Recently in Scientific Vacuity Category

The Louisiana Coalition for Science has released a press release calling for the Senate to reject the creationist bill approved by the Louisiana House

New group stands up for sound science education in Louisiana

LA Coalition for Science decries House support for SB 733, calls for Senate to reject bill

Baton Rouge, LA, June 11, 2008 — In response to numerous attacks on science education in the Bayou State, concerned parents, teachers and scientists are getting organized. The new group — Louisiana Coalition for Science — calls upon the Senate to oppose SB 733, a bill which will open the door to creationism in public schools.

Spread the news.

Allen MacNeill has yet another interesting contribution (as well as an announcement about a new course). Allen MacNeill:It’s very gratifying to see Lynn Margulis finally getting the recognition that she deserves. As the originator of the serial endosymbiosis theory (SET) for the origin of eukaryotes, Lynn’s work provides an excellent example of how ID should (but currently doesn’t) proceed. During the late 1960s, Lynn published a series of revolutionary papers on the evolution of eukaryotic cells, culminating in her landmark book Symbiosis and Cell Evolution, in which she carefully laid out the empirical evidence supporting the theory that mitochondria, choloroplasts, and undulapodia (eukaryotic cilia and flagella) were once free living bacteria (purple sulfur bacteria, cyanobacteria, and spirochaetes, respectively).

Read the rest at Serial Endosymbiosis and Intelligent Design

Allen makes an excellent case how science progresses and that while science may resist change, the only way to change science is to do hard work, research and show how your ideas form scientifically relevant contributions. This is particularly relevant when it comes to Intelligent Design, whose proponents have chosen it to remain scientifically vacuous, without content. And still they whine about being ‘expelled’ when in fact they are ‘exposed’.

Allen is also organizing Seminar in History of Biology: Evolution and Ethics: Is Morality Natural? at Cornell

COURSE LISTING: BioEE 467/B&Soc 447/Hist 415/S&TS 447 Seminar in History of Biology

SEMESTER: Cornell Six-Week Summer Session, 06/24/08 to 07/31/08

The Washington Post has an excellent editorial on the recent attempts by Intelligent Design Creationists to ‘teach the controversy’ and ‘academic freedom’, observing that

Red-herring arguments about ‘academic freedom’ can’t be allowed to undermine the teaching of evolution.

The editorial points out how these efforts to undermine science are at best misguided.

NO ONE would think it acceptable for a teacher to question the existence of gravity or to suggest that two plus two equals anything but four. It’s mystifying, then, that a movement to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology is attracting some support. Equally perverse is that this misguided effort is being advanced under the false guise of academic freedom.

Michael Le Page at New Scientist discusses Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions.

Shared misconceptions:

Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection
Natural selection is the only means of evolution
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment
Evolution always promotes the survival of species
It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution
“Survival of the fittest” justifies “everyone for themselves”
Evolution is limitlessly creative
Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality
Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Read on for the much longer list of Creationist myths

T Ryan Gregory at Genomicron who is an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada educates us (and perhaps some ID proponents) about some of the common pitfalls in phylogeny. In this case, the posting discusses the findings in a recent paper which argues that the comb jellies and not sponges are the earliest branch.

Another video by DonExodus2 below the fold discussing the infamous list of ‘scientists’ rejecting evolution.

PS: DonExodus mentions that You DeWitt received his undergraduate degree from Case Western Reserve University it was his PhD degree. Minor detail.

From the Biography page at AIG: Dr David A. DeWitt received a B.S. in biochemistry from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Case Western Reserve University. Also the lastest List of ‘doubters’ includes the correct affiliation for DeWitt as Liberty University. The list analyzed by DonExodus is the original list of ‘doubters’

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.

We learn at the Discovery Institute Blog about a recent lecture tour in Spain by ID creationists

Over an eight day period last January, Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (aka DoctorsDoubtingDarwin.com, a rapidly growing, 277-member, physician group from 17 countries) sponsored a lecture tour in Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, Leon and Vigo. It was titled “Lo Que Darwin No Sabia,” or “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” Tom Woodward, Ph.D. (author of Doubts About Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back) and myself (author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links) lectured on eight occasions to exceptionally large audiences. Santiago Escuain was our translator extraordinaire. Rich Akin, the CEO of PSSI, put in enormous hours into making this trip a huge success.

El Pais reports on the ‘successful’ Spain Tour of ‘Lo que Darwin no sabía’. Of course, the DI does admit later on that the success was limited.

