Recently in Evolution of Creationism Category

Although “Expelled” has been receiving mostly negative reviews from the mainstream media and scientists, creationist organizations other than the Discovery Institute, AIG and ICR (both Young Earth Creationists) have remained cautiously silent. For instance, The Reasons To Believe (RTB) Scholars appeared to be suspicious about Expelled but refrained from any recommendations but now that they have seen a pre-release screening they have sent an email which can be found on the Calvin College ASA discussion list.

Dear RTB Chapter members,

With the impending release of “EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed” (April 18), the Reasons to Believe scholar team thought it best to prepare a statement of our position, a guide for answering questions from chapters, networks, and apologists. Keep in mind that the mission of RTB centers on reaching out to science-minded people with two purposes:

In the Economist, an article explores how scientists are trying to explain religion. In a project titled “explaining religion” that involves scholars from 14 universities, researchers from many different disciplines are attempting to unravel the biological explanation for religion. The project receives funding from the “New and Emerging Science and Technology” programme of the European Union. The same programme also organizes the Tackling complexity in Science project and I noticed the absence of any ID relevant proposals.

At the NewScientist blog, we find a posting which raises more questions than it answers

After confirming the news that the movie is without much of any scientific content, and makes ill chosen references to Nazis, Amanda Gefter, opinion editor, describes the Q&A that followed.

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.

Although Behe has referred to Miller as an ‘intelligent design proponent’, Miller himself is on the record in many different forms that we should not conflate Miller’s faith with his scientific position.

On November 13^th, 2007 Nova will present Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” and as part of the experience, Nova is providing an excellent companion website. One of the features involves the perspective of various scientists on defining the concept of science

Miller has two segments in which he explains both the scientific method and religion and addresses what he considers some of the abuses of logic (“a gross mischaracterization to take a scientist in the past … and say that Newton worked based on a hypothesis of design)

On Isaac Newton Running time 1:34
Science vs. Religion Running time 2:29

Miller Wrote:

What Intelligent design pretends to do to be in the tradition in Newton, What intelligent design actually is, to be perfectly honest, is in the tradition of the middle ages where they stop investigation by saying we cannot answer this mystery it is the work of God “the designer”. This is a science stopper

Well, my time at NCSE is almost up. Next week I will be moving up to Berkeley to start a PhD in for-real, honest to goodness evolutionary biology. It’s quite exciting. Unfortunately, before I go I have to clean all my files out of my cubicle at NCSE to make way for Josh Rosenau (yes, the Thoughts from Kansas guy), who will be occupying my desk. Amongst the stacks of books that I have checked out from libraries, borrowed from various people at NCSE without giving them back, etc., I came across one I hadn’t seen since The Great Hunt for the Origins of Intelligent Design back in early 2005, during the research period of the Kitzmiller case. As everyone now knows, even though the ID guys will never admit it, “intelligent design” as such originated in the 1989 ID textbook Of Pandas and People, with “intelligent design” being the new label chosen after the 1987 Edwards decision made creationist terminology difficult to use in textbooks. Pandas was the first place the term “intelligent design” was used systematically, defined in a glossary, claimed to be something other than creationism, etc. In a desperate attempt to obfuscate this basic historical point, ID guys have dug up various random instances of the words “intelligent” and “design” placed together (although they missed the 1861 Darwin letter, and the 1847 Scientific American article), most of them with absolutely no evidence of having influenced the actual actors in the 1980s who created the ID movement (there are some legitimate precursors, but they are in explicitly creationist works, e.g. Lester and Bohlin’s (1984) The Natural Limits to Biological Change, so the ID guys won’t cite them post-Kitzmiller).

