Intelligent Design
jlynch | March 18, 2007Following on from yesterday's section, Here's the second installment.
Creationism, Cultural Politics and Clashing Ideologies.
If this were solely an issue of scientific observations or the veracity of hypotheses, it is doubtful that the Creation/Evolution debate would inflame such passions. While purely scientific controversies excite the scientists within the respective fields, they rarely make headlines, and never become part of legislation, or rulings of the Supreme Count. It is clear that what is being argued about here, at least as far as the ICR is concerned,
is the status of biblical…
jlynch | March 18, 2007Over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, Casey Luskin makes much of a piece by Peter Williams decrying the use by paleontologist Richard Fortey of the phrase "IDiots". Williams exclaims:
"While Darwinists provided their own name, this childishly rude title does not allow the proponents of the ID theory to choose their own name for their theory. Descending to name-calling is not going to help the Darwinist cause shift the appearance of 'a threatened Establishment'! Rather, it confirms it."
Well, first of all, I'm not a Darwinist, so don't call me one*. Secondly, I don't…
goodmath | March 17, 2007 So the Discovery Institute's most recent addition has chosen to reply to my post about
tautologies. (Once again, I'm not linking to him; I will not willingly be a source of hits for the DI website when they're promoting dangerous ingorance like this.) Typically, he manages to totally miss the point:
Darwinist blogger and computer scientist MarkCC (why don't they use their real names?) called me a lot of names a couple of days ago. The most profane was that I am a 'bastion of s***headed ignorance.' Profanity seems to be a particular problem with the computer-math Darwinists. A dysfunctional…
goodmath | March 14, 2007 Today's bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts that the theory of evolution has no relevance to antibiotic resistance, because what evolution says about the subject is just
a tautology. (I'm deliberately not linking to the podcast; I will not help increase the hit-count that DI will use to promote it's agenda of willful ignorance.)
So what is a tautology?
A tautology is a logical statement…
jlynch | March 10, 2007Egnorance: The egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance. First coined by Burt Humburg Reed Cartwright to describe Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon, ID-flak, and no-nothing (at least when it comes to biology).
goodmath | March 10, 2007 This isn't really math, but I can't resist commenting on it. I was looking at Evolution News and Views, which is yet another "news" site run by the Discovery Institute, because the illustrious Dr. Egnor had an article there. And I came across this, which I found just hysterically funny:
If You Have Laws, Don't You Have to Have Punish Lawbreakers?
Robert Crowther
The Advocate today gives a big hip-hip-hooray for Darwin's "process." They worry that the public doesn't accept Darwinian evolutionary claims to explain the complex diversity of life and the universe. Must be that they just don't…
jlynch | March 6, 2007Back in July I reported on the "ID Arts Initiative" - an attempt by Access Research Network to establish the relevance of their particular brand of creationism to the fine arts. Well now they have a website and a blog featuring some fairly horrific poetry. Witness "GIGANTOPITHECUS, WE HARDLY KNEW YE: IN SEARCH OF MISSING LINKS" by
Robert Voss (shouting caps in the original):
BUILT UP FROM A SKULLCAP AND ORANGUTAN'S JAW,
IN MANY OLD TEXTBOOKS, PILTDOWN MAN WE ALL SAW,
TEETH FILED TO LOOK HUMAN, AND STAINED TO LOOK OLD,
HIS LESSON FOR US: DON'T BELIEVE ALL YOU'RE TOLD.
TEN YEARS LATER,…
goodmath | February 24, 2007 PZ has already commented on this, but I thought that I'd throw in my two cents. A surgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, posted a bunch of comments on a Time magazine blog that was criticizing ID. Dr. Egnor's response to the criticism was to ask: "How much new information can Darwinians mechanisms generate?"
Of course, the Discovery Institute grabbed this as if it was something profound, and posted an article on it - and that's where they really start to get stupid:
Egnor concludes:
I did a PubMed search just now. I searched for 'measurement', and 'information' and 'random' and 'e coli'. There were…
jlynch | February 18, 2007PZ lays a smackdown on a neurosurgeon who is one of the Discovery Institute's 700 who are "skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life" and claims:
I am asking a simple question: show me the evidence (journal, date, page) that new information, measured in bits or any appropriate units, can emerge from random variation and natural selection, without intelligent agency.
Predictably, PZ doesn't even have to break into a sweat taking care of this stupidity.
jlynch | February 13, 2007Reuters is reporting:
The Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday threw out science standards deemed hostile to evolution, undoing the work of Christian conservatives in the ongoing battle over what to teach U.S. public school students about the origins of life. The board in the central U.S. state voted 6-4 to replace them with teaching standards that mirror the mainstream in science education and eliminate criticisms of evolutionary theory.