Intelligent Design Creationists like Bill Dembski have argued that Woese’s work contradicts evolutionary theory or more specifically common descent and Darwinian theory. See for instance “Woese: Life could have started “millions of times”” or this old posting of mine.

Since many creationists have come to misunderstand Woese’s arguments, the impact on Darwinian evolutionary theory, let’s start exploring Woese’s argument

Dembski’s article which references (and fully reproduces) an article by Ronald Kotulak claims that Woese commented in 2002 that life could have started “millions of times”, a statement I have not been able to track back to his scholarly work.

The 2002 paper is likely: Carl Woese On the evolution of cells PNAS June 25, 2002 vol. 99 no. 13 8742-8747

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.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has released a six section overview on Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

Section 1: Science as a Way of Knowing
Section 2: Science and Society
Section 3: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design
Section 4: Why Intelligent Design is not Science
Section 5: Science Education and Intelligent Design
Section 6: Fairness and Balance in the Classroom and Beyond

I would add another section on the scientific vacuity or infertility of Intelligent Design. Ask yourself this simple question: What non-trivial contribution has Intelligent Design made to our scientific understanding? And ask you then a follow-up question: For those systems which ID claims to be designed, how does ID explain these systems?

The answers, or lack thereof, may surprise you.

HT: NCSE

We are all familiar with the creationist argument about the eye, an argument which Darwin already addressed in his original work. And while creationists are still in much of a denial about eye evolution, science keeps on closing gaps.

In the Australian a second paper addressing eye evolution is discussed.

Oops, someone pointed out to me that this publication preceded the DI’s press tour.

Poor Discovery Institute, after spending much time and effort on trying, unsuccessfully, to generate some media interest on the Gonzalez tenure case, all they got was a cynical response from Mac Johnson at the conservative site Human Events.com.

So in light of the issue’s new prominence and with a desire to improve the mental hygiene of others, I would just like to say that Intelligent Design is a really, really bad idea –scientifically, politically, and theologically. I say this as a dedicated conservative, who has on many occasions defended and espoused religion and religious conservatism. I also say it as a professional molecular biologist, who has worked daily (or at least week-daily) for years with biological problems to which the theory of evolution has contributed significant understanding – and to which Intelligent Design is incapable of contributing any understanding at all.

Intelligent Design is a career-killer. There’s just no two ways about it. And not because of how peers treat the ID supporter; they throw their own productivity under the bus, to use Casey Luskin’s overworked cliche. We saw the same thing with Behe and Dembski. Behe has published ONE peer-reviewed paper in the last decade. And Dembski… well, does anybody even know where he works these days?

All hyperbole aside, let’s look at Gonzalez’s publication track record…

Continue reading at Neurotopia

The Discovery Institute, after having realized that Intelligent Design is doomed to remain scientifically infertile and vacuous and after their devastating loss at the Dover trial, seems to have retreated to their fundamental opposition to materialism. Hopelessly confused by Phil Johnson’s misunderstanding of methodological and philosophical naturalism, the DI seems to be intent to blame evil Darwinists for immoral behaviors such as eugenics.

Let me start of by pointing out that any such attempt is doomed from the beginning for the simple reason that the Discovery Institute and other ID Creationists have claimed that Darwinism cannot provide foundation for morality, or in other words, Darwinism cannot serve as a principle on which to build a decision of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. This means that Eugenics cannot have a foundation in amoral scientific concepts lest there exists an external principle on which to base the decision as to what is good and bad for society.

People should therefor not be surprised that eugenics has been a principle which preceded Darwinism. Equally unsurprised will be the well informed readers who are familiar with the eugenic history of Christian evangelicals in the United States.

But I digress. The Discovery Institute, after having come to the inevitable conclusion that Intelligent Design is likely to remain without scientific relevance has changed its approach. While I predict that their attempts will become an ever greater disaster than their attempts to introduce the concept of Intelligent Design into schools, there is an even greater concern. Namely by violating St Augustine’s fair warnings about Christians saying foolish things (about science), an observer may easily come to reject the whole teaching of Christianity as a similarly foolish enterprise.

From Mike Elzinga whose comments deserve their own posting

It doesn’t require a federal judge to figure out if ID/Creationism is a science or not.

Anyone can go through the list of activities of the ID/Creationists and pseudo-scientists and compare them to the activities of working scientists.

Do typical working scientists engage in the following activities when advancing new ideas?

