that Harun Yahya is also the purported author of The Atlas of Creation that was mailed to thousands of scientists a while back. It’s also the book in which a fly fishing lure was presented as a photograph of an insect along with other obvious mistakes. I knew the ID creationists were getting desperate for allies, but this is a new low. Soon I expect to see Denyse wearing a burqa.

Update: Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservative notes that Denyse has now interviewed Oktar. See Arnhart’s post linked above for commentary on the interview, particularly Oktar’s claim that intelligent design is the product of a Masonic conspiracy to promote atheism and Deism. This just gets weirder and weirder.

William Dembski and Robert Marks have written a paper. No it won’t be going in the peer reviewed literature, but into another of Dembski’s anthologies. Mark C. Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math explains what is mind-bogglingly wrong with it here and here.

by Barbara Forrest, http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/

Francis Beckwith has communicated to me via e-mail (May 3, 2009) his disagreement with my referring to him as an “ID supporter” in the abstract of my recently published paper entitled “The Non-epistemology of Intelligent Design: Its Implications for Public Policy,” Synthese, April 15, 2009. (See also Tim Sandefur’s post in response to Beckwith’s complaints about Sandefur’s classifying him as a creationist.) Here is the abstract:

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties. Despite these difficulties and despite ID’s defeat in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), ID creationists’ continuing efforts to promote the teaching of ID in public school science classrooms threaten both science education and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. I examine the ID movement’s failure to provide either a methodology or a functional epistemology to support their supernaturalism, a deficiency that consequently leaves them without epistemic support for their creationist claims. My examination focuses primarily on ID supporter Francis Beckwith, whose published defenses of teaching ID, as well as his other relevant publications concerning education, law, and public policy, have been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. Beckwith’s work exhibits the epistemological deficiencies of the supernaturally grounded views of his ID associates and of supernaturalists in general. I preface my examination of Beckwith’s arguments with (1) philosopher of science Susan Haack’s clarification of the established naturalistic methodology and epistemology of science and (2) discussions of the views of Beckwith’s ID associates Phillip Johnson and William Dembski. Finally, I critique the religious exclusionism that Beckwith shares with his ID associates and the implications of his exclusionism for public policy.

(source)

And I’m the Queen of Mexico. Over at Four Dollars, Almost Five, rhiggs has posted a month or more long email exchange with Attorney Casey Luskin on “what scientific data there was to support intelligent design.”

Head on over there and check it out.

From the Sunday Herald via the estimable John Pieret, about creationists:

According to a survey conducted recently, 75% of British people don’t get Charles Darwin. Astounding. That’s three from four. That’s most of the two-legged beings you are liable to meet. That’s almost everyone at the check-out. That’s most of your blood relatives.

It should come as no surprise, however. Reportedly, these folk harbour “doubts” as to natural selection. They incline instead towards myths with a comforting whiff of refutation and brimstone. They are otherwise persuaded, despite a ton of evidence. People, as ever, believe what they want to believe.

Perhaps, though, they also demonstrate, at a monkey-never-typing-Hamlet stroke, that there might be less to this evolution business than the brochures claimed. Chimps will be chimps.

Speaking as a monkey’s uncle’s less popular nephew, I don’t mind. If I have read Darwin half-way right, employing both opposable thumbs to prop up the book, natural selection depends on a majority always missing the point. Then we kill and eat them.

…

But they tell me, while approving miracles, canonising the extra-holy, opposing stem cell research, and abortion, and birth control, and gay people, and bad words, and the simple ability to think independently, that natural selection is only a theory. Only.

As the man said, natural selection in action.

(If I seem to quote Pieret a lot, it’s because he finds this stuff faster than my Google News traps.)