Predictably, the Discovery Institute is not happy:
"You have a board in Kansas that is so extreme," said John West, senior fellow at the Discovery…
jlynch | February 12, 2007
The New York Times has run a story about the young earth creationist (and ex-DI Fellow) Marcus Ross who received his PhD in geological sciences. Predictablly, the denizens of Uncommon Descent see this as some sort of victory. Cordova comments:
He serves as a role model for how ID proponents and even young earth creationists can matriculate through Darwinist controlled institutions.
A role model? Perhaps. But only if one believes that it is OK to lie your way through graduate school. As PZ notes:
He was doing "research" on the distribution of mosasaurs 65 million years ago, but what he was…
jlynch | February 8, 2007Cardinal Cristoph Schönborn [fanboy site here] flew across the radar a few years back for a purile pro-ID op-ed in the New York Times that was egged-on by the Discovery Institute's Bruce Chapman,. Now Chapman - a relatively recent convert to Catholicism - is having a mini-orgasm about a lecture Schoenborn gave
in New York yesterday, one that was sponsored by the Homeland Foundation, a group that funds cultural and religious programs, many involving the Catholic Church. (As this page notes, some members of the Homeland Foundation's board are members of Opus Dei and some grants are given to…
goodmath | February 5, 2007 I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense
get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the
moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then... Last week, DaveScott (which is, incidentally, a psueudonym!) decided to retaliate against my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Orac, by "outing" him, and publishing his real name and employer.
Why? Because Orac had dared to criticize the way that a potential, untested
cancer treatment has been hyped recently in numerous locations on the web, including UD.
While reading the message…
jlynch | January 12, 2007Rob Crowther over at the Discovery Institute seems to be a little upset and is accusing evolutionists of arrogance. Commenting on this post by Steve Reuland over at the Panda's Thumb, Crowther opines:
You seldom see this kind of arrogance outside of academia. And you would never see scientists making such proclamations to the general public. Or to doctors. Not if they didn't want it noted on their permanent record.
The bottom line for Reuland and other dogmatic Darwinists is that scientists are Darwinists because they're smarter than you. And biologists are more likely to be Darwinists…
jlynch | January 11, 2007Earlier on today, I noticed the following by Dembski:
If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn't get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new "Department of Biological Engineering"; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new "Department of Nature Appreciation" (didn't Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).
PZ comments here. This is worth putting side by…
jlynch | January 9, 2007Dembski himself once defined intelligence as "the power and facility to choose between options - this coincides with the Latin etymology of 'intelligence,' namely, 'to choose between'". What happens if you use this definition to argue, on Dembski's own blog, that the theory of evolution "postulates as the agent of evolutionary change - a process of_selection_
(aka 'choice') between options" - that is, given Dembski's own definition of intelligence, natural selection is an intelligent process. Predictably, you get banned. Richard Hoppe has more.
goodmath | January 5, 2007 In my discussion with Sal Cordova in this post, one point came up which I thought was interesting, and worth taking the time to flesh out as a separate post. It's about the distinction
between a Turing equivalent computing system, and a Turing complete computation. It's true
that in informal use, we often tend to muddy the line between these two related but distinct concepts. But in fact, they are distinct, and the difference between them can be extremely important. In some sense, it's the difference between "capable of" and "requires"; another way of looking at it is
"sufficient" versus "…
goodmath | January 3, 2007Over at [Dispatches][dispatches], Ed Brayton has been shredding my old friend Sal Cordova.
Ed does a great job arguing that intelligent design is a PR campaign, and not
a field of scientific research. Ed does a fine job with the argument; you should definitely click on over to take a look. But Sal showed up in the comments to defend himself, and made
some statements that I just can't resist mocking for their shallow stupidity and utter foolishness.
[dispatches]: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/01/answering_cordova_on_ids_goa…
Let's start with a mangled metaphor from [here][comment-…
jlynch | January 1, 2007
In the shadow of The Year in ID, Dembski gives us his predictions for ID in 2007. Three simple things:
A new ID friendly research center at a major university. (This is not merely an idle wish -- stay tuned.) [Prediction by me: This will be at Baylor and no biology will be involved.]
The publication of Michael Behe's book with Free Press: THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION. [Prediction by me: No new science here, shoddy peer review, and Behe will ignore previous criticisms.]
The publication of the sequel to OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE, authored by Jonathan Wells and me and titled THE DESIGN OF LIFE:…
goodmath | December 26, 2006Being a Nice Jewish BoyTM, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the
entire year. So yesterday, I was sitting with my laptop, looking for something interesting to read. I try to regularly read the [Panda's Thumb][pt], but sometimes when I don't have time, I just drop a bookmark in my "to read" folder; so on a boring Christmas afternoon, my PT backlog seemed like exactly what I needed.
[One of the articles in my backlog caught my interest.][pt-sc] (I turned out to be short enough that I should have just read it instead of dropping it into the backlog, but hey, that's how things go…