Do they pitch them to naive audiences while complaining they can’t get a fair hearing in the science community? Do they form institutes that spend millions of dollars to crank out propaganda pushing their idea and criticizing the scientific community? Do they issue talking points to grass-roots organizations and political groups to be argued in churches and local newspapers around the country? Do they publish books on their ideas in the popular press and claim they are peer-reviewed?

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.

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

On Bill O’Reilly, Ben Stein made the following claim:

Ben Stein Wrote:

ID is an effort to fill in the gaps, and is a sincere effort to add new knowledge to the theory.

(paraphrased)

Nice to know that ID is in the business of filling the gaps, seems that Ben Stein does realize that ID is just a variant of God of the Gaps. However, like so many other ID proponents, Ben has been misled to believe that ID adds new knowledge to the theory. It doesn’t. Did he not get Bill’s memo? Did Ben not get a copy of the Wedge document?

Bill Dembski Wrote:

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.”

Since ID proponents argue, without much merit, that they are being censored, I invite them to explain on this thread to us what knowledge ID has added to science. Ideally, this would be knowledge which would not have been added to science were it not for Intelligent Design’s “revolutionary approach” which involved avoiding to deal in ‘pathetic levels of detail’.

Read more at Pharyngula

In the comments section of an earlier posting in which I explored the “arguments” from an ID proponent as to why the suckling behavior of whales shows evidence of Intelligent Design, Duncan posted the following rebuttal by Dr Colin D MacLeod

Duncan Wrote:

The comment about whales and their nipples being evidence of Intelligent Design was published in a letter to the Scottish newspaper The Herald, and seems to derive from a 1938 book by the Creationist Douglas Deraw, entitled “More Difficulties of the Evolution Theory”. The claim received a pretty terminal rebuttal on 20 October, with the publication of the following letter:

Laurence Moran at Sandwalk comments on a video excerpt with Bill Dembski, recently touted by the Discovery Institute’s Robert Crowther. What is fascinating that despite more than a decade of Intelligent Design ‘research’ this is the best ID has to offer.

Ironically, Dembski starts of by stating that “what darwinists have done is hidden behind complexities of living systems”. How ironic can this be… While science, as I have shown in several examples, deals in explanations, pathways and hypotheses, Intelligent Design has contributed exactly zero to our scientific understanding of these systems. Worse, while Dembski mentions some complex systems, he also avoids some examples of complex systems science understands quite well how they may have evolved.

My thanks to Robert Crowther for presenting the “best’ response ID has to offer. You be the judge.

On ERV’s blog we find an article titled Irreducible Complexity Reflects Human Ignorance about Phillip Klebba, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma. It was Klebba’s relentless questions during the Q&A of Dembski’s talk at the Trinity Baptist Church Oklahoma University in Norman Oklahoma which forced Dembski to admit to the level of ignorance that is required for ID.

The Baptist Trinity Church had invited Dembski “to penetrate the university campus with the gospel” (source). After all, what better way to introduce the students to the gospel than through the ideas of William Dembski? Dembski presented a talk titled “Why Atheism is no Longer Intellectually Fulfilling: The Challenge of Intelligent Design to Unintelligent Evolution”. During the Q&A, Dembski found out that the students were not impressed by his arguments. While Dembski may have contributed to the successes of Atheism on the University, he also managed to show to the audience present why ID is scientifically vacuous.

The Committee on Culture, Science and Education has revised its working document after an earlier submission had been delayed. The Committee has done an excellent job at distinguishing between the scientifically vacuous concepts of creationism and Intelligent Design while still ensuring that freedom of religion is not affected

Not surprisingly the reaction from ID has been predictable. Davescot calls it “A Socialist Manifesto on Evolution.”, ignoring the varied makeup of the committee. Why the ad hominem response? Because the Committee has reached some accurate conclusions about Intelligent Design.

The intelligent design movement would seem to be anti-science for several reasons. Firstly, the nature of the science is distorted. Secondly, the objectives of the science are distorted. The writings of the leaders of this movement show that their motivations and objectives are not scientific but religious.

The intelligent design ideas annihilate any research process. It identifies difficulties and immediately jumps to the conclusion that the only way to resolve them is to resort to an intelligent cause without looking for other explanations. It is thus unacceptable to want to teach it in science courses. It is not enough to present it as an alternative theory in order to have it included in the science syllabus. In order to claim to be scientific, it is only necessary to refer to natural causes in one’s explanations. The intelligent design ideas, however, only refers to supernatural causes.

Does this mean that there is no place for ID? Of course not.

