Is it just me, or is there something particularly ludicrous and pitiful about Ruse (or anyone) discussing with Paul Nelson what evidence would make Paul Nelson change his mind about ID, when Nelson isn’t even man enough to lift his head up out of the sand the tiny bit required to admit that the earth is old, that this is a hard evidentiary fact, that denying it is as perverse as denying that the Earth is round, and that the promotion of the young-earth view in evangelical churches is one of the greatest frauds in American history?

Of course, Ruse is too much of a softy to ask these kinds of questions,* which is exactly why the IDers keep inviting him (and paying him) to do these debates.

(* To be clear: Ruse is useful and a pro-science warrior on many things, but one thing he doesn’t do much of is challenge the creationists scientifically and force them to deal with the hard evidence that challenges their beliefs. Doing this takes a lot more work of course and only a few people are good at it.)

According to the Waco Tribune‘s story on the Baylor controversy:

Intelligent design asserts that certain things in the universe can result only from an intelligent cause or God.

HT: Andrea Bottaro

The NCSE reports on some “shocking” developments in Texas

McLeroy accused of hostility to science education and religious tolerance

In a press release dated August 7, 2007, the Texas Freedom Network accused Don McLeroy, who recently was appointed as the new chair of the Texas state Board of Education, of harboring “a shocking hostility to both sound science education and religious tolerance.” TFN’s charge was based on the transcript of a 2005 talk McLeroy gave at Grace Bible Church in Bryan, Texas, on the debate over teaching evolution and “intelligent design.” “This recording makes clear the very real danger that Texas schoolchildren may soon be learning more about the religious beliefs of politicians than about sound science in their biology classes,” TFN President Kathy Miller said. “Even worse, it appears that Don McLeroy believes anyone who disagrees with him can’t be a true Christian.”

I wonder how the many Christians who disagree with McLeroy feel about this?

And for those who were wondering about the nature of Intelligent Design, they need not worry any further:

Denyse O’Leary notes some of the differences between creationists and Intelligent Design proponents:

Then the creationists in turn help the ID theorists by making clear what creationism is and what it is not. Creationism is about the BIBLE, see? It’s not about intelligent design theories like Behe’s* Edge of Evolution or Dembski’s design inference.

It’s extremely uncommon for me to find myself in agreement with Denyse on anything (and it’s not a comfortable feeling), but in this case I do think she’s got a good point. Creationism is certainly explicitly based on the Bible, and Intelligent Design certainly is not. In fact, that’s probably the Achilles’ Heel of the entire Intelligent Design movement.

Say what you will about the Young-Earth creationists, about Ken Ham and Kent “Prisoner #06452-017” Hovind, they are steadfast in their belief in the literal truth of the Bible, and steadfast in their refusal to lie about that belief. They believe that they are right, and they are not willing to publicly deny their faith. In that, they stand in stark contrast to Intelligent Design.

Over on UD, Paul Nelson claims that he is representing the “Darwinian tree of life” position correctly when he asserts that the tree must trace to a single cell, not just a single species:

It looks like somebody either never heard of Dover, or refused to learn from their lesson. It seems the local ID supporters of Chesterfield County aren’t happy:

So far, the official actions of the CCSB have been limited to issuing a rather vague and confusing statement. ID proponents had hoped to influence the selection of science textbooks, but they started their campaign too late, and the CCSB approved the selection of standard biology texts. But there is still much concern about the situation in Chesterfield. ID supporters, backed by a local conservative group called the Family Foundation, are energetic and well-organized, as evidenced by their ability to deliver a petition with more than 1,100 people who questioned the use of “evolution-only” science texts.

Energetic and well-organized supporters of pseudoscience… sounds like a one-way ticket to another budget-busting, unwinnable multimillion dollar lawsuit. Virginia, you can do better than these guys.

The Alliance for Science has the full story. If you are a Virginia resident and want to get involved, please contact them. Also, visit the link to learn much more about the story, and also about Shawn Smith’s blog that tracks the Intelligent Design Creationism movement in Chesterfield County. Let’s keep sound science in Virginia science classes and get the jump on things before they can stir up trouble.

Crossposted at Neurotopia

Over at Uncommon Descent, the blog of William Dembski and friends, a contributor has a post up discussing Peter Duesberg’s aneuploidy hypothesis for cancer (which Orac discussed here for more background). The post itself is a bit confusing–it’s titled “When Darwinism Hurts,” and according to the author’s clarification, it’s about “Darwinism” leading us down the wrong path as far as cancer research goes. (Though whether cancer would be due to mutations in specific genes or in chromosomes, it’s still an evolutionary process, but I digress…) To me, anyway, the more interesting portion was in the comments section, where both DaveScot and Sal Cordova imply also that HIV might not cause AIDS; more over at Aetiology.

Given all of the recent ignorant yammering about “junk DNA” on the Discovery Institute’s blog and other ID blogs – unfortunately partially derived from a fair bit of ignorant yammering in the science media on the same topic – I think it is worth it to post a very simple and insightful post from April 2007 by T. Ryan Gregory entitled “The Onion Test.” Gregory is a professor at the University of Guelph and runs genomesize.org, an online database of animal genome sizes. He has recently become one heck of science blogger (at Genomicron) and has been doing a yeoman’s job of attempting to explain patiently and calmly to the world what the real scientific issues are with genome size, the “junk DNA” concept, and the problems with the ubiquitous-but-bogus storyline about junk DNA. Said ubiquitous-but-bogus storyline goes something like this: “Scientists have found that junk DNA is functional! Weren’t scientists (er, other scientists) stupid to think it was junk! What morons! Three cheers for our pet idea, which is that junk DNA does X.” ID advocates, who don’t even have an “X”, repeat the story but instead just riff off the vague idea that someone somewhere has explained what the function of “junk DNA” is, have played this storyline for all it’s worth, adding a completely vapid “We told you so!” on top of it.

For a dose of reality, I recommend that everyone read Gregory’s Onion Test. I quote it below for your convenience.

Well, my own personal copy of Michael Behe’s new book The Edge of Evolution arrived via amazon.com today, so I suppose it is fair game. I have linked to a few early blog comments (see more from ERV), and Michael Ruse has a short newspaper comment out today. And several other reviews are coming out in the near future in Science, Discover, etc. None of them positive at all, but it’s amazing how much attention someone can get by sacrificing scientific rigour and inserting divine intervention instead.

I don’t have a full review of the book and I won’t for a bit since I am working on other things. But I want to get dibs on one peripheral but particularly shocking and egregious error that Behe makes in The Edge of Evolution. The error is simple but it points to what I have become convinced is the true core of the mishmash known as “intelligent design”: sloppiness and wishful thinking.

So I guess DaveScot and Dembski didn’t like Mark Chu-Carroll’s critique (which I linked to) of Behe’s usage of fitness landscape concepts in The Edge of Evolution.

Well, if anyone is still having trouble getting it, check out Good Virus, Bad Creationist at the blog ERV. The reason I say it’s the best Behe critique ever is the style. L.O.L.

PS: And watch out for ERV. She’s clearly going to run the planet someday, or at least the NIH.

Review copies of Michael Behe’s new book The Edge of Evolution are now out – the book is officially coming out on June 5 – and now the reviews are starting. Mark C. Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math, has beat us all to the punch. I perceived many of these problems while giving The Edge of Evolution my own read-through, but it takes a mathematician to comment on Behe’s abuse of fitness landscapes and probability arguments with the appropriate sense of outrage.

I am sure we will have much more on Behe’s latest starting in June. My first take is that The Edge of Evolution is basically an incompetent attempt to provide a biological foundation for the silly assumptions that were made in Behe and Snoke’s (2004) mathematical modeling paper in Protein Science. (You will recall that it received its most thorough critique here at PT and also in a rebuttal written in Protein Science by Michael Lynch; and a biological rebuttal in this 2006 paper in Science – see also summary by Adami.)

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.

This just in from Randy Olson. Free to forward:

FLOCK OF DODOS airing on Showtime Thursday May 17 at 8:30 EST/PST

Facts regarding status of tenure case at Iowa State

Partial quote:

Why was tenure not granted to Guillermo Gonzalez?

Dr. Gonzalez was evaluated for tenure and promotion to associate professor by the tenured faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. That evaluation was based on an assessment of the excellence of his teaching, service, scholarly research publications and research funding in astronomy, using standards and expectations set by the department faculty. The consensus of the tenured department faculty, the department chair, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the executive vice president and provost was that tenure should not be granted. Based on recommendations against granting tenure and promotion at every prior level of review, and his own review of the record, President Gregory Geoffroy notified Gonzalez in April that he would not be granted tenure and promotion to associate professor.

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:

The Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin is all atwitter about a new web article from German creationist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig [1] about how the giraffe is some kind of massive problem for evolution. Major planks [2] include the alleged lack of transitional fossils between the different fossil giraffe genera (never mind that creationists elsewhere typically accept that the differences between mammalian genera are small, and put the “created kind” or “basic type” at a higher taxonomic level), some confusion about whether one of the giraffe vertebrae is cervical or thoracic or something in between (note to creationists: read about homeotic shifts), and the allegation that there is no evidence for a feeding advantage for tall giraffes, relying on the fact that male giraffes are taller than female giraffes and a 1996 paper in American Naturalist (Simmons & Scheepers 1996, “Winning by a Neck: Sexual Selection in the Evolution of Giraffe”) that attempted to buck conventional wisdom and suggest that sexual selection was the cause of long necks in giraffes.

Sadly, the last plank is particularly bogus, since it completely ignores and displays no knowledge of a massively relevant and quite brilliant paper, published just back in January 2007 in American Naturalist, that constitutes an experimental demonstration of the relative feeding advantage of giraffe height:

The American Enterprise Institute has an interesting discussion title Darwinism and conservatism: Friends and Foes? with Larry Arnhart, from the Northern Illinois University and John Derbyshire, from the National Review, and George Gilder, and John West, from the Discovery Institute.

Gilder ended with a particularly ironic comment about emergent properties

George Gilder wrote:

When people talk about emergence, it’s a new popular way of saying “I have no clue”.

Does Gilder realize how this describes ID far better?

As a side note: West repeated the specious claim that Doug Axe’s probabilities were relevant to a working protein.

John Derbyshire’s contribution is excellent.

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’d like to direct you all over to Red State Rabble to read Pat Hayes’ post this morning entitled “Discovery’s Disturbing Legacy.”

The ID movement has failed scientifically (never having got off the ground), in the courts, and at the ballot box in school Board elections at the state and local level. This has not fazed the Discovery Institute, which is now concentrating on the culture war tactic of associating science (“Darwinism”) with Nazism, eugenics and other cultural evils.

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.

Well, not exactly… But the following press release allows us to explore a common confusion amongst ID proponents, in addition to providing more compelling evidence supporting common descent.

The origin of the brain lies in a worm: Researchers discover that the centralised nervous system of vertebrates is much older than expected

First of all, an “ancient” evolutionary prediction

The findings provide strong evidence for a theory that was first put forward by zoologist Anton Dohrn in 1875. It states that vertebrate and annelid CNS are of common descent and vertebrates have turned themselves upside down throughout the course of evolution.

So how come UcD ‘contributor’ DaveScot considers the findings an argument from incredulity? And what are ID’s explanations and or predictions?

A detailed eyewitness report on the Discovery Institute’s conference revival at Southern Methodist University last weekend has been published. This bit (p. 3) is particularly good:

At this point, we were fed up with the sheer lack of science being discussed. (Remember, ID theorists claim to support a science, not a religion.) So we held up our signs. They bore questions such as, “Why do we have wisdom teeth if they do not fit our jaws?” and “Why did it take 20 species of elephant to go extinct to get two species that survived?” and “Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?” to name a few.

by Douglas L. Theobald

As many of you undoubtedly know, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor is the Discovery Institute’s latest garrulous creationist mouthpiece. In a recent blog entry responding to Michael Lemonick of Time Magazine, Egnor claims that the 19^th century scientists Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell used “the inference to design” to study electricity:

“Let’s ask: what role did the inference to design play for scientists who gave us electricity? … The two scientific pioneers of classical electromagnetism, Faraday and Maxwell, were particularly devout Christians who inferred design everywhere in nature. They believed that God designed everything — including electricity. Their approach to science was pure design inference, undiluted by atheism or materialism…. They worked entirely from the design inference.”

Faraday and Maxwell were Christians who did indeed see design in nature. However, Egnor has it backwards.

The SMU Campus newspaper carried an opinion piece written by Ben Wells who is a junior anthropology major.

The article starts out by describing the political and religious foundation behind the Discovery Institute’s actions

This weekend Dedman Law School’s Christian Legal Society will be hosting a controversial and well-known institute that preaches a religious message masked in a capsule of pseudoscience.

Indeed, the Wedge document outlines clearly how Intelligent Design is meant to be a religious and not necessarily a scientific issue.

A controversial document (reported as the Wedge Document, a 1998 internal memo) stated the Institute’s goal was to “drive a wedge” into “scientific materialism” in order to divorce it from its purely observational and naturalistic methodology and stop the deleterious effects of evolution on Western culture.

Two weeks ago, I demonstrated to Dr. Michael Egnor that his knowledge of early molecular genetics was severely flawed. He responded yesterday, calling me a “pseudo-Darwinist” because those experiments involved, according to him, “designed” variation and “artificial” selection, not random “undesigned” variation and “natural” selection.

He is of course wrong about the experiments, but his rantings about pseudo-Darwinism bring up an interesting point: Egnor himself is a “pseudo-Darwinist”, drawing an absolute dichotomy between natural and artificial selection when it suits him and blurring the two when it doesn’t. Eugenics, according to Egnor, is both the “single incontrovertible Darwinian contribution to the field of medical genetics” (3/28) and the “antithesis of Darwin’s theory” (4/9). But such rhetorical contradictions are what we have come to expect from creationists and ID activists.

For a more detailed trip to the woodshed you can read the following two posts.

My “Backed into a Corner, Egnor Cannot Keep His Arguments Straight”

Orac’s “Irony meter about to explode. Must. Escape”

Bill Dembski and company are having a self-congratulatory session about a new “pro-ID” paper published by Finnish researchers Matti Leisola and Ossi Turunen in Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. Looking at the paper, you wouldn’t know that it’s a “pro-ID” paper at all because it contains not one shred of evidence in favor of ID, nor does it even try directly arguing for ID (compare this to the Meyer paper, which while riddled with errors, at least put forth pro-ID arguments). On what basis could it possibly be a pro-ID paper? If it weren’t for the fact that Matti Leisola is a creationist, there would be no reason to believe it was intended as such at all.

Nevertheless, Dembski apparently thinks that it’s a pro-ID paper on the basis of its content, presumably because he conflates rational design methodology as used in protein engineering with ID. Of course this is nonsense, and in reality the paper is merely a redundant review of the current state of protein engineering techniques, with most of the space dedicated to the very long list of successes enjoyed by evolutionary methods. There are much better reviews out there, but nevertheless Leisola and Turunen give a decent (if too limited) overview of directed evolution experiments. Then they proceed to argue that rational design methods will start working better once we have more detailed knowledge of the mechanism by which the primary sequence of a protein determines its structure and function. This is an obvious and noncontroversial conclusion, so one is still left wondering how this could possibly be spun as “pro-ID”. I’ll say more about that in a minute, but first let me give a quick overview of the state of protein engineering as it exists today.