A.E. Wilder-Smith (1915-1995) was a European “creation scientist,” now deceased, sometimes described (pre-Kitzmiller) as inspiring pieces of ID. He was active from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. It is true that Wilder-Smith discusses “information”, “design”, “Design”, Paley, etc., a lot (as well as human tracks next to dinosaur tracks, Noah’s Flood, and other extremely embarassing creationist nonsense). But I have never found the actual phrase “intelligent design” in his work. However, in early 2005, I did come across this, in a 1968 work by Wilder-Smith, discussing a certain oh-so-amazingly-complex organ. For some reason the IDers don’t cite this example as a precursor:

To deny planning when studying such a system is to strain credulity more than to ask one to believe in an intelligent nipple designer, who incidentally must have understood hydraulics rather well.

(pp. 144-145 of: Wilder-Smith, A. E. (1968). Man’s origin, man’s destiny: a critical survey of the principles of evolution and Christianity. Wheaton, Ill., H. Shaw. Italics original, bold added.)

There you have it. The origin of “intelligent…design.”

(In fairness, the full quote is posted below the fold.)

A blogger has an interesting report on the event that the Discovery Institute just held for teachers at Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles) University in order to promote their newest disguise for creationism, the textbook sneakily entitled “Explore Evolution.”

I’m sure it’s a just coincidence that the very first person to blog this event – this no-way-it’s-creationism-no-sirree event – did it from the Old Earth Creation Homeschool blog and works for the old-earth creationist ministry Reasons to Believe.

Anyway, here’s the interesting bit:

After you have been in the habit of creationism-watching for a few years you become extremely familiar with all of the usual creationist arguments, half-baked talking points, unchecked assertions taken as obviously true, etc. If you really get into it you learn the creationist movement’s long and specific history, and you learn that whatever form of creationism you are studying at the moment inevitably traces back basically to American protestant fundamentalism, and before that to something sometimes called “naive Biblicism.”*

But there comes a point when you don’t think you can learn anything much new about the creationists. You might stumble on a new mutation of a creationist urban legend or quote mine, or a new bit of creationist history like Dean Kenyon actually being a young-earther despite this fact being carefully hidden by the ID movement for 15+ years. But basically, you don’t expect to find out much that is new.

Well, if you thought you were at this point, you would be wrong. A review article in this week’s Science magazine (with a special focus on behavioral science) shows that scholars can ring out yet another twist in creationism studies.

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:

I have just read the latest post of young-earth creationist/Discovery Institute fellow/Biola professor/blogger John Mark Reynolds. I think I am just going to have to occasionally serve the role of his guilty conscience in matters scientific. He has apparently thrown his own scientific conscience down a well somewhere, or he wouldn’t be able to say the wildly hypocritical things he does.

John Mark Reynolds has put up the second part of an essay he is writing on the topic of how young-earth creationists like himself can rationalize sacrificing their scientific honesty on the altar of Biblical inerrancy. Here was my post on part 1.

Here’s a really stunning bit:

Christianity has a general view of the world that accounts for why science works … it allows the cosmos to be a cosmos (ordered) in a deep sense. Secularism lacks the same strength.

Few things are more ironic than young-earth creationist John Mark Reynolds (theologian at Biola, Discovery Institute fellow, leader in the ID movement) lecturing scientists about truth, stubborn facts, and having an “open philosophy of science.” If there’s an earthquake in LA today, it won’t be the tectonic plates shifting, it will be the simultaneous detonation of thousands of irony meters. How does the man get up in morning, when young-earth creationism is as hopelessly false on the empirical facts as anything ever has been in the whole history of science, and when the fundamentalist movement’s promotion of young-earth creationism is perhaps the biggest example of systematic fraud ever perpetrated on the American public? If you ever need an example of an ID advocate blathering lip service about “truth”, while shamelessly disregarding it in practice at the exact same time, here you go.

This is interesting:

Creationists welcomed their new leaders to Knoxville last weekend for a convention held by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle non-profit that acts as a publishing house and endowment for proponents of intelligent design (ID). The institute supports a dozen senior fellows and more than two dozen other scientists. Staff scientists are working to develop an intelligent design curriculum, and advance copies of Explore Evolution, a biology textbook soon to be released by the organization, were available at the convention. Program Director Stephen Meyer told the crowd it is “premature” to teach intelligent design in public schools. Meyer said, “We encourage people not to push this in schools right now.”