Remember that Dembski and others have admitted that processes of variation and selection (chance and regularity) can in fact increase the information content of the genome. As such, it seems that whether or not Dawkins can explain the origin of information, seem irrelevant. However, as Ridlon shows, Dawkins indeed attempted to explain the origin of information in the genome. I invite Casey Luskin, or other ID proponents, to explain why they believe Dawkins’ explanation is flawed. In addition, I invite them to either admit or deny that Dembski and others have dropped the flawed argument that processes of regularity and chance cannot create information in the genome?

JM Ridlon Wrote:

If you will notice, Casey Luskin’s article “Richard Dawkins on the Origin of Genetic Information” has been updated. I emailed Casey yesterday and mentioned that the EvolutionNews blog statement of purpose is as such:

“The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution.”

Yet he failed to mention that Dawkins rebutted the video and very nicely answered the challenge: http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/dawkins.htm. This is a prime example of “sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased”. A quick google search of “Dawkins and Information” would have been enough research to have discovered Dawkins response.

Therefore, while I commend Luskin for posting the rebuttal, he still is not excused from poor research. He also doesn’t admit that Dawkins answered the question (Luskin says: Read Dawkins’ response at http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/dawkins.htm and see if he still has yet to satisfactorily answer the question!).

Now that Luskin admits that Dawkins answers the “Information Challenge”, I think someone on Panda’s Thumb should challenge Luskin, who says, “Read Dawkins’ response … and see if he still has yet to satisfactorily answer the question!”, to show where Dawkins is wrong. Don’t let him off the hook here.

It seems that ID has chosen to rekindle the ‘how does evolution create information’ question. See for instance “Richard Dawkins on the Origin of Genetic Information” at EvolutionNews.org where spokesperson Luskin presents this question. And yet, the question has been answered many times, so why are ID activist ignoring these explanations or pretending that it has not been answered succinctly and successfully?

One of the basic claims of ID is that processes of regularity and chance cannot create complex specified information. ID relies here on an equivocation of the term ‘information’ since ID’s definition of information is merely a measure of our inability to explain it. In other words, unlike the complexity and information that science can explain, ID relies on that which science cannot explain (yet?) and calls it complexity or information.

Confused? I bet… Many ID proponents have similarly fallen victim to the bait and switch approach here.

So whenever ID states that science cannot explain complex specified information, all one has to do is point out the tautological nature of the claim. When ID then switches to the more common definition of information and complexity, it is trivial to show how evolutionary processes can indeed generate in principle information and complexity.

The real question then becomes: Where these processes indeed involved in the evolution of life on earth? While science provides a rich framework to study these questions, ID is left at the sidelines, unable to contribute anything relevant since it refuses to constrain its designer, it refuses to provide pathways and processes.

And remember, whenever science proposes a pathway, all ID can do is reject a strawman version of it, namely a pathways based on pure chance. Of course, any non trivial scientific pathway is inaccessible to the calculations needed by ID to make its case.

On “Threads from Henry’s Web”, Henry Neufeld writes more about Colling and ‘teaching the controversy’

This action shows some of the destructive potential of ignorance, but it also removes any fig-leaf of respectability from the “teach the controversy” argument. The advocates of creationism generally do not want the controversy taught. They want to win. If they were to win a court case allowing their materials into the public school classrooms, their next move would be to prevent critical examination of those ideas, and then to prevent the teaching of evolutionary theory itself. I simply don’t believe the public propaganda. I never have, but the evidence that it is pure propaganda just keeps building up.

Henry describes himself as “… an author and lecturer, owner of Energion Publications, and president of Pacesetters Bible School.” His description of the problems and risks of ID seem timely and to the point.

On Evolution News, Crowther argues that

The Privileged Planet: Such a Dangerous Idea Its Author Had To Be Stifled

Of course, most who are familiar with the facts will understand that Crowther’s assertions are without much merit. First of all, even Hauptman, who spoke out against Gonzalez, was clear to state that it was the scientific vacuity of ID which affected his vote about Gonzalez.

“[But] intelligent design is not even a theory. It has not made its first prediction, nor suffered its first test by measurement. Its proponents can call it anything they like, but it is not science,” added Hauptman. “It is purely a question of what is science and what is not, and a physics department is not obligated to support notions that do not even begin to meet scientific standards.

Although some have called systems biology a ‘friend of Intelligent Design’, reality is that systems biology is all but a friend of what is best known as ‘ignorance’.