In 1999-2000, the Kansas State Board of Education was running their PR machine full-bore, trying to convince the public that the central organizing theory of modern biology and biotechnology was a dead idea. Creationist speaker after creationist speaker was flown into town to put on a dog and pony show. If you were a Young-Earth Creationist, you might have seen Duane Gish/Fred Whitehead nondebate. If you liked ID creationism, you might have seen Johnson or Wells. Back then, it was a very big tent.

Well, KCFS wasn’t going to take things lying down, so we thought we’d prepare a few flyers to inform the audience to help them be ready for the creationists when they arrived. One of those flyers, “Jonathan Wells: Who is He, What is He Doing, and Why?” turned out to be pretty important.

Fast forward to Spring 2005, after the creationists had taken over the state board of education again and ran roughshod over the accepted processes of curricular review. They rejected the recommendations of the experts who developed very good standards and held a show trial, in which evolution would be dragged before them to answer the tough ID creationists’ questions.

The details of the story are described elsewhere, but one of the “witnesses” was Jonathan Wells, who during his testimony claimed that he was not influenced by religion. Within the span of an hour, KCFS was able to print several copies of our Wells flyer to distribute to interested members of the press. The result was that in the following day’s newspapers, Jonathan Wells testimony and his quotations were seen in juxtaposition to each other, making of his credibility to journalists what those in the know had deemed of it for years.

Find the flyer on the flipside. It’s also available in RTF format. Please note that the DI has since changed their name from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to simply the Center for Science and Culture. So clearly it’s no longer religious.

I’m sure you’ve seen the posts here at Panda’s Thumb or over at Scienceblogs about the Discovery Institute’s newest protégé, Dr. Michael Egnor. A professor of neurosurgery at SUNY-Stony Brook, Dr. Egnor has been pontificating on how “Darwinism” has nothing to offer to medicine; and indeed, that evolutionary biology has “hijacked” other fields of study. Mike has already aptly pointed out many of Egnor’s strawmen and intellectual dishonesties, so I won’t review them all. I’ve stayed out of the fray until now because I’ve had limited time and others have been handling it quite ably, but he keeps treading into (and butchering) my territory, so I just wanted to point out a few other things Egnor is waving away when he makes statements like this:

Preventing the emergence of resistant strains of bacteria is important work, but the insight that Darwinism brings to the problem – the unkilled ones eventually outnumber the killed ones – is of no help. We can figure that out ourselves. The tough work on preventing the emergence of resistant bacteria is done by microbiologists, epidemiologists, molecular geneticists, pharmacologists, and physicians who are infectious disease specialists. Darwinism, understood as the view that “chance and necessity” explains all biological complexity, plays no role.

Sigh.

Others have already addressed the blatant ignorance of this statement (spouted following a paragraph wherein he claims that the evolution of antibiotic resistance is just a tautology), so I’m actually going to leave the antibiotic resistance stuff alone for the time being. What I want to address instead are other areas where evolution is critical for insights into many of those fields Egnor mentions, especially since my own research is at the convergence of the first three he lists: microbiology, epidemiology, and molecular genetics.

(Continued over at Aetiology).

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.

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.

How does Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly respond when asked on NPR about the poor quality of its entries?

Carl Zimmer has transcribed the response.

A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of “accident” in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum.

Why?

Read on at Evolving Thoughts

Last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education had several letters responding to J. Scott Turner’s January 19 piece that rhetorically asked, “Why Can’t We Discuss Intelligent Design?” One of them was actually from me. I sent it back in January and figured it had been forgotten about, but I guess not. It is cut down a bit, but has the essential points. See also good replies from David Barash and Gred Laden.

The letters are freely available at the CHE website not freely available, so I will post the text of my original submission below the fold.

Our local “Dissenter from Darwinism,” Fred Skiff, gave a talk last Friday. Prior to the talk, I predicted:

One, that Skiff will provide a strawman version of evolutionary theory (heck, and science itself) as he did last time I saw him speak… Two, that Skiff will assert or imply that evolution implies atheism, and that if one accepts methodological naturalism, one therefore must also accept philosophical naturalism, and choose between evolutionary theory and their religious beliefs. Three, that he will assert that “intelligent design” is the sensible alternative to “orthodox” science, but its study is being repressed by “Darwinists” or something of that nature.

All I gotta say is: damn, I’m good. In a bit of what I assume was unintended irony, Skiff was introduced with a comment noting that discussions about intelligent design frequently generated “heat” but not a lot of “light,” after which Skiff spent much of his time railing against “Darwinists” and “Darwinism,” creating a strawman presentation of evolutionary biology, misinforming about theRichard Sternberg case, claiming that supporters of evolution were out to make it “illegal to question Darwinism” and that the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has said to “destroy intelligent design by ruining reputations.” Is it any wonder Skiff receives a lot of heat after inflammatory rhetoric such as that? A summary of the rest of the talk is over at Aetiology.

I know that SUNY Stony Brook has a great evolutionary biology program. That being said, the ignorant rantings of neurosurgery professor Dr. Michael Egnor have to be an embarrassment to Stony Brook. Orac, a surgery professor himself, gives Egnor another drubbing over the incredulous comments he made on a recent Discovery Institute pod cast.

Just when I thought I could put the paper bag away……That all around evolution-ignorant but nonetheless eager lapdog of the Discovery Institute, SUNY Stonybrook Professor of Neurosurgery Dr. Michael Egnor, is back.

Rats. I thought that the utter drubbing he took at the hands of myself and my fellow ScienceBloggers (in particular PZ Myers) might have given him the message that he needs to lay low for a while. Apparently not. I guess he must have the monumental ego that more than a few neurosurgeons are famous for. (After all, it takes supreme confidence in one’s own abilities to be able to cut into the human brain and believe that the patient will come out OK.) It’s not enough this time for him to show up in the comments of PZ’s blog to make a fool of himself and embarrass scientific surgeons everywhere. This time around, he’s appearing on the Discovery Institute podcast, to be interviewed by fellow DI lapdog and sometimes attack poodle Casey Luskin in a a truly nauseating lovefest entitled, One Doctor’s Journey to Becoming a Darwin Doubter:

Not surprisingly, basically all Dr. Egnor’s “critique” of “Darwinism” boils down to is his personal incredulity that biological complexity could ever possibly have evolved from more simple elements without the input of intelligence, his anthropomorphizing the genetic code, and his concluding that, because the genetic code functions like a human language and because human language is created only by the “intelligent design” of humans, then the genetic code must have been intelligently designed. That’s it. No data supporting his position, just his “doubts.” His propensity to equate “randomness” with “meaninglessness” also strongly suggests the religious, not scientific, roots of Egnor’s “skepticism” about “Darwinism.”

Read the Entire Piece

I only today ran across this speech Christopher Hitchens gave in September of 2005 at Monticello, to commemorate his book on Thomas Jefferson. In the question and answer session, he was asked about the attempt by some pseudo-historians to portray America as an essentially Christian nation, and he had a few choice words to say about church, state, and Intelligent Design.

Hewlett and Peters are the next scientists, in a long line of scientists, who have written about the scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design. The understanding that it is unnecessary to argue about whether or not ID is science has allowed scientists to focus on the lack of fertility or as others call it the ‘scientific vacuity’ of Intelligent Design. In their paper, Who Sets the Evolution Agenda? published in Theology and Science, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2006, Martinez Hewlett, a professor Emeritus at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the University of Arizona and Ted Peters, a professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, explain their objections to Intelligent Design:

In the meantime, we work with the premise that the Darwinian model is the best model for apprehending evolutionary biology. We believe the Darwinian model has proved itself the most fertile. It leads to new knowledge, which demonstrates its fertility. The difficulty with the Intelligent Design and Creationist models is that they lack fertility. They fail to produce progressive research programs. In a scientific sense, they cannot produce testable models. We believe that the dialogue with theology must take place with the best of science, not with a substitute that is a philosophical position and not science at all.

Via From Right 2 Left, I see that U of Iowa physics professor. Fred Skiff, will be speaking on intelligent design next week:

At the next “Finding God at Iowa” Lunch Forum, Fred Skiff, University of Iowa professor of physics and astronomy, will speak on the theory of intelligent design. The forum will be held from noon to 1 p.m. March 2, in the Ohio State Room (Room 343) on the third floor of the Iowa Memorial Union.

Skiff will offer “A ‘Fireside Chat’ on Intelligent Design.” He will discuss some of the questions underlying the debate over intelligent design in nature, such as: What are the appropriate assumptions, methods, and limits of science? Can the intelligent design argument be properly made within the realm of science?

Why am I so dismayed (well, besides the obvious)? Read more about it at Aetiology…

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.

Everyone remembers Utah state senator Chris Buttars, who pushed the “divine design” legislation last year? Looks like someone else remembers him also…

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, left, and Lee Gardner, Salt Lake County assessor, are oblivious to the fact that they are being stalked by an extinct dodo roaming between the East and West Capitol buildings on Monday. The dodo visited the state Legislature to drum up interest for the documentary film “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus.” The local showing is sponsored by the Salt Lake City Film Center and Utah Museum of Natural History. It will be be shown at 7 tonight at the Rose Wagner Center. (Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune)

ROBERT JOHN RUSSELL ”Intelligent Design is Not Science and Does Not Qualify to be Taught in Public School Science Classes” Theology and Science, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2005

Russell points out correctly that ID provides two alternatives for “agency”: either a natural agent or God.

The theory of ID does not qualify to be taught in public school science classes as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. The reason is straightforward. Even though ID supporters will not specify what they mean by the intelligent agency that supposedly accounts for the origin and evolution of life, there are only two options for what ”agency” could possibly mean: either a natural agent or God. The first option ultimately relies on the very theory, Darwinian evolution, that it proposes to challenge and the second option is a theological claim. Thus, ID does not qualify to be taught in public school science classes as an alternative scientific theory to Darwinian evolution.

He ends with a warning to Christians

The lesson to Christians is that we should abandon ID as fools’ gold and accept the challenge of true discipleship and dialogue—to engage contemporary science as it describes the universe by working out a challenging but immanently more honest interpretation of science in light of Christian faith.
So where does one start? Check out the CTNS website (www.ctns.org) and its links to a world of Christian friends who are ready to offer hope that is worthy of being believed.

Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges of Cleveland, home of Cabbage Patch dolls and Babyland General Hospital, is a vocal critic of evolution. This former barber and captain in the state patrol has twice (1999 and 2005) introduced legislation to include non-existent evidence against evolution in public schools—one of the teach-the-controversy laws that the Discovery Institute is so fond of these days. In 2005, Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education testified against his bill, causing Bridges to remark that he could have gotten “experts” as well, if he’d known that GCISE was going to be there. Earlier this week, we learned the type of “experts” that Bridges relies on.

On Feb. 9, Texas State Rep. Warren Chisum, the second most powerful member, sent a memo from Bridges to every member of the Texas House of Representatives. This memo advertised a model bill and called for the end of “tax-supported evolution science” because it “is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings on the mystic ‘holy book’ kabbala dating back at least two millennia”. Talk about bringing the crazy—but wait there’s more. Bridges’s memo invites lawmakers to visit FixedEarth.com, the “non-moving Earth & anti-evolution web page of the Fair Education Foundation, Inc.” Yeap, you read that right, Fixed—WTF—Earth.com.

In the 16 December issue of New Scientist, there was an editorial (“It’s still about Religion”, subscription required) and an article “The God Lab” (free access), which investigated the Biologic Institute, an institute that was set up with money from the Discovery Institute supposedly to do laboratory work into Intelligent Design. Not surprisingly, the Biologic Institute does not come out well. On the 13^th of January, Douglas Axe, Brendan Dixon and Ann Gauger wrote a letter (subscription required) addressing the editorial, saying they are convinced that Intelligent Design will lead to good science, but they won’t talk until their research is finished. I wrote a letter myself in response, but it didn’t make it into either the print or web letters. For the record, here is my unpublished letter.

At the Discovery’s Website for the Renewal of Science and Culture, Logan Gage proudly presents the statements by a British Scientist who claims that Intelligent Design is a valid scientific theory.

Professor of Design and Nature Stuart Burgess of Bristol University (UK) was interviewed in yesterday’s The Independent. This is a man who knows something about design. He is worth heeding:

I’ve been designing systems like spacecraft for more than 20 years. One of the lessons I’ve learnt is that complex systems require an immense amount of intelligence to design. I’ve seen a lot of irreducible complexity in engineering. I have also seen organs in nature that are apparently irreducible. An irreducibly complex organ is one where several parts are required simultaneously for the system to function usefully, so it cannot have evolved, bit by bit, over time.

Source: Independent

An engineer…

I always enjoy watching creationists blather about stuff that they have no knowledge about, which is of course just about anything that comes out of their mouths. I am always amazed how they can pull the most randomly backwards arguments from out of nowhere and confidently state that this one is the one that is going to trump “Darwinism”. Their arguments are really not that different from one another, but they sure can come up with some bizarre and senseless variations.

Good Math, Bad Math has a good take down of one such recent argument from Cordova on UD: Once again, Sal and Friends Butcher Information Theory.

Over at the Discovery Institute’s Media Complaints Division, Michael Behe seems to be a wee bit concerned by the attention that a recent Nature paper is getting, moaning that, “It seems some scientists have discovered that one way to hype otherwise-lackluster work is to claim that it discredits ID.”

OK. To start with, watching Michael Behe whine about someone else using ID to hype “otherwise-lackluster work” creates a concentration of irony so dense that four mining firms have put in bids for that post. Sorry, but I had to get that one out of my system. Now that I’ve more or less managed to get that minor issue out of the way, let’s look at what, for lack of a better term, we will have to call the “substance” of Behe’s complaints.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

I suppose everyone has someone who they consider an embarrassment to their alma mater. I can probably think of a dozen just off the top of my head regarding my undergraduate institution (including a number of politicians who shall remain nameless). However, one who really sticks in my craw is the infamous Jonathan Wells of the Discovery Institute, who also happens to be a Yale alum (Divinity school—small comfort that it wasn’t Yale College, at least).

So, Wells has been back polluting Yale lately, via the Opinion pages of the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News. Predictably, Wells mischaracterizes evolution, but he also uses his “authority” as a theologian to rail against the upcoming Evolution Sunday sermons, following a previous editorial by Jonathan Dudley describing Evolution Sunday as “not entirely benign.” Dudley is a student at the Divinity school where Wells received his degree, and according to the YDN, is also a molecular oncology researcher at the Yale School of Medicine–so he dislikes the perceived conflict between science and religion. As such, he’s in favor of events like Evolution Sunday that seek to counter this idea, but he’s worried that one argument from authority is being traded for another:

(Continued at Aetiology)

Kazmer Ujvarosy (chief scientist of the Frontline Science Institute, one of the most prestigious research organizations dedicated to Intelligent Design) explains the theory of Intelligent Design in a very clear manner

First of all, they allege that ID theorists failed to name the designer…..

If ID critics want me to be even more specific, Christ identified himself as that intelligence which created the universe to make reproductions of himself in the form of human beings. In other words we find design in nature because Christ constitutes the seed of the universe, or the cosmic system’s input and output. As he disclosed it in Revelation 22:13, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

It only gets better

PZ reports on Wells: Jonathan Wells knows nothing about development, part I

If one were asked who the very worst advocate for Intelligent Design creationism was, it would be a difficult decision—there are so many choices! Should we go back to first principles and pick PJ Johnson, the cunning lawyer who has the goal of undermining all of science? Smarmy and obtuse Sal Cordova? Pompous and vacuous William Dembski? I’m afraid my personal most loathed ID creationist has got to be Jonathan Wells.