The science of ID isn’t fully developed, and it shouldn’t be pushed in schools, but the revolutionary research movement founded with a textbook is producing another textbook! (and another!)

What has the ID movement been up to, following Kitzmiller and subsequent defeats? Apparently, they are going back to their base. In 2006 and 2007, the ID movement has hosted a number of “conferences” around the country. They call them “conferences” because it sounds scientific, but they are more like weekend revivals, actually, where the ID guys are flown in, give their standard talks to the public, and with a full-time professional apologist like Thomas Woodward (apologetics.org) or Lee Strobel (author of The Case for a Creator, The Case for Christ, etc.) emceeing the event. In fact, the “largest ID conference ever held” was held last September in the Florida Sun Dome, well-known to be a common venue for scientific conferences.

So anyway, this year a series of “Darwin vs. Design” conferences have been set up, apparently in a cookie-cutter format with identical guests and topics, and hosted by Lee Strobel.

The bios of the speakers are online (PDF). This bit is interesting, and shows us another thing that the ID movement has been up to:

Session #3 Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science & Culture, editor of Darwinism, Design and Public Education, and co-author of the forthcoming textbook Explore Evolution, will explain why the information encoded in DNA points powerfully to a designing intelligence.

Oh my, what a clever title for the new Discovery Institute textbook! It’s almost like they picked one of the most common phrases for mainstream evolution education projects and websites, so that they could appear to be teaching science rather than doing religious apologetics.

And as we all know, picking new labels easily solves all conceivable problems with creationist textbooks.

On Wesley R. Elsberry’s blog at antievolution.org, Wesley discusses the recently stated position of the Templeton Foundation on “Intelligent Design”.

The Templeton Foundation, the deep pockets people for science and religion studies, says that its stance has been misconstrued on “intelligent design” in letters to the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street journal.

Pamela Thompson, Templeton Foundation spokesperson, says in her letter to the LA Times:

We do not believe that the science underpinning the intelligent-design movement is sound, we do not support research or programs that deny large areas of well-documented scientific knowledge, and the foundation is a nonpolitical entity and does not engage in or support political movements.

The statement is probably overdone a bit. The Templeton Foundation did fund a number of projects and people in the “intelligent design” creationism movement. While early recognition of the depth of worthlessness and the essential political nature of “intelligent design” creationism was probably too much to ask, certainly by mid-2000 these elements should have been clear to granting entities like the Templeton Foundation. Templeton’s retreat from IDC, though, only became apparent in 2005.

Good to know that even foundations like the Templeton Foundation are taking a clear distance from the scientific vacuity known as Intelligent Design. Not surprising, ID has remained void of scientific research and proposals. At best, we have some pseudo-mathematical musings and an overarching appeal to ignorance.

Hello Panda’s Thumbers. I haven’t posted for quite a few months, although there is news from Kansas that I’ll have to share in just a few days.

But here’s the quick way to put up a post - offer something written by someone else.

A few months ago Pulitzer Price winning author Edward Humes (www.edwardhumes.com) contacted Liz Craig and me at Kansas Citizens for Science, offering us an advance copy of his new book, “Monkey Girl,” about the Dover trial. I had been interviewed by Ed back during the Kansas 2005 “science hearings,” and material about Kansas is in “Monkey Girl” as background material.

We passed the book over to fellow KCFS board member Pat Hayes, whose blog Red State Rabble is a popular daily read for many. Pat loved the book, and wrote an excellent post about it. I’d like to pass Pat’s post on in its entirety, although you can go here and read in its home location if you wish, particularly if you want to follow the links to online book stores or to the audio excerpts. There’s a lot about Kansas here, but this is timely given that the Kansas Board of Education will be voting in just two weeks to throw out the creationist science standards and to adopt the high-quality standards written by the duly-appointed science standards writing committee.