In a recent article in BioSystems 88 (2007) 163–172, titled “Alternative routes and mutational robustness in complex regulatory networks”, Andreas Wagner and Jeremiah White describe how

Alternative pathways through a gene regulation network connect a regulatory molecule to its (indirect) regulatory target via different intermediate regulators. We here show for two large transcriptional regulation networks, and for 15 different signal transduction networks, that multiple alternative pathways between regulator and target pairs are the rule rather than the exception. We find that in the yeast transcriptional regulation network intermediate regulators that are part of many alternative pathways between a regulator and target pair evolve at faster rates. This variation is not solely explicable by higher expression levels of such regulators, nor is it solely explicable by their variable usage in different physiological or environmental conditions, as indicated by their variable expression. This suggests that such pathways can continue to function despite amino acid changes that may impair one intermediate regulator. Our results underscore the importance of systems biology approaches to understand functional and evolutionary constraints on genes and proteins.

So while ID proponents are arguing for an ‘edge’ to evolution, real science is uncovering a remarkable richness for evolution.

So let me ask the following question: Who has contributed to scientific knowledge here?

At Darwin or Design Jason Rennie talks to Dr Ryan Nichols. Dr Nichols wrote an interesting paper called Scientific content, testability, and the vacuity of Intelligent Design.

There are Hours of additional content

I appreciate Rennie’s link to Scientific content, testability, and the vacuity of Intelligent Design where I discuss Nichols’ paper and the vacuity of ID.

The actual paper by Nichols does not seem to be available online: Ryan Nichols, Scientific content, testability, and the vacuity of Intelligent Design theory The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2003 ,vol. 77 ,no 4 ,pp. 591 - 611.

Direct link to podcast

It’s another day, and Casey “The Energizer Bunny” Luskin is at it again, claiming that ID successfully predicted that “junk DNA” would be found to have a function. He has yet to explain how and why he believes that “Darwinism” somehow stifled research into those areas of the genome, and ignores the fact that scientists routinely use our understanding of evolution, common descent, and natural selection to identify areas of the genome to identify non-coding regions that are likely to have function. He does, however, provide us with an explanation for why he thinks that Intelligent Design somehow “predicts” function for all of the so-called “junk” DNA:

Intelligent design begins by studying the types of complexity produced by intelligent agents. We observe that intelligent agents produce things for a purpose, that is, to fulfill some function. This leads ID proponents to an expectation—yes, a prediction—that DNA will not tend to contain meaningless junk but will contain structures that have (or once had) a function for the organism. ID does not lead us to the expectation that our cells’ DNA will be largely non-functional garbate. The hypothesis—that “junk”-DNA will have function—is obviously experimentally testable. In fact, I know pro-ID biologists studying the function of junk-DNA who were inspired to do such research due to intelligent design. One biologist in particular is not yet tenured, and so I will not disclose his/her name. Suffice it to say, for this biologist, finding function for non-coding DNA was directly inspired by intelligent design.

If that explanation looks familiar to you, it should. It’s pretty much the same one he gave last month. This leads me to my two challenges - one that’s addressed to most of you, and one just for Casey:

Read more (at The Questionable Authority, where comments may be left):

Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross have a paper titled Biochemistry by design published in TRENDS in Biochemical Sciences Vol.32 No.7 , 2007. (10 pages including 1.75 pages of references) I am not surprised why the defense in the Kitzmiller trial tried to get Forrest removed as an expert witness.

Creationists are attempting to use biochemistry to win acceptance for their doctrine in the public mind and especially in state-funded schools. Biochemist Michael Behe is a major figure in this effort. His contention that certain cellular structures and biochemical processes – bacterial flagella, the blood-clotting cascade and the vertebrate immune system – cannot be the products of evolution has generated vigorous opposition from fellow scientists, many of whom have refuted Behe’s claims. Yet, despite these refutations and a decisive defeat in a US federal court case, Behe and his associates at the Discovery Institute continue to cultivate American supporters. They are also stepping up their efforts abroad and, worryingly, have achieved some success. Should biochemists (and other scientists) be concerned? We think they should be.

I apologize to James Hall for using his phrase in describing what Robert Crowther, and other Intelligent Design proponents, seem to be involved in when they are objecting to the simple fact that Intelligent Design is a straightforward argument from ignorance.

The problem is that ID proponents have used equivocating language which has led to much confusion amongst its followers. I cannot blame Crowther for taking serious the claims of his DI fellows, but merely claiming that ID is not an argument from ignorance is merely begging the question.

While it is relatively straightforward to reach the conclusion that ID is an argument from ignorance, it does require some careful analysis of how various terminologies are being used by ID proponents.