The reason? The man claims to be a developmental biologist, my favorite field of science, and actually has some credentials in the discipline…but every time he speaks out on the subject, he stuns me with his ignorance. Here he is, trying to explain the Cambrian explosion.

Read the rest of the story at Pharyngula

Note that this is part I, apparently Jonathan Wells has written an even more outrageous claim.

The NCSE reports on an Antievolution bill in Mississippi

Mississippi’s House Bill 625, introduced by Representative Mike Lott (R-District 104) on January 9, 2007, and referred to the House Committee on Education, would provide, if enacted, “The school board of a school district may allow the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in the schools within the district. However, if the theory of evolution is required to be taught as part of the school district’s science curriculum, in order to provide students with a comprehensive education in science, the school board also must include the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in the science curriculum.” A similar provision was part of 2005’s House Bill 953, of which Lott was the chief sponsor; HB 953 died in committee on January 31, 2006.

Comment: Seems that the faithful have not gotten the Discovery Institute’s memo. However, the link between ID and creationism seems undeniable once again.

On UncommonDescent, GilDodgen quotes from Denyse’s comments

GilDodgen wrote:

Denyse wrote:

Bear with a simple lay hack here a moment: Why must we know a designer’s intentions in order to detect design?

If the fire marshall’s office suspects arson, do the investigators worry much about WHY?

Surely they investigate, confirm their finding, and turn the information over to other authorities and interested parties, without having the least idea why someone torched the joint.

ALL they need to be sure of is that the joint did not torch itself, via natural causes.

The observation Denyse makes is so obvious that one would need a Ph.D. in obfuscation not to see it. Common sense is not so common, at least among those with a foundational commitment to materialism.

Gil is right, Denyse’s observation is so obvious and wrong. Of course, in order for this to understand, it requires one to shed the veil of ignorance and determine how design is detected in real life and furthermore how intelligent design wants to detect “Design”. Note that I am distinguishing between design and Design to avoid the equivocation so commonly found in ID literature, leading to much confusion amongst its followers.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a “silliest thing” post, but I’ve got a good one. I was perusing the 2002 book The Case for Angels. The book is written by philosopher/apologist Peter S. Williams, and Dembski wrote a foreword strongly endorsing the book. In fact, Dembski concluded his foreword with the following:

There exists an invisible world that is more real and weighty than our secular imaginations can fathom. I commend this book as a way of retraining our imaginations about that reality. (Dembski foreword, p. xii)

No, he’s not talking about dark matter, although technically that fits the description perfectly. He’s not even talking about the existence of God, which of course is a famous debate. No, Dembski and Williams are talking about angels…and demons, which, if it wasn’t obvious, are the bad angels. For some reason, demonology is a topic that regularly trips up fundamentalist evangelicals. I posted one example from a modern ID advocate; another well-known example is Norman Geisler’s testimony for the creationists in the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas case. See below for Peter Williams’s take.

Jason Rennie of The Sci Phi Show, who interviewed me awhile back, has put his interviews of Michael Shermer (anti-ID), Salvador Cordova (YEC/ID), Michael Behe (ID), and yours truly (guess) into a podiobook, which is I guess is what kids are doing these days. Rennie is evidently sympathetic to ID, but he does let his guests talk, which is nice in this case because at least the guests cover more than the standard talking points.

A while back I was trying to organize a Flock Party for the Triangle area; however, I have yet to get my hands on a copy of the DVD. (I guess it is taking a while for NCSU to buy its copy.) Regardless, I am excited to announce that the Museum of Natural Sciences is going to be throwing a Flock Party this Thursday, January 18^th.

The film will be shown at 7:00 pm in the Museum Auditorium and is free to the public. Dr. Randy Olson, the filmmaker, will give a presentation and answer questions after the screening.

The full announcement is below the fold.

J. Scott Turner, a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse, New York, has a this dumb opinion piece in the January 19 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since a subscription is required to read this (your university probably has a subscription), I’ll excerpt a couple of the dumber remarks:

Also amusing is the spectacle of independent-minded scientists’ running to college administrators or the courts for help in defining what is science and what is permissible discourse in their classroom.

…

Faced with all that hue and cry, I almost want to say: “Friends, intelligent design is just an idea.”

…

The strain’s very persistence invites the obvious question: If Darwin settled the issue once and for all, why does it keep coming back? Perhaps the fault lies with Darwin’s supporters. Rather than debate the strain on its merits, we scramble to the courts or the political ramparts to expel it from our classrooms and our students’ minds.

Read more at Recursivity.

The weblog of William Dembski is called “Uncommon Dissent Descent” (UD). It has a reputation for banning unwanted commenters (read: “evolution defenders”), but generally on the grounds that they’re obstreperous and disruptive. However, it’s becoming clear that it’s not just disruptive behavior that gets one banned: It’s also merely disagreeing, calmly and lucidly, with DaveScot.

Recently Dembski posted some remarks about ID in the United Kingdom and invited comment from UK residents. One UK resident, “Febble”, accepted the invitation. Febble remarked that she had no objection to intelligent design being taught in the UK, since under Dembski’s definition of “intelligent”, Darwinian natural selection is intelligent. She wrote

I am happy to accept “Intelligent Design” as a scientific hypothesis to account for the development of life, as proposed by yourself, Dr Dembski, as long as you stand by this definition of intelligence:

‘ by intelligence I mean the power and facility to choose between options–this coincides with the Latin etymology of “intelligence,” namely, “to choose between” ‘

From Intellligent Design Coming Clean

However, such a hypothesis need not (and should not) be presented as an “alternative to evolution” as it is described in the Truth In Science materials. Far from rejecting an agent “with the power and facility to choose between options”, this is exactly what the Theory of Evolution postulates as the agent of evolutionary change - a process of_selection_ (aka “choice”) between options.

That did not go over well. DaveScot, Dembski’s bouncer, first responded with sarcasm:

Survival of the survivors. Brilliant!

I guess we can all go home now. Case closed.

and then within minutes moved on to the core ID argument: ‘Computers are really complex and they’re designed, and cells are really really complex so they must be designed too’.

Convocation on Intelligent Design Creationism with Robert Pennock

(#12066 ; 58 minutes; 12/11/2006 )
Robert T. Pennock, the scientist, philosopher and author of “Tower of Babel, The Evidence Against the New Creationism” speaks on the controversial movement to include intelligent design creationism in the curricula of public schools.

On Nobel Intent, John Timmer discusses recent attempts by Intelligent Design Evangelical Activists (IDEA) to ‘rally its base’. Mostly this involves returning to the good old creationist claims about evolution and mutations but it also involves ad hominem attacks on Judge Jones who ruled in a devastating manner on the topic of Intelligent Design, causing Behe to describe Judge Jones as “the former head of the liquor control board who signed off on a tendentious brief by a product liability trial lawyer.””

Of course, it was Behe’s own testimony which provided much of the ammunition for the lawyers and helped Judge Jones make his ruling. Not surprisingly, Behe claims that his testimony has been misinterpreted or misunderstood. So far, it seems that Behe is unable to accept personal responsibilities for his testimony.

DMPC Announces the 2006 Winners of the Disease Management Intelligent Design Awards™

Hat tip to Glenn Branch on this. Here is an organization that knows how to best put the shoddy reputation of the term “intelligent design” to good use:

The Disease Management Purchasing Consortium (DMPC), the most comprehensive source of information about the disease management industry, announced today the winners of the “2006 Disease Management (DM) Intelligent Design Awards,” given annually to those contributions which most set back the evolution of the disease management and wellness fields. Just as engineers say that more is learned from a single bridge which collapses than from 100 which stay up, there are serious lessons to be learned from these often-humorous failures.

Intelligent Design™ as a phrase synonymous with failure… seems apt to me.

The email exchange between Dembski and Richard Dawkins continues. Dawkins just posted an email that Dembski sent to him in 2004 (2003 actually, referring to “early next year”, which would be 2004).

It sparked a memory that I had seen it before. So I asked around. It turns out that in late 2003 Dembski sent the following email to most of the people he is spamming right now. In response to this letter in the UK Guardian by Dawkins, Dembski emailed the following. It really…well, any comment would be superfluous.

On UncommonDescent, Dembski ‘explains’ his motivation behind the Judge Jones School of law:

Dembksi wrote:

Just to be clear, my aim in this flash animation was not to shake up the convictions of convinced Darwinists. Rather, my aim was to render Judge Jones and his decision ridiculous in the eyes of many young people, who from here on will never take Darwinian evolution or him seriously. If the cost of accomplishing this is yet another lowering of my estimation in the eyes of PT or Richard Dawkins, that’s a price I’m only too glad to pay — heck, I regard that as a benefit of the deal.

David Opderdeck correctly observes that

The problem here is three-fold, IMHO: (1) it inculcates a disrespect for the legal system; (2) it rests on a false premise of “plagiarism”; and (3) it discredits your substantive work, particularly among those of us who really know how the legal process works.

Davescot tried to object and David responded

Just when you think the ID guys can’t get any sillier and more immature, you see stuff like this. Dembski admits on his blog:

Over at www.overwhelmingevidence.com there is a flash animation featuring Judge Jones spouting inanities (inanities that he actually did write or say). There’s been a design inference made that it’s my voice in the Jones animation. A disgruntled former UD commenter KeithS slowed it down and lowered the pitch. Well, it’s true, it actually is me.

Now I’m wondering if the reason we’ve seen Dembski’s writing output decline is because he is spending all his time designing anti-Judge Jones flash animations. And I’m wondering who did the grunts.

Update: see below the fold.

It looks like the lame ducks in Washington have decided to issue an opinion and an appendix accusing the Smithsonian of discriminating against Sternberg and politicizing science. That’s right; anti-evolution politicians are accusing the Smithsonian of being the one responsible for politicizing science. It comes as no surprise that the media complaints division is on the story. Expect WorldNet Daily and other reputable news organizations to run with the story.

The opinion was prepared by congressional staff and was commissioned by Congressman Mark Souder, the chairman of the subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy, and human resources, and who in 2000 co-hosted a Discovery Institute briefing on intelligent design aimed at persuading congress that ID needed political support. Soon after the briefing, he even read a defense of ID, given to him by the Discovery Institute, into the congressional record. On his website you can find the typical pedestrian arguments against evolution.

So it comes as no surprise that the staff of this friend of the DI has decided that the Smithsonian violated Sternberg’s rights and that new laws need to be passed to establish affirmative action for anti-evolutionists. Because, according to them, judging anti-evolutionists on the merit of their views of science is discrimination. Next they’ll be telling us that Los Alamos should hire people who have doubts about gravity.

Yawn. Can’t they come up with anything original after their devastating loss in Dover?

In its latest issue, New Scientist has published a story—Intelligent design: The God Lab—and an editorial—It’s still about religion—about that double-secret, DI funded research center: the Biologic Institute.

The reticence cloaks an unorthodox agenda. “We are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design,” says George Weber, the only one of Biologic’s four directors who would speak openly with me. “The objective is to challenge the scientific community on naturalism.” Weber is not a scientist but a retired professor of business and administration at the Presbyterian Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. He heads the Spokane chapter of Reasonstobelieve.org, a Christian organisation that seeks to challenge Darwinism….

Last week I learned that following his communication with New Scientist, Weber has left the board of the Biologic Institute. Douglas Axe, the lab’s senior researcher and spokesman, told me in an email that Weber “was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it”. Axe’s portrayal of the Biologic Institute’s purpose excludes religious connotation. He says that the lab’s main objective “is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science”, although he allows that the Biologic Institute will “contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design”.

Clearly, the Discovery Institute has established the Biologic Institute a few decades too late. The Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society have been doing research to challenge naturalism for a long time. They are so prestigious in the field that they have even created their own research journals for publishing their papers. This does not bode well for the Discovery and Biologic Institutes because they will have a hard time breaking the stranglehold that those two research centers have on the industry. For decades now, the ICR and CRS have been telling us that their research is going to revolutionize science in five years time. How can the Biologic and Discovery Institutes compete with such success?

We here at the Thumb wish the Biologic and Discovery Institutes all the luck in turning the ID public relations campaign into a working scientific program. They’ll need it.

Reasonable Kansans has a positive writeup of a lecture Behe gave yesterday in Kansas. It seems that the “intelligent design” activists are still smarting from their loss in Dover a year ago. It looks like Behe and his DI breathern are trying out some new talking points about the trial.

It’s worth a read to keep up with the continuously morphing public relations campaign of the “intelligent design” activists: Reasonable Kansans: Behe Lecture.

Remember last month when Nature published that crank creationist letter from Polish politician and scientist Maciej Giertych? Well this week Nature has published responses to that letter. PZ has posted the list on his blog: ‘Pigpile on Maciej Giertych!‘.

Go check them out and come back here and tell me which one is the best.

Many of us are familiar with the accusation by Intelligent Design activists that evolution and Darwinism deals in just-so-stories. For example, Behe, after the Kitzmiller ruling, remarked that:

On December 21, 2005, as before, there are no non-design explanations for the molecular machinery of life, only wishful speculations and Just-So stories.

Source: Whether Intelligent Design is Science: A Response to the Opinion of the Court in Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District By Dr. Michael J. Behe

Similarly, Dembski ‘argues’ that

Evolutionist explanations are just-so stories. They are entirely speculative and do not qualify as evidence.

Source: Dembski, William A., 2002. No Free Lunch, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, chap. 6.

by Pete Dunkelberg

The Apologetics Calendar had exciting news for Floridians recently:

Your online source for strategic apologetics events around the U.S. and beyond.

Evidence of Design Conference, November 3–4, 2006 — Clearwater and Tampa, Florida

The C. S. Lewis Society is sponsoring this conference, which will thoroughly equip church members and leaders with generally non-technical, cutting-edge information. It will demonstrate practical steps to use design-evidence as a thoughtful bridge to skeptics who have been taught through Darwinian evolution that God is a myth. This conference will enable Christians and others to use simple evidence to demonstrate there is in fact a designer of life and that he is Jesus Christ. The three main speakers include Dr. Walter Bradley, Baylor University professor, co-author of The Mystery of Life’s Origin and co-founder of the Intelligent Design Movement; Dr. Paul Nelson, leading ID theorist and editor of the journal Origins and Design; and Dr. Tom Woodward, author of Doubts about Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back (October 2006). Their material will be presented in a skeptic-friendly manner, so all skeptics of design are cordially invited. The wonders of living cells will also be portrayed on stage by large models of the “molecules of life,” including a split-open DNA model that is simply stunning. This will be an eye-feast you’ll never forget!

Part I: Darwin’s Growing Crisis, will offer presentations by our speakers at Calvary Baptist Church, 110 North McMullen Booth Road, Clearwater, Florida 33759, 727.441.1581 (www.calvarybaptist.org/) at 7:30 pm Friday evening, November 3^rd.

Part II: New Evidence of Design, will be presented by the same speakers on Saturday, November 4^th at Calvary Baptist from 9 am until noon and at Christ Community Church, 6202 N Himes Ave, Tampa, FL 33614, 813.879.2077 (http://ccct.dallasnewmedia.com/) from 1:30 pm until 4:30 pm. Part II of the conference is presented on both sides of Tampa Bay as a convenience to those desiring to attend. The presentations on Saturday at these two locations are identical.