So be sure to read to the end to read Pat’s strong endorsement of “Monkey Girl,” and put it on your reading list when it comes out in just a few days.

Many were taken by surprise by the Cobb County School Board’s decision to settle the Selman case, give up their practice of putting evolution “warning labels” in textbooks, and pay $167,000 in fees to the plaintiffs. They had fought this case for four years, and succeeded in getting the Court of Appeals to vacate the district court decision for a retrial. Perhaps the third time Cobb’s sticker got in front of a court would be the charm.

Well, the reality was that this was not likely at all.

The funny thing about the Discovery Institute’s Media/Judge Jones Complaint Division is how it deals with defeat. Oftentimes we will see weeks and weeks of vigorous posting about this or that political fight – but then, if they lose, they often just completely ignore it, like nothing happened.

We tend to focus on the ID creationists here at PT, but it is worth remembering that outside of the public policy sphere, in the conservative evangelical subculture, it is still the young-earth creationist ministries that are the dominant players.

All year there have been rumors and speculation about the causes of a breakup between the USA branch of Answers in Genesis, which is sinking a huge amount of money into their Creation Museum, and the Australia branch. Blogger Jim Lippard is The Official Expert on all of this, and today he has The Big Scoop on a whole bunch of new details about the schism. Follow the links in his post to see his previous posts tracking the issue throughout 2006.

Someone didn’t get the DI memo in Arkansas:

One of the assembly’s officers, former state lawmaker Gunner DeLay of Fort Smith, is the Republican candidate for attorney general.

DeLay said he wrote a paper in law school on what he says is a teacher’s “right to academic freedom” under the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution to teach subjects that are “scientifically valid.”

He said that could include intelligent design.

“The basis of my paper was that although legislative mandated efforts to teach creation science or intelligent design have been struck down, the courts have left open teaching those theories under an instructor’s First Amendment right to academic freedom,” DeLay said.

Such protected speech would have to have a “scientific basis,” DeLay said, adding that a science teacher “could not come in and say we’re all born under a cabbage leaf.”

“The old creation science is the new intelligent design. And yes, I think it’s scientifically valid,” DeLay said.

Hat Tip: Eric Meikle.

Did you ever wonder what was behind that weird amicus brief that a Hindu group filed (with ID advocate Edward Sisson’s help) in support of the evolution warning label sticker in Selman v. Cobb County? You remember, the one that ended by citing a Supreme Court decision, only the Supreme Court in question was the Supreme Court of India? Well, you’re in luck, because I just came across an article by Meera Nanda on Vedic creationists and the alliance they’ve formed with the more traditional conservative evangelical creationists here the U.S. I’d pay good money to see these two groups in the same room with Harun Yahya…

Over at Darwin Central, some impressively-obsessed blogger has attempted to rate 50 creationist websites on their propensity to use commonly-mined quotes. Methods: (1) start with the quotes in the Talkorigins.org Quote-Mine Project; (2) search for those quotes on the creationist websites; (3) somehow put it all in a relational database; (4) tabulate.

The winner, with 75 of the 158 quotes listed at Talkorigins, was Anointed-one.net/. It is followed by a couple of sites that are primarily creationist quote-mine collections (studying the evolution of such collections would be an interesting project). Answers in Genesis (#9), the ICR website (#8), and Harun Yahya (#5) make the top ten list, but the famous Velikovskian Ted Holden, aka The Inimitable One, beats them all with his website bearfabrique.org (#4). The Discovery Institute comes out at a disappointing #30, but there is a lot of competition out there, and they spend a lot of their time trying to dumb down the education of U.S. children.

All in all, this is a rather impressive effort, and another example of the kind of “creoinformatics” that the web and modern technology makes possible.

