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The Nature of Nature - more ID "research"

By jlynch on May 1, 2009.

In 2000, Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center (Dembski's pet project) hosted a conference title "The Nature of Nature: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Naturalism in Science". It now looks like the proceedings of the conference are finally appearing:

Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, eds., The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2009).

You've got to hand it to those ID boyos, they believe in loooooooong editing phases on their projects. This could explain why we're waiting on so much that has been promised.

The volume will apparently feature a paper by Dembski on his Law of Conservation of Information. Seriously. A Law. It must be SCIENCE because it's a LAW. And if this is an earth-shattering conservation law, how come we're not seeing it in the physics or mathematics literature? I'm willing to suggest that Dembski's mathematical pseudoscience will be shot down quite quickly by the likes of Mark Perakh, Jason Rosenhouse & Jeff Shallit and science will continue on regardless of his expectorations.

Gordon and Dembski essentially were the Michael Polanyi Center, a unit that appeared and disappeared with remarkable speed, the disappearance being due to the fact that it was nothing more than a front for the Discovery Institute's Wedge strategy. You will remember that Dembski proclaimed that "[d]ogmatic opponents of design who demanded the Center be shut down have met their Waterloo", the first of his many pronouncements that sadly - for him at least - turned out to be false.

It is of note that Gordon & Dembski couldn't get a reputable academic publisher to take on their project and instead had to rely on a conservative group like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Gee, I wonder why? That said, if ISI wants to send me a copy, I'll be happy to review it here. But I'm not holding my breath.

Tags
Anti-evolution
Intelligent Design

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Nice to know Dembski's still spouting crap about Sol Spiegelman's work on RNA polymerases in paper.

I'm just an undergraduate, so I didn't have the necessary background to challenge Dembski about his misrepresentations in person when he lectured here. But at the same time, it took me five minutes to google Spiegelman's experiments and see how Dembski's take on them was misleading, flawed, and unsupportive of the point he was trying to make.

Personal note: when I was asking professors here at Baylor for letters of recommendations, one of them enthusiastically offered to write one before I could even finish asking. He explained that he was, quite to my surprise, a fan of my blog and had been ever since another biology prof here sent him a link to the post on Dembski.

So yeah: Baylor and blogging - 1; Dembski - 0