Had the Discovery Institute had found some startling new evidence just since the Dover trial? Brimming with curiosity, I drove all the way to Clearwater to hear the news. Nelson gave two talks, of which the first turned out to be the best. What follows is little more than my raw notes of that talk. The slides with quotes and citations came quicker than I could take them all down, and as the night wore on my note taking became rather sketchy, but you will get the gist of his presentation. Draw your own conclusions.

On, Tuesday, November 14^th, 2006, Robert Pennock, author of “Tower of Babel, The Evidence Against the New Creationism” presented a lecture titled “The Ground Rules of Science: Why the Judge Ruled Intelligent Design Creationism Out of Court “ on the topic Intelligent Design as part of the Helen Edison Lecture Series [1]. Apparently, the lecture was attended by close to 5000 people, filling the beautiful RIMAC arena

Since the Sixth College sponsored the event, “[a]ll Sixth College students[ we]re strongly encouraged to attend the Convocation, and first-quarter CAT students [we]re required to attend. The 2006-2007 Council of Provosts Convocation Series is also open to the general public. “

As an ironic side note, it seems that Luskin’s confusion as to who was required to attend may have contributed to the full house.

UCSD-TV has scheduled the program for the following dates

12/11/2006, 8:00 PM pacific time zone
12/12/2006, 11:00 PM pacific time zone
12/15/2006, 7:00 PM pacific time zone
12/17/2006, 8:00 PM pacific time zone
12/26/2006, 10:00 PM pacific time zone
1/8/2007, 9:00 PM pacific time zone
1/9/2007, 11:00 PM pacific time zone
1/12/2007, 6:00 PM pacific time zone

From Premier Christian Radio we learn more about the concept of Intelligent Design.

28 October 2006
Darwin vs. Design

We revisit the subject of Intelligent Design and Evolution with special guest Dr. Tom Woodward from the USA who has written a history of the Design movement. Pete Hearty of the National Secular Society argues for Darwinian evolution. Will the idea of a a “God-like” intelligence behind nature supersede Darwinism?

A “God-like” intelligence behind nature.
Good for them, finally some Christians who clearly describe what ID is all about.

Seems that noone has informed Logan Gage of his erroneous interpretations of Darwinian theory, the concept of randomness and the meaning of purpose. In a followup posting Gage argues

Logan Gage wrote:

If you have not seen it already, you will enjoy playing with this random mutation generator. You will see how wonderful the Darwinian process is at taking your text and moving on to ever-greater levels of complexity.

In addition to failing to comprehend the concept of randomness, Gage now seems to confuse random mutation with ‘the Darwinian process’. Has noone informed him that the Darwinian process consists of two components? In fact, mutations were not even known in Darwin’s days, thus Darwin speaks of variation and selection.

In addition, he also seems to mangle Dawkins’ Weasel example, which seems a common affliction amongst creationists.

In other news, David Opderdeck explores the flawed logic in Logan Gage’s position and argues that Gage’s position “was unfair, and reflects a serious theological problem with some “strong” ID arguments.”

Is there anything redeeming to Intelligent Design?

Just when you think you have seen a new low in scientific ignorance amongst ID activists, Salvador Cordova comes to the rescue by arguing that

Salvador Cordova wrote:

In information science, it is empirically and theoretically shown that noise destroys specified complexity, but cannot create it. Natural selection acting on noise cannot create specified complexity. Thus, information science refutes Darwinian evolution. The following is a great article that illustrates the insufficiency of natural selection to create design.

In fact, quite to the contrary, simple experiments have shown that the processes of natural selection and variation can indeed create specified complexity. In other words, contrary to the scientifically vacuous claims of Sal, science has shown that information science, rather than refuting Darwinian evolution, has ended up strongly supporting it.

So what causes this significant level of confusion about evolutionary theory, and information theory?

These days it’s hard to visit the few pro-ID sites and not be greeted by a level of scientific ignorance matching and in some cases even exceeding the level of scientific vacuity of ID itself. Point in case is a recent contribution by Logan Gage titled Francis Collins on Square Circles

If the Discovery Institute’s Center for the renewal of Science and Culture were serious about its quest to improve science education, especially evolutionary biology, then it should spend some time educating its spokespeople.

Gage objects to Collins’ position on evolution and Christianity, ‘arguing’ that an unguided and random process could not possibly involve a deity. Let’s count the many confusions:

Jonathan Witt, fellow for the Discovery Institute’s Center for the renewal of science and culture, has written a review of Francis Collins’ book “ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief”.

Witt objects to Collins’ interpretation of Intelligent Design, arguing that like many before him, Collins just does not get it… Or does he?

On UcD our dear friend Salvador Cordova shows how the recent political, scientific and legal disasters to Intelligent Design have made the movement desperate for some ‘good news’. According to Sal, the good news comes in the form of 30% of community college professors considering ID to be science.

So let’s look at the study in question:

The study was done by two sociologists, Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University. They contacted 1,471 professors at religious and secular colleges and asked about politics and faith.

Source: Praying for an ‘A’ might not impress your prof

On Evolution News Casey Luskin makes the following claim:

“North Korean Nuclear Test Forces Seismologists to Make a Design Inference”.

Luskin is correct to point out that seismologists have made a design inference. What Luskin fails to tell you is that the design inference has little relevance to Intelligent Design’s “Design Inference”.

Let me explain why Luskin’s claim shows that Intelligent Design has failed to address some of the many criticisms raised, and that ID’s concessions have rendered it to be scientifically vacuous.

See also SETI, archeology and other sciences at Skeptico’s blog for why Luskin’s arguments fail.

Last week, I did an interview on the podcast program called The SciPhi show (Science Fiction and Philosophy), run by Jason Rennie. It has now been posted (direct link to mp3 – 16 MB). The show previously did interviews with Michael Shermer, and ID guys Salvador Cordova and Michael Behe. I was somewhat annoyed with what the latter two were getting away with in their interviews, so on the spur of the moment I dropped Rennie an email, and boom, he had me on.

In addition to pointing out all the usual ID mistakes, there was an interesting discussion about Star Trek: Remember that Star Trek episode where they discover that the suspiciously coincidental bipedal, humanlike form of all of the Star Trek aliens was (somehow) encoded into bacteria seeded across the galaxy billions of years ago, by an ancient bipedal race, a fact revealed when a 3-D holograph recording is deciphered out of the ancestral DNA genome (somehow!). The only thing the episode left out was an explanation for human-klingon-vulcan interfertility. Great episode, typically ludicrous science, but does it help the ID guys make their case? Listen to find out.

Remember how Dembski, despite common sense, argued that the design inference was free of false positives. And yet, history has shown countless examples of false positives. Nevertheless, IDers seem to get a lot of mileage from their Mount Rushmore example. So here is a another example of ‘design’

The feature can be studied in more details on Google Maps

Perhaps ID activists can explain why this example would not count as yet another false positive? Hat tip to Jim Armstrong on the ASA Reflector. Also noticeable is how the ‘Indian’ seems to be listening to what may very well have been the world’s first iPod….

The Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at the Indiana University in Bloomington has a whitepaper on Intelligent Design titled Intelligent Design, Science Education, and Public Reason

Crouch, Miller and Sideris express their concerns with “growing challenges to science and science education across the United States over the past several years”. They point out that:

Many of these efforts have been driven by religious believers and express theological convictions about the origins and development of human and non-human life. Whatever the ultimate outcome of these antievolution measures, the mere fact that such efforts are so frequent across so much of the United States is something that has engendered a legitimate worry among educators at both the secondary school and university levels. We write to address educators, policy makers, and the interested public with an eye to clarifying basic concerns regarding the scientific, religious, educational, and legal dimensions of this recent challenge.

The authors continue to give a good overview of the roots of Intelligent Design, the vacuity of its claims and address the often heard claim “teach the controversy”. As the authors observe “But describing the “teach the controversy” slogan in this way distorts what is at issue.”

I started writing a little something on my blog mentioning Ed’s critique of the latest DI “we’ve blown 4 million with nothing to show for it” spin. I was just going to link to it and then make one little tiny extra point, but before I knew it, it had balooned into a long-winded essay. So I thought I’d share it with a broader audience.

How to Waste Four Million Bucks

Enjoy!

Wondering what ever happened to all that ID inspired scientific progress that was supposedly just around the corner? Here’s Bruce Chapman explaining why it hasn’t materialized:

Friends of ID know the cases of a number of ID-friendly scientists who have lost their lab privileges or otherwise been discriminated against at universities here and in the UK. We are not trumpeting very many cases because the situations of several such scientists remain difficult. It is an appalling commentary on the state of academic freedom that ID-friendly scientists should have to work in an atmosphere of fear, but it’s true. We just want friends of ID who wonder why we don’t publicize work in progress more than we do to take a moment and reflect about that!

As for foes and critics who pester us for information about research now underway and who insinuate that, unless we oblige them, we must accept their opinion that such research is not happening, we owe them nothing. Since when does a scientist have to “report” on his work to the public before he is ready? The opposite is almost always the case.

There’s lot’s of ID research, but a conspiracy of censorship prevents us from telling you about it. Lot’s of people are being oppressed by Darwinists, but we can’t tell you who they are.

RIght. And people who deny the existence of robots are themselves robots.

I’ve posted some further comments over at EvolutionBlog. Enjoy!

Anyone who has been a “creationism watcher” for any length of time is familiar with the venerable creationist tactic of “quote mining.” Since creationists, essentially universally, can’t (or don’t want to) deal with actual scientific data pertaining to evolution, they attempt maintain a facade of respectibility by quoting statements from biological authorities. This can take many forms; for example, for the 1987 Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard case, the creationist lawyer Wendell Bird, apparently with the help of Paul Nelson, assembled a massive 500-page brief that consisted almost entirely of thousands of quotes from authorities on every topic bearing on “creation science”, from astrophysics to biology to philosophy to religion. This failed to convince the Supremes, but Bird turned his brief into a large two-volume book, The Origin of Species Revisited. Other elaborations on creationist quote-mining include various “Quote Books”, including The Quote Book (1984 booklet, inserted in Creation magazine I believe) and The Revised Quote Book (1990) from Answers in Genesis, the Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter (now online), and Henry Morris’ That Their Words may be used against Them (comes with CD!). Then we have endless collections of quotes on creationist websites, 50 of which were recently surveyed and ranked against the Talk.Origins Quote-Mine Project. Sometimes these quotes evolve and mutate over time (here is an example from Of Pandas and People), and sometimes they even spontaneously generate from thin air, as with this imaginary quote from Clarence Darrow.

You may be saying, “Surely this is a problem, but only famous authorities get quote mined. It would never happen to me!” Think again. On September 5, 2006, an article I coauthored in Nature Reviews Microbiology on flagellum evolution was published on the NRM website as an Advanced Online Publication. Before the ink was even dry – heck, before the ink was even wet, the October issue hasn’t come out yet – Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute is quote mining it! The mining occured in Luskin’s insta-response to the revised edition Chris Mooney‘s book The Republican War on Science. Check this out:

In my very unusual line of work, I read silly stuff all the time. Some weeks, it is difficult to tell what is most silly: most creationist arguments are not new and you stop being surprised by them after awhile.

You may or may not be familiar with the name Ignaz Semmelweis. It’s not one that’s typically taught to school children, like Koch or Pasteur may be. He even tends to get glossed over in upper-level biology courses. But Semmelweis was an important figure in the history of microbiology (indeed, I picked his work as the greatest experiment in my field). Here’s what I wrote about him in that post:

Semmelweis was a physician in Vienna in the 1840s, with an interested in “childbed fever,” a leading cause of mortality in women who’d given birth. During this time, he noticed that the mortality rate from this disease in a hospital division where medical students delivered babies was 16%, while in a division where midwives delivered them was ~2%. It was also known that childbed fever was rare when women gave birth at home. Semmelweis thought there was something the med students were doing that served to raise the rates of childbed fever in those divisions.

In 1847, Semmelweis’ friend, another physician, died due to a wound acquired while performing an autopsy. Semmelweis examined the tissues of his friend, and noticed the pathology there was similar to those in women who’d died of childbed fever. According to history, this led to his “eureka” moment: medical students performed autopsies, and midwives did not. The students must be bringing some contagious agent from the autopsy room back to the delivery room.

To test this, Semmelweis instituted a procedure, requiring students to wash their hands in a chlorine solution before entering the maternity ward. Mortality dropped dramatically, and Semmelweis extended the procedure to include surgical instruments as well. However, colleagues scoffed. Semmelweis actually lost his job, and took a position in Budapest–where he again instituted his handwashing protocol, with similar incredible results. Sadly, he died in 1865 in an asylum, disgraced.

Of course, many of you realilze that IDers love to tell the stories of scientists who were persecuted and scorned when they first proposed their idea, only to have history vindicate them. They compare their own ID supporters to Galileo, Barry Marshall, and other noted scientists (and, of course, Dembski’s been called the “Isaac Newton of information theory,”) and like to pretend that, like these esteemed scientists, history will give them the last laugh. Well, it seems that Semmelweis also has become something of an iconic figure to some who support “intelligent design.” Find out more about it at Aetiology.

Regular readers are very familiar with my refrain that many science deniers use the same tactics: bad arguments, quote-mining, appeals to authority, castigation of originators of respective theories, etc. etc. Another common thread is the complete bastardization of statistical analysis. Mark Chu-Carroll elaborates on Peter Duesberg’s misuse of statistics here, while mathematician John Allen Paulos destroys creationist/ID analysis here. I’ll highlight some of the best parts at Aetiology.

With all the flap about D. James Kennedy and his “no Darwin, no Hitler” pseudo-documentary (see Pharyngula and Dispatches from the Culture Wars for the sordid details), I was reminded of some incidents that took place three years ago in New Mexico involving D. James Kennedy and the NM chapter of the Intelligent Design Network.

In 2003, when New Mexico was in the process of developing new science standards, Kennedy deployed his Center for Reclaiming America’s 1500 New Mexican “E-army” members to bombard the NM State Board of Education with letters opposing teaching “evolution only” in the schools.

This article fondly mentions the help of IDnet-NM’s leader Joe Renick in this effort.

The purpose of this post is to show that D. James Kennedy and Joe Renick are integrity-challenged “Birds of a Feather.” Since D. J. Kennedy is getting a lot of negative press this week, I’ll focus here on Joe Renick, who hired the Zogby Polling Firm for some extremely dubious research that purported to show New Mexican scientists were in favor of teaching ID in schools. A rather large flap ensued, and even the heads of Sandia and Los Alamos Labs entered the fray. When the dust settled, Renick promised to stop using the poll.

That was over three years ago. However, as of August 22^nd, 2006, Renick’s group is still using those bogus Zogby polling results.

Three years of broken IDnet promises. I’m shocked - shocked!

So, you may or may not be aware of the latest “challenge” to evolutionary theory–DI Fellow Jonathan Wells’ new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.” Following in the footsteps of Tom Bethell’s “Politically Incorrect Guide to Science” (whose terrible chapter on AIDS I reviewed here), the book is just all shades of terrible. (As has been pointed out by many others who’ve read books in the “Politically Incorrect” series, they should just drop the pretense of “Politically”–simply “Incorrect” sums them up much better). I’ll have a more comprehensive review of one of Wells’ chapters (discussing, essentially, how evolution plays no role in medicine, antibiotic resistance, etc.) next week some time, and you’ll be seeing others pop up as well (see this post for the collected links), but for today I want to focus on a small part of the final chapter (titled “Scientific Revolution”. Yeah, go ahead and snicker).