Check out this post by Karl Mogel at The Inoculated Mind. It reviews an April 28 talk at UC Davis given by Discovery Institute fellow Nancy Pearcey. Although Pearcey is now an official ID advocate, she was originally a young-earth creationist. In fact, she was one of the editors of the young-earth creationist Bible-Science Newsletter from 1977-1991, and for much of that period wrote monthly articles. As I showed in this PT post last year, several of her Bible-Science Newsletter articles became part of the text of the first “intelligent design” book, Of Pandas and People. The draft of the Overview chapter of Pandas, which was the chapter that Pearcey wrote, shows the same changes from creation/creationist to intelligent design/design proponent that the six “excursion” chapters of Pandas show. This was first made public when the draft Overview chapter was introduced into evidence in a July 14, 2005 pretrial hearing in the Kitzmiller case.

On Uncommon Descent, Dembski shows once again evidence of the historical roots of Intelligent Design and Creationism. In fact, he seems to be suggesting that ID and religious faith are quite intertwined, as much of the evidence already suggested.

Dembski is commenting on Richard Dawkins’ “Root of all Evil” documentary on Channel 4 in the UK.

Dembski Wrote:

You’ve got to wonder what the staffers at the NCSE are thinking when they go to such lengths to assure the public that there’s no problem reconciling evolution and religious faith, only to have Richard Dawkins come along and utter the following (taken from his BBC program “The Root of All Evil?”):

Over on the DI’s new Declaring-Victory-in-Superficial-Public-Debates-Where-No-Federal-Judges-are- -Present-to-Enforce-Actual-Rules-of-Evidence-and-Keep-You-Honest blog, Bruce Chapman highlights a news story on a recent debate at North Carolina State University. Describing the four-person panel, Chapman writes,

North Carolina State University has shown, however, that the topic can be debated with the fairness and civility that ought to characterize academic discussions. On Thursday, April 20, before a crowd of some 200 people, a biologist and philosopher defended intelligent design, and a biologist and philosopher defended Darwinism.

The articles says that the two ID defenders were “Gerald Van Dyke, an NCSU botany professor, and Robert Hambourger, an NCSU associate professor of philosophy.” I was pretty sure I had heard of pretty much all publicly speaking ID supporters who had something resembling a biology PhD – it is easy to remember them, because it is a very short list. So who was this Gerald Van Dyke guy? It turns out he is indeed an honest-to-goodness Professor of Mycology at NCSU. He works on pathogenic fungi that attack agricultural crops.

Even though I didn’t remember him specifically, he seemed familiar for some reason.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I’m always up for a good documentary. The History Channel this week is running a series, 10 days that changed America. According to the website,

The History Channel selected 10 teams of award-winning documentary filmmakers to spotlight “10 historic events that triggered seismic shifts in America’s political, cultural or social landscape.” The programs, including the one filmed in Dayton, include archival footage, reenactments, historic artifacts and interviews.

On Wednesday, April 12^th, they’ll air “Scopes: The Battle over America’s Soul” (9PM EST). Should be interesting; I see that Answers in Genesis is already complaining about it.

Jon Buell, the head of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and publisher of the book Of Pandas and People (Pandas), has written a long essay criticizing Judge Jones’ ruling in the Dover case. That’s hardly a surprise, of course. The judge ruled against his position, how could he do anything but criticize it? Unfortunately for him, his criticisms don’t hold up under scrutiny because they are based on false claims, legal ignorance and, in at least one case, an outright lie. This may be a long one, so let’s get started.

Continue Reading at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there.

Remember how, according to the ID movement, “methodological naturalism” was supposed to be a Darwinist/atheist conspiracy to arbitrarily exclude ID? Well, let’s have a look at who coined the term. Ronald Numbers, one of the leading experts on the history of creationism, writes,

The phrase “methodological naturalism” seems to have been coined by the philosopher Paul de Vries, then at Wheaton College, who introduced it at a conference in 1983 in a paper subsequently published as “Naturalism in the Natural Sciences,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 15(1986), 388-396. De Vries distinguished between what he called “methodological naturalism,” a disciplinary method that says nothing about God’s existence, and “metaphysical naturalism,” which “denies the existence of a transcendent God.”