You probably remember Forest Mims III. He was the other party in the “Eric Pianka advocates genocide” saga. (See also here and here to remind yourself of the absurdity of the whole situation). Mims is a creationist and another Discovery Institute Fellow, and an amateur scientist. According to Wells, he’s made a bizarre claim: that the fact that influenza viruses haven’t evolved resistance to UV light is evidence for design. I thought that Casey Luskin’s piece on intelligent design and flu was as bad as it gets, but I think this is a toss-up; you just can’t make this stuff up.

(Continued at Aetiology)

Over at Red State Rabble, Pat Hayes, has an interesting commentary on the Discovery Institute’s reaction to the apparent retirement of “intelligent design” creationism critic, Jesuit Father George V. Coyne, from the directorship of the Vatican Observatory.

If Discovery, as the main think tank championing intelligent design, doesn’t address metaphysical and religious questions then we have to ask: On what basis are they weighing in on theological questions such as Rev. Coyne’s alleged support for “Process Theology?”

If intelligent design, as its proponents claim, can tell us nothing about the nature of God, then why is Bruce Chapman – in his official capacity as Director and using Discovery’s Evolution News and Views blog to deliver the message – even addressing the question of whether or not “God is still learning and could not have known what his world was becoming.”

And finally, if intelligent design is truly a scientific theory as claimed, what is the scientific proof that provides the evidentiary basis for making a determination about the truth or falsity of what God knows and what he doesn’t.

Go read Pat Hayes’s Theological Deviations.

On his Evolution List blog, Allen MacNeill discusses a paper written by one of his students of the Cornell ‘Evolution and Design’ seminar. The paper, written by Elena Broaddus, discusses the topic of our ““innate” tendency to infer purpose in nature”.

The posting starts with some interesting pictures of ‘faces’ found in nature. We are all very familiar with detecting ‘design’ in clouds and there are countless instances where people see faces or other attributes in natural objects. Elena addresses this ‘innate tendency’ that leads us to infer purpose in nature.

This morning I am doing a live online discussion/debate with Mustafa Akyol (of Kansas hearings fame) at Islamonline.net. It is starting in a few minutes.

Over at Uncommon Descent, Wm. Dembski has a blog titled “Paley updated and videoized” :

August 9, 2006
Paley updated and videoized

Kids growing up watching this video are going to find it harder later in life to swallow Darwinian evolution:

http://www.kids4truth.com/watchmaker/watch.html
Filed under: Intelligent Design — William Dembski @ 10:49 am

After watching the video, I clicked the “Learn more about The Watchmaker” button, and found a surprisingly clear statement of what “Intelligent Design” (ID) is, in a nutshell:

We believe the [Intelligent Design] movement is helpful to the Biblical Creationism movement because it causes people to see the lunacy of the Theory of Evolution.

By George - I think they got it! (And from the way Dembski is pumping the video on his blog, one must assume he approves…)

It’s not that Creationism led to Scientific Creation, which led to Intelligent Design, which led to “Evidence Against Evolution” - it’s that Creationism IS “Evidence Against Evolution.”

The ID proponents are still smarting from last years resounding defeat in the Kitzmiller case, where ID was publicly shown not to be science. Once again, the ID folks have posted their list of supposedly “peer-reviewed” articles that allegedly support ID. Unfortunately for them, this list is bogus, the articles are either not peer-reviewed by any standard working scientists would recognize, or if peer-reviewed have nothing to do with ID. The infamous Behe & Snoke paper, for example, shows that in the absence of natural selection, neutral drift alone can
efficiently produce protein binding sites in realistically-sized populations in times consistent with the fossil record. This finding is hardly ID friendly.

But what is interesting is what is missing from this list, a paper from ID luminary Jonathan Wells. Why is this paper missing? It was in previous versions of the list. Could it be that Wells made a testable hypothesis, and it was shown to be wrong?

If current results hold, it looks like the creationists on the 10-member Kansas Board of Education have lost two seats in the Republican primary. The likelihood is therefore that the new Board of Education will switch from being a 6-4 pro-creationism majority to at least a 6-4 pro-science majority (depending on the November general election). This probably means the pro-ID/creationism science standards are history.

So let’s sum up the last 9 months:

The results of the primary in Kansas election are beginning to come in. The unofficial results are being posted every 10 minutes here on the website of the Kansas Secretary of State.

In an earlier posting on the No Free Lunch Theorems and random search, I stated that

PvM wrote:

It should not come as a surprise that the “No Free Lunch Theorems” have more unfortunate surprises in store for Intelligent Design. More on that later…

Now it is later and I present: Erik Tellgren, freshly returned from a trip, who has combined the results for random search and the work by Gavrilet to show

Tellgren wrote:

The original NFL theorem and rugged fitness landscapes are briefly reviewed and it is pointed out that the assumptions behind the former lead to the latter type of fitness landscape. Furthermore, it is stressed that for these fitness landscapes, the absolute performance of evolution is not prohibitively bad, that high-fitness regions tend to be well-connected, and that the difficulty of finding high-fitness regions does not increase with the size of the search space. (PDF format.)

Concluding that:

Tellgren wrote:

To summarize, the implications of the assumption of a randomly chosen fitness function do not just include Wolpert and Macready’s NFL result, but also the results

1. that the absolute performance of any search for high-fitness genotypes is fairly good and, importantly, independent of the size of the genotype space, and
2. the set of high-fitness genotypes is well-connected and the connectedness ncreases with increasing dimensionality of the genotype space.

More metaphorically, the NFL scenario may deny biological evolution a free lunch, but once the lunch break is over it hands evolution a large free bowl of noodle soup.
Acknowledgement:

Read more at TalkReason:Free Noodle Soup

A couple weeks ago, William Dembski posted an anonymous “edited report” of a talk Ken Miller gave at Texas Tech in March. The “edited report” suggests that Miller should be considered an ID supporter. The only problem is that the “edited report” completely fabricates the question and answer it uses to make its point. Ken Miller has posted a response on his website.

Read Texas Tech – The Real Answer.

Joey Campana has developed a site based on the MediaWiki software called ResearchID.org. They made a point of noting that it opened, June 22, 2006.

That’s a mere four years and one day after I announced the opening of TalkDesign.org (TD) at the end of my talk at the CSICOP Fourth World Skeptics Conference. I also pointed out on that day that “intelligent design” had failed to produce on the promised scientific basis for ID, despite the assurances of Wedge document, Rob Koons, and William Dembski that that was priority one for the ID movement.

Let’s consider some of Campana’s welcome letter:

A major priority for ResearchID.org’s administrative team is to provide a place where investigation of intelligent design can take place absent from the tumult of politics and social polemics that surround the issue of ID. A principle focus of this effort to escape the rhetoric is developing a fulcrum of discussion, so that all sides can speak the same language, instead of talking past each other as participants in debates about ID tend to do. This non-polemical environment can allow for some accumulation of some of the “critical mass” that ID theorists mention when they speak of scientific research into a new idea.

Sounds nice. What I’d like to know is where these nicely-behaving non-polemical ID “theorists” are going to come from? I can see that it will be easy to simply say that any known ID critic is off-limits on the site (forgoing any argument about individual commitment to polemics) and you would still have a lot of possible people to step in and take up a skeptical stance. But what about ID advocates? If you exclude the polemical ones, then you have pretty much eliminated the well-known names of the ID movement. Who is going to step in and provide that measured, mature, and non-rhetorical voice for ID?

Anti-ID groups are now parasitical on the claims of ID for their existence. Unwittingly, they have become pawns and foils for ID theorists and researchers. The intelligent design community is in a position where we are setting the agenda, now all we have to do is to continuing bringing more meat to the table.

I think that there is a nugget of truth here: scientists are primarily reacting to anti-science movements. I’d love to do my job well enough that I would be looking for something else to do. And I can find plenty of other stuff to write about here on PT. But other than the nugget of reaction rather than pro-active measures on the part of the scientific community, this bit of text from Campana is completely out in the weeds. One cannot “continue” to do what one has never done before.

Random Search and No Free Lunch

In his book “No Free Lunch”, Dembski argues that, based upon the No Free Lunch Theorems, finding an optimal solution via “random search” is virtually impossible because no evolutionary algorithm is superior to random search. And while various authors have shown the many problems with Dembski’s arguments, I intend to focus on a relatively small but devastating aspect of the No Free Lunch Theorems.

First I will explain what the No Free Lunch Theorems are all about, subsequently I will show how Dembski uses the No Free Lunch Theorems and finally I will show that the No Free Lunch Theorems show how a random search, perhaps counterintuitively, is actually quite effective.

The following posting is based on a response I provided to Allen MacNeill on his excellent blogsite. In addition to much needed checking of grammar and spelling, I also have added additional content and/or revised the argument for clarity.

Avid readers of Pandasthumb may remember that Allen MacNeill is a Cornell professor who will be teaching an Intelligent Design course this summer. The course in question is: BioEE 467/B&Soc 447/Hist 415/S&TS 447: Seminar in History of Biology, and has a blogsite. The first class will start June 27, 2006.

In the posting, to which I responded, Allen shows the many problems in one of Salvador Cordova’s postings. Sal is an avid ID activist and defender of Dembski and his postings can be ‘admired’ at Uncommon Descent. Sal stated that ““There are many designed features in biology that make no sense in terms of natural selection but make complete sense in terms of design.””

As Allen shows, this is a very flawed statement. In my response I make an attempt to explain in straightforward terms why Intelligent Design’s approach is flawed and makes ID scientifically vacuous or in other words, void of content.

PvM wrote:

Excellent points Allen. ID proponents seem to be quick to claim that science is using ID’s approach to detect design but on closer scrutiny these claims fall apart quickly.

ID is inherently a claim based on ignorance (elimination) and while it uses some ‘fancy sounding’ terms like complex specified information, the terms are used in a manner which conflates ID’s terminology with how science uses such terminology.

Updated with some missing text and edited for content June 15

A recent article in Physics Today discusses the search for SETI using optical detectors. On Uncommon Descent, Dembski claims that OSETI shows how the explanatory filter is used in sciences. Since Robert Camp already has shown why such a claim is inappropriate for SETI, I would like to explore Dembski’s latest claim as it applies to OSETI.

I will quote from the article to show how OSETI mimics the explanatory filter in the sense that it can generate false positives. Ironically, Dembski quotes the same passage, which suggests that Dembski accepts false positives for his explanatory filter, and which would render the filter useless.

OSET is, like SETI, an attempt to detect intelligently designed signals but unlike SETI ,which focuses on narrow band signals, OSETI relies on nanosecond optical pulses which it claims are more likely generated by intelligent sources because of the lack of known natural mechanisms that would generate such pulses.

Because no known astrophysical source could put out a bright nanosecond optical pulse, some SETI searchers have concluded that looking for signals from technologically advanced aliens is more promising with optical telescopes than with radio telescopes

If we find nanosecond pulses, we can’t lose,” says Horowitz. “If it’s not from an alien civilization, at least we will have discovered an astrophysical phenomenon that no one anticipated. Not a bad consolation prize.

Source: Physics Today, June 2006, http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-6/p24.sht…

In other words, if nanosecond pulses are found, science will be in a a ‘win-win’ situation since either the pulse indicates intelligent design or the pulse indicates a new astrophysical phenomenon. In other words, a design inference in OSETI, unlike the Explanatory Filter, still leaves open a natural explanation.

Creationists have considered the ‘mystery’ of the chirality of life a problem inaccessible to scientific explanation. Of course, science as usual takes little notice of claims to ignorance and has provided yet another explanation for the chirality of life.

Point in case, a recent paper in Nature shows that:

Chirality, the molecular version of right- and left-handedness, has intrigued chemists ever since Pasteur found mirror-image tartaric acid crystals. The synthesis of molecules in a single chiral form is usually achieved by using a chiral entity from the outset. But in some reactions the formation of a chiral product seems to be further amplified. Most current explanations implicate autocatalysis as the source of this asymmetry. An alternative mechanism is demonstrated this week. This new approach generates a strong bias towards one chiral form from a small initial imbalance, based on the equilibrium solid–liquid phase behaviour of amino acids. As this takes place in aqueous solution, the process might explain how a prebiotic world, with left- and right-handed molecules present in equal numbers, could turn into a living world where biomolecules favour one chiral form.

Editor’s Summary ‘Chemistry mirrors life’

The paper in question is:

Martin Klussmann, Hiroshi Iwamura, Suju P. Mathew, David H. Wells, Jr Urvish Pandya, Alan Armstrong and Donna G. Blackmond Thermodynamic control of asymmetric amplification in amino acid catalysis Nature 441, 621-623 (1 June 2006)

Based on the work by Dembski, this ‘researcher’ concludes that

So we are left to conclude that homochirality came about by some directed, non-stochastic mechanism

So let’s look at the ‘design inference’ in more detail

Robert Camp in Can Intelligent Design be considered scientific in the same way that SETI is? delivers a fatal blow to the specious claims by Intelligent Design supporters that SETI uses the ‘explanatory filter’ proposed by Dembski to detect ‘design’. In fact, in order to detect design, these sciences all use additional information such as means, motives, and opportunities to reach their conclusions. Since ID wants to avoid dealing with motives, pathways, methods at all cost, ID will remain scientifically devoid of content.

In the next few weeks I intend to show various approaches and arguments which all reach the same conclusion.

Let’s start with Dembski’s claim about Intelligent Design

Dembski wrote:

To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there exist well-defined methods that, based on observable features of the world, can reliably distinguish intelligent causes from undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already developed such methods for drawing this distinction — notably forensic science, cryptography, archeology, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Essential to all these methods is the ability to eliminate chance and necessity.2

Dembski, William. 2003. “Intelligent Design.

Several others have already pointed out the problems with Dembski’s claim but Camp’s analysis is quite excellent and timely as it helps understand why ID id doomed to remain scientifically vacuous.

Various terms have been used to describe the simple observation that ID is scientifically vacuous, and devoid of content.

In the meantime, we work with the premise that the Darwinian model is the best model for apprehending evolutionary biology. We believe the Darwinian model has proved itself the most fertile. It leads to new knowledge, which demonstrates its fertility. The difficulty with the Intelligent Design and Creationist models is that they lack fertility. They fail to produce progressive research programs. In a scientific sense, they cannot produce testable models. We believe that the dialogue with theology must take place with the best of science, not with a substitute that is a philosophical position and not science at all.

Martinez Hewlett and Ted Peters, Who Sets the Evolution Agenda?Theology and Science, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1-3

C9: Misuse of an inductive argument by the assertion of no false positives. also
CI111.1 Specified complexity is a reliable criterion for detecting design. from the index of creationist claims by Mark Isaak

Hat tip to Wesley Elsberry

Dembski wrote:

Biologists worry about attributing something to design (here identified with creation) only to have it overturned later; this widespread and legitimate concern has prevented them from using intelligent design as a valid scientific explanation.

Though perhaps justified in the past, this worry is no longer tenable. There now exists a rigorous criterion—complexity-specification—for distinguishing intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones.

Wiliam Dembski: Science and Design 1998 First Things 86 (October 1998): 21-27.

Compare this with

In 2003, Micah Sparacio collected a set of common criticisms of Dembski’s Specified Complexity. Since the initial collection of criticisms, little seems to have happened to address the various criticisms raised. I have collected ones which I find particularly of interest as they shown the various and many problems with the concept of specified complexity. Especially C11 seems applicable to my argument that CSI is merely a unncessary complex way of stating that we do not understand yet how something with a function in biology may have arisen.

This is a work in progress, as I will be linking the claims to other relevant materials.

Dembski, apparantly unable (or unwilling?) to address the claims and observations by Intelligent Design critics that Intelligent Design is scientifically vacuous, seems to have changed his approach to: well if ID is scientifically vacuous then evolutionary science is evidence-free.

This all is particularly ironic because Intelligent Design is both evidence-free and scientifically vacuous for the simple reason that intelligent design cannot make any useful predictions since the design inference is based on a gap argument, also known as an argument from ignorance.

Dembski, via one of his ‘colleagues’, asks the following question

What are the other vexing questions facing biologists that we are led to believe have already been solved? How about the origin of the information in the first cell? How about the origin of molecular machines? What about Haldane’s dilemma?

On Uncommon Descent, Dembski quotes a ‘colleague’ on the recent scientific arguments about the link between the eukaryotes and prokaryotes.

Their title refers to the “Irreducible Nature of Eukaryote Cells,” which reads like an echo of Mike Behe. The logic of their argument confirms this: the structures and the genetics of eukaryotes mean that an evolutionary pathway from prokaryotes must be rejected.

Little explanation is given why this resembles the argument of Behe.

However, they do not again use the word “irreducible” in their paper. What is clear is that the “simple” pathway that the textbooks have proclaimed for years must now be abandoned. Surely there are lessons here about the way darwinism gives false leads in its appetite for a narrative about the origins of complexity.

Even if we assume for the moment that the study’s results will hold and that the ‘false leads’ should be blamed on Darwinism, one has to realize that doing science means getting things wrong occasionally.

The problem of Intelligent Design is that it has not even the luxury of being wrong since it fails to present any scientifically relevant explanation or hypothesis, other than ‘Darwinian theory cannot explain ‘X”. And although the latter is often argued to be evidence of design, it is clear that intelligent design is doomed to remain scientifically vacuous.

On Aetiology Tara Smith explores these new research findings, and the hype.

In a Wall Street Journal Editorial titled Misplaced Sympathies Kevin Shapiro outlines the many problems with Intelligent Design.

The notion that Intelligent Design is scientifically vacuous is spreading quickly

Kevin Shapiro wrote:

Proponents of intelligent design, like the mathematician William Dembski, argue that we don’t understand the origins of various biological systems and never will, because they can’t be broken down into smaller parts that could be explained by natural selection. Therefore, we should give up on Darwin and accept the existence of a designer. Alas, this kind of argumentum ad ignorantium flies in the face of an ever-increasing amount of evidence from molecular biology, and hardly measures up to the neoconseratives’ rigorous intellectual standards.

So how do ID activists respond to these facts? Not too well

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, Orac is a surgeon and a blogger. He’s been trying so hard to defend his profession, but it just keeps getting worse. Recently unveiled is a brand new “dissenters from Darwinism” list: Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity.

As medical doctors we are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the origination and complexity of life and we therefore dissent from Darwinian macroevolution as a viable theory. This does not imply the endorsement of any alternative theory.

(Continued at Aetiology)

Paul Nelson has a “new” argument against common descent. It revolves around the discovery of ORFans, “orphan Open Reading Frames”, ie stretches of DNA that appear to code for a protein (an Open Reading Frame, ORF), but that we have no current idea of what the protein is or does, or what other proteins it is related to (hence ORFan). A powerpoint presentation from one of Dr. Nelson’s talks that mentions ORFans is here. ORFans also loom large in Dr. Nelsons rather forceful commentary on a post by Sahotra Sarkar describing a debate between them.

Are ORFan’s a significant problem for evolution? No, not in the least. The ORFan story, while still not completely understood, represents a good example of how science works, and why it’s a good idea to actually understand evolutionary biology before you criticise it (and why it’s a good idea to not stop reading in 2003).

Intelligent Design activists have become more and more insistent, given the recent court rulings, that Intelligent Design is not religious (wink wink) as it merely identifies ‘designed’ objects and does not say anything about the ‘designer(s)’. While others have already shown how vacuous such claims are, a recent paper takes a different take on this issue. Elliott Sober in a paper titled INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY AND THE SUPERNATURAL – THE “GOD OR EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS” REPLY describes how ID points to a supernatural intelligent designer.

Fish can hold breath for months

If you thought you were the champion of holding your breath under water as a kid, think again. Crucian carp, a fish closely related to the goldfish, can live months without oxygen, scientists have discovered….

“Anoxia related diseases are the major causes of death in the industrialized world,” said Goran Nilsson, a professor at University of Oslo. “Evolution has solved the problem of anoxic survival millions of years ago, something that medical science has struggled with for decades with limited success.”

While ‘Intelligent Design” failed to resolve onf of the major causes of death, evolution has been far ‘smarter’.

Lauri Lebo >At trial, Dover’s sacrificial lamb’ Buckingham reflects on becoming defense targetYork Daily Record Mar 26, 2006. pg. 1/07

Salient quote:

While the Discovery Institute’s opposition to Dover’s curriculum policy has been widely reported, Buckingham said at first Cooper was enthusiastic and supportive. Cooper offered to send him materials about intelligent design.

“He’d call me to see if we were going to go forward,” Buckingham said.

But gradually, as the publicity continued, the attorney began to suggest that the board should not move forward on the curriculum change because it could lead to a lawsuit.

“He was afraid we were going to lose the case,” Buckingham said. “And he thought, if we did lose the case, it was going to set intelligent design back for years.

“He just didn’t think we were the proper people to be pushing this at this time,” Buckingham said.

The day after the school board voted in October 2004 to include intelligent design in its biology curriculum, Discovery Institute posted a news release saying it didn’t support the school board.

“I think they thought we jumped their gun, so to speak,” Buckingham said.

For once, I’m not the one writing the microbiology/evolution convergence stuff. Over at Mike the Mad Biologist, check out his post discussing Viruses, phylogeny, and Venezuela, discussing how phylogenetic analysis is used to track the evolution of Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. As Mike notes, “This study is a really good example of how biologists use evolution to understand structure and function.”

On Aetiology, I have a discussion running about certainty, and the “I know what I know; do not confuse me with the facts” mentality that many of you accustomed to dealing with IDers/creationists will recognize.

Well, tonight I let my macabre sense of fascination with creationism get the better of me, and I skipped the premier of the new Dr. Who on the SciFi channel and went to see the the Dembski lecture over at Berkeley. I should have stayed home. At least Phillip Johnson gets to his point and outrages you enough to get your blood flowing. Dembski just sort of meanders around and issues ultravague utterances about how maybe design did something somewhere, and how we should think this because “Darwinists” can’t list every single mutation that occurred over billions of years, therefore their research program has failed. Yawn. The only good bit was when Dembski put up a flagellum graphic with “liquid cooled” written in big bright letters across it. I wonder how long it will be until the aquariums add this label to the fish species descriptions.

Over at Immunoblogging, Joseph has a multi-post series on the evolution of the immune system that I’ve been meaning to highlight, since obviously the claim that there’s no research done in this area plays a large part in IDists’ claims. So, some background reading on a few of the issues:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
and a bonus (if a bit older) post on Toll-like receptors here, along with a newer overview here.

Additionally, at the new Good Math, Bad Math, MarkCC discusses Dembski’s (mis)use of the NFL theorem and creationist use of probability. Check ‘em out.

Since they say this more succintly than I probably could, I’ll just quote from the email I received:

AAAS is providing educators with practical resources to meet the challenge of teaching evolution. For example, at a successful special event for local teachers during our Annual Meeting in February, we distributed a packet titled Evolution on the Front Line: An Abbreviated Guide to Teaching Evolution. Project 2061, our long-term science education reform initiative, prepared the materials, which included the educational benchmarks for evolution knowledge at specific grade levels and other valuable teaching tools.

You can access the guide, speaker presentations, and the AAAS opening video shown at this event at http://www.aaas.org/programs/centers/pe/evoline/….

AAAS has responded to mounting attacks on evolution, including attempts to insert intelligent design into science curricula, with a series of op-ed commentaries, letters, and high profile interviews. We have adopted a “local strategy” through which we intervene, whenever we can, at the local level where the real action usually is. From Kansas to Pennsylvania to Georgia and, most recently, South Carolina, we have defended evolution as one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science. We are being heard, but there constantly are new audiences to reach. We encourage you to add your voices, as scientists and educators defending the integrity of science and science education in our places of worship, schools, and community organizations. Visit our website for in-depth resources and news reports for the press and the public: http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/evolution/.

Only had a chance to browse it so far, but looks like some good stuff.

The University of Kentucky held its debate on ID, and Colin Wier, a law student there, has written a report on it from his notes. I have taken the liberty of correcting typos (he wrote this during the presentations) and posting it below the fold. Many thanks to Colin for this hard work.

[Oops, did I say Kansas? Sorry, this isn’t Kansas any more…]

[Note: everything below this is Colin’s report]

Intelligent Design activists seem to be upset with the Media for point ing out that intelligent design requires a supernatural designer, “or other guiding force”. That ID proponents have spent much effort to disguise this foundational principle has been well-documented. Thus when ID activists claim that ID

… merely proposes that there is good evidence that some features of nature–like the intricate molecular motors within cells and the finely-tuned laws of physics–are best explained as the products of an intelligent cause, not chance and necessity. Whether this intelligent cause identified through the scientific method is (or is not) “god” cannot be answered by the science alone and is therefore outside the scope of the theory of intelligent design.

the media aa well as the judge in the Dover case have found these claims without much merrit.

West, faced with an uncooperative media, decided to send of a letter to the newspaper complaining about using ‘inaccurate descriptions’ of Intelligent Design (by refusing to accept ID’s definition and instead looking at the logical consequences of ID’s claims). Worse, the editors, according to West, ‘surpressed a more accurate description’…. Not to mention the use of the pejorative ‘watering down’ when describing ID’s efforts. And yet, the judge ruled that

Moreover, ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

ID, by raising mostly irrelevant objections to evolutionary theory (see for example Icons of Evolution) is trying to water down evolutionary theory. Lest people are confused what drives ID proponents to ‘teach the controversy’, let me quote West

John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, said he considered the revisions a victory for his group. The revisions in Glencoe and Holt books are tantamount to an admission by “Darwinists” that evolution theory is flawed, he said. “This vindicates us.”

Indeed, the goal seems to not be to strengthen evolutionary theory but rather to suggest that Darwinian theory is flawed. And yet, West is surprised when the media describes the efforts as ‘watering down’ evolution.

It may be helpful for the reader to be reminded of the ‘arguments’ by ID activists which lead to the inevitable conclusion that ID is all about the supernatural, although given the recent ‘successes in the courts’, it should not come as a surprise that ID activist have tried unnusccesfully to ‘divorce’ ID from its religious foundations.

And people wonder why so many are starting to realize that Intelligent Design is scientifically vacuous.

NCSE reports that the Philadelphia Enquirer has an interview with Judge Jones. Judge Jones is the judge who presided over the Kitzmiller v Dover case and ruled strongly against Intelligent Design.

Asked about his ruling on Intelligent Design not being science the Judge reminds us of a simple fact: Both sides had insisted a ruling on this issue

The controversial part of the ruling was whether intelligent design is in fact science. Lost in the post-decision debate was that both sides, plaintiffs and defense, asked me to rule on that issue.

Over at Daily Kos, DarkSyde continues his series on Know Your Creationists. This episode is about the Discovery Institute’s Jonathan Witt, and while Witt may be a bit player, Darksyde finds plenty to hammer on. In particular, he makes an excellent point about the ID advocates’ use (or rather abuse) of the term “Darwinist”:

Exhibit B: Darwinism. Judging by frequency of usage, DR Witt, along with every other IDCists on the planet, seems enamored with that word. I asked him recently what he meant by Darwinism, and he replied in part “I use the term to refer to a person who believes that natural selection working on random variation produced all the diversity of organic life we see around us.” DR Witt is entitled to speak for himself, but I work with biologists every day as part of my ongoing battle with creationisim, and I haven’t met one yet who refers to himself as a Darwinist, or his field of research as Darwinism. At best it’s a quaint older term which is no longer used among biologists and hasn’t been for decades. At worst, it’s intentionally chosen to present evolutionary biology as a rival ideology to theism by hired guns marketing Intelligent Design Creationism to the Christian laypublic, and Darwin’s name is used specifically to nurture latent resentment, and to conjure up the ever present book-burners and witch-burners who still lurk among the lucid, among that grass roots demographic.

Worse still, DR Witt’s straightforward answer does little to reassure me of his probity: In the very same venue where I asked that question, DR Witt had used the term Darwinism to clearly refer to a school of thought in philosophy, as for example when he said “Thus, in practice the materialist/Darwinists’ fourth … “ and this is just one of many such statements threatening the consistency of his self professed definition.

As best I can tell, Darwinism as used by IDCists can mean pretty much anything the IDCist wants it to mean. They can and do use it to refer to common descent and all modes of speciation/diversification, abiogenesis, cosmology or most any field of science. But it’s by no means limited to science. It’s bandied about in contexts of abstract philosophical claptrap; metaphysical naturalism, materialism, secular humanism, all of which are often nothing more than covert references to atheism. If it served the IDCist purpose in discrediting science, Darwinism could probably mean Killers of Small Furry Animals.

That’s pretty spot on. Let me emphasize that the term “Darwinism” is only rarely, if ever used in the scientific literature. There’s a good reason for this: It has no fixed meaning. It has at times been used to describe the mere process of natural selection causing adaptations (something almost every biologist agrees with) and at other times used to describe the notion that natural selection alone is responsible for evolutionary change (something almost no biologist agrees with). Hence it is usually either redundant or it doesn’t apply. Yet ID advocates use the term almost exclusively to describe anyone and everyone who accepts mainstream evolutionary biology. I don’t know why they expect scientists to take them seriously when they lack the professional courtesy to use accurate terms when describing those with whom they disagree.

To illustrate the fact that biologists almost never use the term “Darwinist” when talking about evolution, I did some literature searches for relevant terms in PubMed. This is an experiment the kids can try at home. The results are below the fold.

In the February 24, 2006 edition of Science, Constance Holden writes about the devastating loss for Intelligent Design activists in Ohio.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION: Ohio School Board Boots Out ID by Constance Holden Science 24 February 2006: Vol. 311. no. 5764, p. 1083
DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5764.1083

Scientists are hailing the demise of an attempt in Ohio to sneak intelligent design (ID) into the public school science curriculum under the guise of a “critical analysis” of evolution. Last week, the Ohio Board of Education voted 11-4 to strike the words from its curriculum guidelines along with a creationist-inspired study guide. Evolution supporters called it a “stunning victory” and cited the influence of the December court ruling against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board in the first test case of injecting ID into biology classes (Science, 6 January, p. 34).

Indeed, while some have denied that the Dover decision would be a Waterloo for Intelligent Design, the Dover ruling seems to have played a significant role in the stunning reversal of the Ohio State Board of Education.

There is good news for those who wanted a copy of Why Intelligent Design Fails, but were protective of their wallets and pocketbooks. Rutgers University Press now has the popular Matt Young and Taner Edis anthology available in paperback, at a sale price of $19.96. Yes, there is sales tax to be added, but there’s free shipping for web orders. I paid more for dinner at the AAAS conference hotel restaurant.

Be sure to check out Taner Edis’s page on WIDF, which links to reviews.

A law student, Colin, advises the following event at the University of Kentucky:

On Wed, Feb. 22, the UK School of Law is hosting a seminar on “Religion, the First Amendment, and the New Supreme Court” at 12:00 noon. The speaker at the event is Thomas Berg, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, and Co-Director of the Terrance J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy. As the notice says, “Everyone is invited.” I assume that refers to the public as well. It’s in the College of Law Courtroom, and being presented by the Federalist Society.