(p. 320 of: Ronald L. Numbers, 2003. “Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs.” In: When Science and Christianity Meet, edited by David C. Lindberg, Ronald L. Numbers. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, pp. 265-285.)

A few additional points worth noting here:

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.

At some point during the last year I realized that nothing really ever changes in creationism, except perhaps the labelling. This probably occurred in-between the discovery that “intelligent design” originated in 1987 as a new label for the creationism just that year ruled unconstitutional in Edwards v. Aguillard, and watching William Buckingham testify at how personally offended he was that the Dover teachers dare teach just a little bit of the evolution that the Pennsylvania state standards required.

Sometimes, though, not even the labels change. Take the Cobb County “theory not fact” sticker which was stuck in every Cobb County biology textbook as a warning label against evolution. It is on my mind because, while it was been ruled unconstitutional in the January 2005 district court decision Selman v. Cobb County, the hearing for the appeal is scheduled for this week, Thursday, December 15.

Now, “theory not fact” policies are sometimes described as a “new” creationist tactic. But I recently came across some information which dates such policies straight back to good-ol’ days of the Scopes Era, the mid-1920’s, when men were men, monkeys were monkeys, evolution was in effect banned from the textbooks, no one was pretending that protecting Biblical literalism wasn’t the key issue, and William Jennings Bryan was barnstorming around the country decrying the evils of evolution.

The first “theory not fact” policy was in fact passed by the California State Board of Education in 1924-1925. The policy was adopted as – guess what – the Board’s accommodation to fundamentalists protesting the teaching of evolution in California. In 1925, the Board took this policy and applied it to textbooks, turning down those that dared treat evolution as anything more than a (colloquial) “theory.”

The newspaper stories from that day read like they are from The Onion. But they’re for real. Via the Historical Archives of the Los Angeles Times in the ProQuest database (subscription required – go visit your local university library), here is a quote from the July 22, 1925 issue of the Los Angeles Times:

I just stumbled on an interesting old article in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (The ASA is the long-established organization of scientists who are evangelical Christians. The membership ranges from young-earth creationism to theistic evolution).

The article is creationist Nell Segraves’s contribution to a five-person response to the question, “Biblical Creation: Should It Be Taught in the Public Schools as a Mandated Subject Alongside Evolution?” Segraves replied:

Biblical Creation: Should It Be Taught in the Public Schools as a Mandated Subject Alongside Evolution?

From: JASA 33 (December 1981): 231-235

(A public discussion on May 14, 1980 sponsored by the Community Services Office, San Diego Community College, and the Biology Department of San Diego Mesa College.)

Nell Segraves

Nell Segraves is a co-founder and an administrative assistant at the Creation Science Research Center. She has been involved in the evaluation of science, social science and health textbooks for approximately eighteen years.

Those of us involved in the Creationist Movement are not attempting to legislate biblical creation into science classrooms. Biblical creation is a belief that we hold, but we are no more advocating our belief in the Scriptures as a science subject than is the humanist advocating atheism as a subject for classroom discussion in science. The Creation Science Research Center is not attempting to introduce to public schools Bible stories or Bible verses. Neither are the other established responsible Creationist organizations. What we are advocating, rather, is the introduction into the science classroom of scientific data which are currently being excluded…namely, scientific data which conflict with the evolutionary theories of origin, and which are needed for the critical evaluation of evolutionary theories as science.

Yep, all we want to do is just teach the “scientific data which are currently being excluded” and “conflict with the evolutionary theories of origin”, and do some “critical evaluation”! It seems like I’ve heard that before, somewhere.

You might be interested to read about a very rare transitional fossil between creationism and “intelligent design” that was recently discovered by Barbara Forrest during her exploration of some exhibits filed in Kitzmiller v. Dover, namely drafts of the original “intelligent design” book Of Pandas and People.

The amazing beast, “cdesign proponentsists” was discovered directly above strata containing the well-known and ubiquitous species “creationists”. Previous research by Forrest had dated the layer the missing link was found in to the latter half of 1987.