Normally this would be a ho-hum affair, with a speaker and perhaps a few questions. The event the next week, however, is what would be of penultimate interest to readers of both the aforementioned blogs. It is entitled, “Intelligent Design: Question and Controversy in Law and Philosophy.” The speakers are Prof. Brandon Look (Philosophy, UK), and Prof. Paul Salamaca (Law - Constitutional and Federal, UK). They’ll be talking about the restrictions the First Amendment places on public schools, where Science and Religion end, and whether Intelligent Design is really Creationism re-labeled. It’s called a “discussion” where they’ll both talk about the facts, arguments, and theories of Intelligent Design. The flyer notes that “Everyone’s Welcome” and will also be in the College of Law Courtroom on Monday, Feb. 27 at 4:00 p.m. It is presented by both the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society.

I would expect only the best of discussions from either of these professors. In fact, to take one side, and not objectively study the issue, would seem to contradict the entire method that we’ve built here in Law (Socratic) and also in Science (the basic nature of science is to question everything, even those things previously thought established). As a citizen in the camps of both I have a great desire to see there be some great discussion.

In full context, Ky. has a law on the books that allows the teaching of Creationism in Public Schools, but does not mandate it. In other words, it is not “against” the law to teach Creationism. It is KRS 158.177, and an interesting read. The notation is that it has been “repealed and superseded by the 1990 Ky. Acts” but to my knowledge it’s still published and law in Ky. Recently, Ky. Gov. Ernie Fletcher (who’s in the hospital with an infection right now, so let’s hope he’s going to be okay) also advocated the teaching of it recently in his “State of the Commonwealth” speech. The seminary where William Dembski teaches (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is in Louisville, and only an hour away so an appearance, I think, would not be out of the realm of possibility though not in a speaking role. Finally, the Ky. Law Journal has previously published a note, “NOTE: When May a State Require Teaching Alternatives to the Theory of Evolution? Intelligent Design as a Test Case.” It’s at 90 Ky. L.J. 743. It was published in 2003, and to my knowledge has never been cited.

The Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has released the following updated statement on evolution (I will discuss the statement and the activities surrounding this statement in a different posting). This powerful statement of the board explains what is wrong with ‘teach the controversy’ legislation.

Evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science. It is the foundation for research in a wide array of scientific fields and, accordingly, a core element in science education. The AAAS Board of Directors is deeply concerned, therefore, about legislation and policies recently introduced in a number of states and localities that would undermine the teaching of evolution and deprive students of the education they need to be informed and productive citizens in an increasingly technological, global community. Although their language and strategy differ, all of these proposals, if passed, would weaken science education. The AAAS Board of Directors strongly opposes these attacks on the integrity of science and science education. They threaten not just the teaching of evolution, but students’ understanding of the biological, physical, and geological sciences.

AAAS Statement

Read on for more

The York Daily Record reports on the Ohio School Board of Education’s decision to drop the terminology ‘critically analyze’ from its curriculum pointing out that while ID activists were quick to argue that the Dover Kitzmiller ruling had no legal standing outside the school district it observes that:

Even so, other school boards across the country are heeding the words of U.S. Judge John E. Jones III, who wrote that, “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.”

Pat Hayes at Red State Rabble (which ought to be on everyone’s daily reading list) calls attention to something I didn’t know: Bill Dembski endorsed the Bible Code nonsense (also reproduced here), identifying it with his intelligent design detection methodology:

At the same time that research in the Bible Code has taken off, research in a seemingly unrelated field has taken off as well, namely, biological design. These two fields are in fact closely related. Indeed, the same highly improbable, independently given patterns that appear as the equidistant letter sequences in the Bible Code appear in biology as functionally integrated (“irreducibly complex”) biological systems, of the sort Michael Behe discussed in Darwin’s Black Box.

The relevant statistical methodology is identical for both fields. As a result, the two fields stand to profit from each other. For instance, my forthcoming book, The Design Inference, gives a thorough account of universal probability bounds, i.e., how small a p-value one needs to eliminate chance decisively. (Although the literature on universal probability bounds dates back to the French probabilist Emile Borel, it seems not to have been engaged by the Bible Code researchers.)

This convergence of the Bible Code and biological design should not seem surprising. There is a tradition within both Judaism and Christianity of speaking of two “books” where God reveals himself—the Book of Scripture, which is the Bible, and the Book of Nature, which is the world. I commend Jeffrey Satinover for his efforts to read both books.

The Bible Code nonsense has been thoroughly debunked: See here for a compendium of dissections, and see also Chaper 14 in Mark Perakh’s Unintelligent Design. Does Dembski still assert the identity, and has he profited from the lesson of the Bible Code? Not visibly. His design detection methodology has been debunked as thoroughly as the Bible Codes, yet IDists still claim that they have a methodology for detecting design. They are in the same boat: a convergence of cranks.

RBH

On Evolution News Casey Luskin reports on Dan Ely. Dan Ely had testified in Kansas and was objecting to the characterization of his position on the age of the earth

When advocating that the Board repeal the Critical Analysis of Evolution Lesson Plan, Board Member Martha K. Wise repeatedly emphasized the claim that authors of the Critical Analysis of Evolution Lesson Plan were creationists. Wise alleged that during the Kansas hearings, Dan Ely testified that he was “struggling with the age of the earth” and stated “He [Ely] thinks the earth is only Five-thousand years old. That’s not just ID. That’s young earth creationism.”

Ely’s testimony fully rebutted Wise’s misrepresentation of Ely’s viewpoint. Ely said that in Kansas, many of the witnesses were asked about their views on the age of the earth. “My answer was ‘We heard today anywhere from five-thousand years to five million years or five billion years,” and everybody laughed, “And most of the evidence looks like it’s very old.” Ely called Martha Wise’s alleged explanation of Ely’s views on the age of the earth “totally erroneous.”

The internet to the rescue (what a little resource can do for a story…): on Talkorigins we find the transcript of the Kansas hearings. In particular the cross examination by Mr Irigonegaray of Dr. Dan Ely. Dr. Ely is a Professor of Biology at the University of Akron, Ohio.

Update: Carl Zimmer reviews “Flock of Dodos”

Olson makes his point about the emptiness of Intelligent Design more effectively than a lot of scientists themselves have.

and additional links

Check out the Flock of Dodos website where filmmaker and marine biologist Randy Olson explores Intelligent Design versus evolution issues.

Various reviews are available online. And don’t miss the trailer which is quite funny.

On “the Loom”, Carl Zimmer presents a fascinating story about the Ampulex Compressa, a parasitic wasp who basically performs ‘brain surgery’ on her victim to provide for a food source for her off-spring.

Let’s explore this example of Intelligent Design

Is it specified? Yes, the wasp performs what seems to be ‘brain surgeon’ when carefully injecting a particular part of the brain with toxins.

Is it Complex? Yes, science is so far ignorance about how Ampulex manages to do these

Scientists don’t yet understand how Ampulex manages either of these feats. Part of the reason for their ignorance is the fact that scientists have much left to learn about nervous systems and metabolism. But millions of years of natural selection has allowed Ampulex to reverse engineer its host. We would do well to follow its lead, and gain the wisdom of parasites.

in fact human scientists have been unable to recreate this feat:

The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with their sting. But they can manage only a crude imitation; the manipulated cockroaches quickly dehydrated and were dead within six days. The wasp venom somehow puts the roaches into suspended animation while keeping them in good health, even as a wasp larva is devouring it from the inside

Seem the Ampulex makes for a better showcase of intelligent design than the Bacterial Flagella, although if ID activists are to believed, the Intelligent Designer somehow created what would later evolve into the Type III secretory system used by such pest as the bubonic plague. Talking about Divine retribution…

Oh yes the original paper

Gal R, Rosenberg LA, Libersat F. Parasitoid wasp uses a venom cocktail injected into the brain to manipulate the behavior and metabolism of its cockroach prey. Arch Insect Biochem Physiol. 2005 Dec;60(4):198-208.
Other relevant papers can also be found at the Libersat’s site

Two threads combine in this posting. First my comments on the Beckwith thread where I show how Dembski and Behe use the term specification or purpose to refer to “function”, and secondly a thread on strings in which the concept of purpose arose again.

First let’s revisit Dembski’s and Behe’s position on function which shows that their use of the term specification or purpose clearly refers to function.

van Till wrote:

However, when it comes time for Dembski to support his conviction that the bacterial flagellum is specified, the procedure becomes considerably more casual, almost facile. Speaking on the specification of biological systems in general, Dembski simply asserts that, “Biological specification always refers to function. An organism is a functional system comprising many functional subsystems. In virtue of their function, these systems embody patterns that are objectively given and can be identified independently of the systems that embody them. Hence these systems are specified in the sense required by the complexity-specification criterion.”NFL, p. 148.In these four brief sentences the foundation of Dembski’s entire strategy for certifying the specification of biotic systems is laid.

Or in Behe’s terms “a purposeful arrangement of parts” where purpose and function are interchangeable.

Behe wrote:

Q The whole positive argument for intelligent design as you ve described it, Professor Behe, is look at this system, look at these parts, they appear designed correct?

A Well, I think I filled that out a little bit more. I said that intelligent design is perceived as the purposeful arrangement of parts, yes. So when we not only see different parts, but we also see that they are ordered to perform some function, yes, that is how we perceived design.

Page 44 of Behe’s cross examination on Day 11 of the Kitzmiller trial. See also Analysis of Behe’s Testimony, Part 1: Purpose and Function at “Dispatches from the Culture Wars”

On the Science and theology blog, Matt Donnelly describes better than I could ever, the difference between Intelligent Design and String theory. While some ID activists have claimed that ID is as ‘scientific’ as String theory (or multiverses or …), they miss a few points. Matt Donnelly’s posting is based on an Editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “A scientific leap, but without the faith”written by Amanda Gefter.

In my own words:

1. ID is an ad hoc argument to explain something we do not understand. String theory or multiverses follow logically or mathematically from observations.

2. ID is in principle unfalsifiable, string theory and mutliverses are just hard to falsify

3. String theory and multiverses fall into a category which is best described as

But the real danger is not string theory’s lack of experiments — it is the misrepresentation of what scientific theories are all about. Sure, falsifiability is a key component of the scientific method. But there is something that matters more: the power of explanation. History reveals that the structure of a theory itself — its internal mathematical consistency, its scope, and its beauty — often determines whether it is accepted as science.

I wrote up a critique of an article DI mouthpiece Casey Luskin wrote regarding avian influenza back in October. I don’t know whether Luskin ever read my post; at the time, trackbacks to the DI site weren’t working. But I’d guess I’m not the only one who pointed out the abundant mistakes in his article, which advanced the thesis that avian influenza wasn’t a good example of evolution. He has since written a response to critics here (warning: .pdf file), correcting one of his errors in the original article (and making a confusing mess out of things).

Luskin’s original thesis was that H5N1 wasn’t a good example of evolution because, he claimed, it was simply a reassortant virus: an avian-human hybrid. Therefore, the “evolution” was not any “new information,” but simply a move of information that already existed. Only, of course, the H5N1 strain circulating *isn’t* a reassortant virus: it’s a pure avian virus. You might think that this tidbit of information would shoot down Luskin’s whole thesis, but no, he struggles on.

(Continue reading at Aetiology)

The Discovery Institute, over at their Media Complaints Division Blog, has posted yet another article castigating Judge Jones for ruling that Intelligent Design is unscientific.

This one, by a second-year law student, takes more or less the same tone as the others:

In this detailed analysis, I will take a close look at Judge Jones reasoning, and evaluate the potential legal basis for determining the scientific status of ID. Ultimately, I find that the Kitzmiller opinion has no legal basis to determine the scientific status of intelligent design, and as such, is merely the opinion of one man, not the law as proclaimed by a federal district court judge.

Ed Brayton, over at Dispatches, has already fisked the substance of that post. I’d like to take a second to look at something else: the Discovery Institute’s pre-decision view of how the judge should rule.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority):

by Pete Dunkelberg

Valencia Community College, Orlando FL, 19 Jan 2006, 7:30 PM

Thomas Woodward, professor of religion at Trinity College and Michael Ruse, professor of philosophy at Florida State University debated evolution vs intelligent design (ID) before a packed hall. Woodward spoke first. His first slide advertised the videos Icons of Evolution and Unlocking the Mysteries of Life. Then he flashed a slide associating evolution with atheism in very large letters. (In reality, biology is merely nontheistic just as chemistry, physics and plumbing are.) Then he started with a major theme: there may be some “microevolution”, which doesn’t count, but there is no evidence for “macroevolution”. To glimpse the volumes of evidence, see Transitional Vertebrate Fossils and 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.

In the comments section of my most recent post on the Discovery Institute’s publication track record, Spike made the following suggestion:

Here is the only scientific paper that one can link from the Discovery Institute’s list of “Peer-Reviewed, Peer-Edited, and other Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design (Annotated)” http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.ph…… . (The rest you have to pay the publishers for, I suppose):

http://www.weloennig.de/DynamicGenomes.html

1. Can you, dear reader, understand it?
If so, could you explain it to us lay people?

2. Is it science?

Caveat Poster I have no special allegiance to “Darwinsists” (whatever those are), evolutionists, scientists or the people who feel they represent the Truth of Evolution. So don’t play into OSC’s hand and don’t use logical fallacies.

If you want to dismember this paper, do so on rational, scientific grounds. Por favor.

I started out intending to examine the entire paper, but it’s taken me a while to thoroughly respond to (or dismember, if you prefer) just one of the claims. I do have other things to do, so I’m going to restrict my response to addressing his claims about the lack of differences seen between organisms. This doesn’t mean I agree with the rest of the paper - it just means that I only have so much time available for this right now.

Read More (at The Questionable Authority):

Let’s say that you are someone who is interested in science, knows a bit about it, but aren’t an expert. You might be someone who reads a lot of popular science books, or who watches a lot of science programs on tv. You might read a lot of science fiction. It’s even possible that you are a science fiction author.

You have heard a bit about the whole intelligent design thing, but you may not have been following it closely - particularly when it’s not in the news. You are also at least a bit disposed to root for the underdog. It’s a better story, and you know that it has been real sometimes. People really did laugh at Fulton and the Wright Brothers, and some scientific theories have faced opposition from entrenched opponents. So how do you know that this isn’t the case with Intelligent Design? Why should you trust us when we tell you that the ID people aren’t really doing science, and that their real motives are much, much more political than scientific. Why shouldn’t you believe the DI’s claims that we represent an entrenched “Darwinian orthodoxy?”

Read More (at The Questionable Authority):

Check out tonight’s InfidelGuy radio program (airs at 8PM EST) featuring Barbara Forrest.

Dr. Barbara Forrest, author of “Creationism’s Trojan Horse” reappears on the program to discuss her thoughts about design, evolution, and the recent court case heard in Dover, Pennsylvania. Dr. Forrest provided key testimony at the trial herself, and we’ll hear first hand how it all unfolded!

(Hat tip to ELGS over at Internet Infidels Discussion Board).

Buridan of Buridan’s ass has some discussion about Vedic creation in America (Short EvoWiki blurb on vedic creationism), linking an article that claims

Prominent I.D. theorists (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe) and some Catholic creationists have endorsed Vedic creationism.

Afraid of kickin’ anyone outta that tent, ain’t they?

Note: Please see update at the end of this post.

I know, I know, it’s not really possible. But ID advocates keep claiming it’s possible, so it’s important to revisit the issue every now and then. The IDists claim that since the arguments for ID can be falsified, then ID itself is falsifiable. But of course this doesn’t follow. Having an argument proven wrong doesn’t disprove a hypothesis. And this is especially true when the arguments themselves (which are simply arguments against evolution) do not logically support the hypothesis to begin with. Judge Jones noted this in his ruling in the recent Kitzmiller case in regards to the Irreducible Complexity argument:

As irreducible complexity is only a negative argument against evolution, it is refutable and accordingly testable, unlike ID, by showing that there are intermediate structures with selectable functions that could have evolved into the allegedly irreducibly complex systems. Importantly, however, the fact that the negative argument of irreducible complexity is testable does not make testable the argument for ID.

[…]

We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution. As a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it.

Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design. We therefore find that Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large. Additionally, even if irreducible complexity had not been rejected, it still does not support ID as it is merely a test for evolution, not design.

(Kitzmiller v. Dover, pp. 76-9, citations omitted)

Of course that didn’t stop the Discovery Institute from responding that Intelligent Design is Empirically Testable and Makes Predictions. If you read this article, you’ll learn that Judge Jones was horribly, horribly wrong, because irreducible complexity can be falsified, which therefore means that ID can be falsified! One wonders if they even bothered to read Jones’ decision.

But irreducible complexity isn’t the only argument that ID advocates employ. Another common argument concerns the Cambrian Explosion, which ID advocates claim shows that all “major types” of animals (by which they mean phyla, a very broad category) “appeared suddenly” without fossil precursors. Putting aside the other problems with this argument, a recent post by the esteemed Prof. Steve Steve, in which he accompanied Ian Musgrave to the South Australian Museum, shows us that chordates (the phylum to which humans and pandas belong) existed before the Cambrian, during the Ediacaran, well before the purported “explosion”. That spells doom for the ID advocates’ argument.

So does this falsify ID? Let’s see what a couple of ID advocates themselves have said, and let’s see whether or not they’re willing to exercise a bit of intellectual consistency.

A truly excellent op-ed by Robert Sprackland appeared in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It’s definitely worth reading.

I know some of you out there do this. You’ve spent so many hours asking your creationist friends to define a “kind,” or explaining why the “tornado in a junkyard” or “watchmaker” analogies are hopelessly flawed, that you’re beginning to see flagella and mousetraps in your sleep. I mean, look at poor Nick. Kid can’t even hear the word “truthiness” without having visions of IDists dancing in his head. I caught myself doing this today, too.

I listen to a lot of country music. (Yeah, yeah, go ahead and mock. I’m used to it). Couple that with 1) the fact that I live in Iowa, where there’s a *lot* of country radio, and 2) the fact that my car didn’t have a CD player, that meant lots of time on the road tuned in to a country station. As a mom (aka taxi), that means the kids also spent a lot of time listening to it–and my daughter’s favorite song of the past year was Faith Hill’s “Mississippi Girl.” So, we bought her Faith’s new CD for Christmas.

(Yes, there is a point to this–see over at Aetiology)

Over at the DI’s News Evolution News and Views blog, (where you can’t comment on anything), Jonathon Witt writes,

KU Darwinists Duck Intelligent Design Debate

The Lawrence Journal-World covers the story here.

=======
“Why won’t the Darwinists at KU debate philosopher and mathematician William Dembski, who will be speaking at a campus forum Jan. 28?

Leonard Krishtalka, director of KU’s Biodiversity Institute, said he was one scientist who declined an invitation to debate Dembski.

“There is nothing to debate,” Krishtalka said. “Intelligent design is religion thinly disguised as science and does not belong in the science classroom.”
=======

I wonder if Krishtalka could at least take the time to show that intelligent design is a religion-based argument. Let’s set the bar really low for his opening statement.

However, Witt fails to mention another part of the story:

My favorite essay arguing against intelligent design isn’t one of Gould’s, or Dawkins’, or Sagan’s. Rather, it’s one that has portions I disagree with, but the eloquent prose simply can’t be beat:

“The analogy which you attempt to establish between the contrivances of human art, and the various existences of the Universe, is inadmissible. We attribute these effects to human intelligence, because we know beforehand that human intelligence is capable of producing them. Take away this knowledge, and the grounds of our reasoning will be destroyed. Our entire ignorance, therefore, of the Divine Nature leaves this analogy defective in its most essential point of comparison.

You assert that the construction of the animal machine, the fitness of certain animals to certain situations, the connexion between the organs of perception and that which is perceived; the relation between every thing which exists, and that which tends to preserve it in its existence, imply design. It is manifest that if the eye could not see, nor the stomach digest, the human frame could not preserve its present mode of existence. It is equally certain, however, that the elements of its composition, if they did not exist in one form, must exist in another; and that the combinations which they would form, must so long as they endured, derive support for their peculiar mode of being from their fitness to the circumstances of their situation.”

These come from an 1814 essay by Percy Bysse Shelley, analyzing the claims in William Paley’s Natural Theology, a text which explores arguments very similar to those used by modern-day ID advocates. So similar, in fact, that although some of the minor details have changed, Shelley’s refutation of it can be easily used today.

As this essay demonstrates, and as recently highlighted in this post, it behooves us to know our history—and none know this better than those who teach the subject. University of Iowa history professor Douglas Baynton wrote an interesting letter to the Washington Post this past Saturday, offering a unique perspective on the “controversy” regarding Intelligent Design by using 19^th century geography texts to speculate about how a course using intelligent design might look.

(Continued at Aetiology)

[Note: I’d planned to post this Tuesday, but didn’t want it to get lost in all the Dover issues. I think, given the decision and the role the history of the ID movement played in that, it’s even more relevant today that this history is considered.–T]

With the recent resounding defeat of Intelligent Design in Dover, ID supporters may actually have to try and do some science to support their claims. On the basis of past efforts, the prospect does not look good for them. Richard von Sternberg, the Intelligent Design-friendly editor who was responsible for publishing Meyer’s woeful review paper, has recently had a paper published with anti-Darwinian James Shapiro (who has said he is not an ID supporter).

Shapiro JA, von Sternberg R. Why repetitive DNA is essential to genome function. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2005 May;80(2):227-50.

In this they try to address the bete noir of creationists, both young earth and intelligent design varieties, “Junk” DNA. The fact that the vast majority of the genome is probably parasitic junk is hard to reconcile with an intelligent designer, so a lot of effort is expended to show that all that DNA must be doing something essential. Sternberg and Shapiro try to show that one major class of non-coding DNA, highly repetitive DNA, is essential for genome function. However, all they end up demonstrating is shoddy scholarship.

This gem is too precious to be lost during the reaction to the Dover Decision.

Do you know how the Discovery Institute likes to say the Designer might not be God, but perhaps a Space Alien or Time Traveller?

Here’s a typical instance from
Phillip Johnson:

“It certainly could be God, a supernatural creature, but in principle it could be space aliens of high intelligence who did the designing,” he says.

Well, look out, Phil - here comes Discovery’s Jonathan Witt, with what can only be described as a Freudian Slip.

Over on Michael Berube’s weblog, Steve Fuller responded to various points being made about his advocacy of “intelligent design”. One item caught my attention:

6.’And please, to cite Dembski…the man is a dilettante who relies on speaking math to those who know a little biology and biology to those who know a little math. His ideas are useless.’ Well, his ideas may be wrong, but they are not useless. In any case, the man’s not finished yet – and (unlike Newton) he’s exposing his ideas for public inspection and critique, rather than going underground for 10-20 years to work all the bugs out. (Perhaps you’d prefer that approach.) Here you’ve got to take seriously what it means for ID to be primarily a science of ‘design’: God and humans design in exactly the same way (so says the theory), so the more we learn about detecting human-led design (e.g. Dembski has come up with scientific fraud detectors used by the NIH and NSF – I can already see students of Irony 101 raising their hands), the more we get (hopefully testable) ideas about how the universe might be designed. ID basically turns biology into divine technology. This is not a million miles from Herbert Simon in ‘Sciences of the Artificial’, in which he imagines (among other things) natural selection as a watchmaker who gets interrupted a lot and periodically needs to regroup from where he left off. [emphasis added - WRE]

William A. Dembski, mathematician, theologian, and philosopher, is also a heavyweight expert when it comes to self-promotion. So why is it, Steve, that Dembski has not himself boasted of the adoption of his particular methods by the NIH and NSF for “fraud detection”?

My basic stance on this is skepticism until such time as an independently verifiable reference is provided. One does not have to look far to find ID advocates exaggerating grandly from mundane reality, so I take the claim that someone other than Dembski has figured out how to make Dembski’s methods work (when even Dembski has thus far failed at that task) with a dried-up Permian sea of salt.

(Continue reading at Antievolution.org)

Once again Ed beat me to the punch…

I have at various times pointed out how scientifically vacuous Intelligent Design really is. While Ed has already discussed the NY Times article, I would like to focus on two statements which show again how vacuous ID really is scientifically.

John West wrote:

“The future of intelligent design, as far as I’m concerned, has very little to do with the outcome of the Dover case,” Mr. West said. “The future of intelligent design is tied up with academic endeavors. It rises or falls on the science.”

Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation wrote:

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.

In the wake of yesterday’s NY Times article that included the Templeton Foundation saying that when they demanded that ID advocates produce actual research that could confirm ID and offered to fund that, they didn’t come up with any, William Dembski responded with this post on his blog. He makes the following claim:

I know for a fact that Discovery Institute tried to interest the Templeton Foundation in funding fundamental research on ID that would be publishable in places like PNAS and Journal of Molecular Biology (research that got funded without Templeton support and now has been published in these journals), and the Templeton Foundation cut off discussion before a proposal was even on the table.

Needless to say, this caused many of us to wonder what research he was referring to that allegedly supported ID and was published without Templeton’s help. In a comment on that thread asking that very question, Dembski said that he was referring to the work of Douglas Axe. They’ve been beating this drum for years and making outlandish claims about the meaning of his work that simply do not stand up to scrutiny. In particular, Dembski has continually exaggerated Axe’s work on perturbation in enzymes far beyond what it says, to the point of claiming it means the opposite of what it really means. Matt Inlay documented this distortion very well in this article from the Panda’s Thumb. Here’s Dembski’s claim about Axe’s work on perturbation:

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

To hear most ID advocates tell it, ID is only rejected by “Darwinian fundamentalists” who hold fast to “atheistic materialism.” Laurie Goodstein has an article in Sunday’s New York Times that puts the lie to that claim. She shows that many organizations and academics who would be seen as likely supporters of ID have been put off by the lack of actual substance being offered:

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.

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

Dembski has posted a contest on his blog, seeking the best case of gradual evolution by cooption (hmm, sounds like something evolutionary biologists have been talking about for decades) in the case of human-designed technology.

I’m talking about an actual history of invention in which an initial technology does A, and then a small change allows it to do B, after which a further small change allows it to do C, after which co-opting an existing system (without extensive modification) allows it to do D, etc. The evolution of a motorcycle from a motor and a bicycle is not a good example in this regard because the motor and bicycle require extensive design-work to adapt them to each other.

I hereby nominate the gradual evolution of “intelligent design” during the descent with modification of the manuscripts of Of Pandas and People, reviewed in this series of posts.

I expect my $100 by week’s end. Seriously, though, speaking of cooption: Dembski’s last-ditch, backup-backup argument against cooption as an explanation of irreducible complexity – that we had no well-documented examples of natural cooption – was destroyed by Scott Minnich during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

After being denied the much sought after status as ‘scientific’, Intelligent Design has run into another roadblock, upsetting the time line laid out in the Wedge Strategy

Intelligent design — already the planned subject of a controversial Kansas University seminar this spring — will make its way into a second KU classroom in the fall, this time labeled as a “pseudoscience.”

In addition to intelligent design, the class Archaeological Myths and Realities will cover such topics as UFOs, crop circles, extrasensory perception and the ancient pyramids.

The eminent science journal Nature has a letter (subscription required) from Professor A. Richard Palmer of the Systematics and Evolution Group, at the University of Alberta.

In it, he proposes that we teach the controversy - not only should we teach that there is an Intelligent Design hypothesis, we should also teach that there is an Intelligent Deceiver motivating the ID movement.

Individuals who understand how to debate alternative scientific hypotheses would never intentionally promote religious dogma as science. So an intelligent deceiver must be at work, guiding proponents of ID to sow confusion over valid scientific debate.

Heavy Demand for Intelligent Design and Science Wars Articles Prompts SciPolicy Journal to Give Free and Open Access to Archives

Haverford, PA (PRWEB) November 21, 2005 – SciPolicy – The Journal of Science and Health Policy – announced today that all of its articles are now free and open access on-line.

The public service move is prompted by a recent ten-fold increase in demands on its already busy website (http://scipolicy.net) for articles related to its Amicus Curiae brief in Federal Court (the case of Kitzmiller, et al v Dover Area School District and Dover Area School District Board of Directors) and for its editorial opposing government mandates to teach of intelligent design in public schools, and its numerous articles on the Science Wars.

…and has spawned some press coverage, here in the Ames Tribune and here in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, making us the first state to have faculty from all Regent universities speak out against intelligent design. I’ll briefly address some of the comments.

In the first article, U of I physics professor (and signer of the DI’s “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition) Fred Skiff elaborates one giant strawman:

“It’s part of science to consider what blinders you might be wearing,” Skiff said. “Materialists put conditions on science that things can only exist if they satisfy materialism. I think that is a mistake.”

(Continued at Aetiology)

Edited to add: bummer, as noted in the comments, Missouri beat us to the punch.

Edited again to add: I see Dembski is claiming “ ID proponents were bypassed” when we circulated this. Not true at all–I don’t even know who on the faculty is an “ID proponent” besides the already-mentioned Fred Skiff (and I can’t say how it was circulated within the physics department, if it went there at all). It was mostly passed along through word-of-mouth, and generally sent to entire departments or colleges at a time. The idea that we were bypassing certain people on a faculty this large is a joke.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on ID in college classrooms today.

AMES, Iowa – With a magician’s flourish, Thomas Ingebritsen pulled six mousetraps from a shopping bag and handed them out to students in his “God and Science” seminar. At his instruction, they removed one component – either the spring, hammer or holding bar – from each mousetrap. They then tested the traps, which all failed to snap.

“Is the mousetrap irreducibly complex?” the Iowa State University molecular biologist asked the class.

“Yes, definitely,” said Jason Mueller, a junior biochemistry major wearing a cross around his neck.

That’s the answer Mr. Ingebritsen was looking for. He was using the mousetrap to support the antievolution doctrine known as intelligent design. Like a mousetrap, the associate professor suggested, living cells are “irreducibly complex” – they can’t fulfill their functions without all of their parts. Hence, they could not have evolved bit by bit through natural selection but must have been devised by a creator. “This is the closest to a science class on campus where anybody’s going to talk about intelligent design,” the fatherly looking associate professor told his class. “At least for now.”

Overshadowed by attacks on evolution in high-school science curricula, intelligent design is gaining a precarious and hotly contested foothold in American higher education. Intelligent-design courses have cropped up at the state universities of Minnesota, Georgia and New Mexico, as well as Iowa State, and at private institutions such as Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon. Most of the courses, like Mr. Ingebritsen’s, are small seminars that don’t count for science credit. Many colleges have also hosted lectures by advocates of the doctrine.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.