Intelligent Design
jlynch | December 20, 2006John West of the Discovery Institute has presented his version of the year in ID. In summary:
A year after Dover, Darwinists seem increasingly disillusioned as well as shrill, the central part of Judge Jones' "brilliant" decision has been found to be riddled with errors and copied nearly verbatim from the ACLU, a research lab has been launched for scientists to pursue intelligent design-inspired scientific research, and states and localities are continuing to adopt public policies to encourage students to study the scientific evidence for and against Darwin's theory. At the same time, the…
jlynch | December 19, 2006
I spent last night reading the updated version of Ron Numbers' classic work The Creationists. While the majority of the text has not changed from the 1992 edition, Numbers has added two new chapters - one on Intelligent Design and another on the spread of creationism outside the US.
For those that have not encountered The Creationists before, it is - without doubt - the historical examination of creationism in America. Numbers traces the roots of modern anti-evolutionism to Seventh Day Adventism, and over sixteen chapters (in the first edition) traces the interactions between young and old…
jlynch | December 19, 2006What a year it has been for the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design movement! Below the fold, I detail the advances that ID has made in the short time since Judge Jones delivered his ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover.
January
Dembski:
Just as a tree that has been "rimmed" (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if it retains its leaves and appears alive, so Darwinism has met its match with the movement initiated by Phillip Johnson. Expect Darwinism's death throes, like Judge Jones's decision, to continue for some time. But don't mistake death…
jlynch | December 19, 2006Ed's got a bunch of stories up this afternoon dealing with ID:
The Cobb Country sticker case has been settled and the country will not order the placement of "any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action." [Update: Press release from Americans United]
A computer analysis of Judge Jones' decision shows that he incorporated only 48% of the findings of fact that the plaintiffs proposed that he incorporate. As Ed notes, "[t]he fact that Judge Jones incorporated…
jlynch | December 18, 2006Professor Emeritus Peter Irons (Political Science, UC San Diego):
"It seems to me the height of hypocrisy for the Discovery Institute to accuse Judge Jones of copying 90 percent of one section of his opinion (just 16 percent of its total length) from the proposed findings of fact by the plaintiff's lawyers, when the DI itself tried to palm off as 'original' work a law review article [submitted to Montana Law Review] that was copied 95 percent from the authors' own book {Traipsing Into Evolution]. Concealing this fact from the law review editors, until
I discovered and documented this effort…
jlynch | December 17, 2006I have a student currently working on conservative reactions to the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling. As part of the preparations, I'm having him read Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism [amaz] and John West's response, Darwin's Conservatives [amaz]. Over at his blog, Arnhart has made the following trenchant observation that I felt was worth sharing:
I claim that intelligent design is mostly a negative argument from ignorance with little positive content. That is to say, the proponents of ID attack Darwinian science for not satisying the highest standards of proof, and then they conclude that if…
jlynch | December 13, 2006The flacks over at the Discovery Institute are spending an inordinate amount of time on their latest press release aimed at somehow undermining Judge Jones' opinion in Kitzmiller v Dover. This is particularly interesting giving the DI claim that they felt that the case should not have gone to trial in the first place. Having lost in the courts (as they have in the scientific arena), they are aiming to win the only way they possible can - by persuading the public that "activist judges" and "evil Darwinists" are plotting to brainwash the students.
Tim Sandefur steps into the breach and takes on…
jlynch | December 12, 2006The Discovery Institute's trademarked brand of science-by-press-release continues. In this press release, John West (a political scientist) claims that "[t]he key section of the widely-noted court decision on intelligent design issued a year ago on December 20 was copied nearly verbatim from a document written by ACLU lawyers" (the document being the findings of fact proposed by the ACLU). Tim Sandefur (a lawyer) notes that such documents "are proposed findings which a judge, if he or she agrees, then incorporates as his or her own findings. Both the school district and the plaintiffs filed…
goodmath | December 5, 2006Yesterday at Pharyngula, PZ posted a description of his favorite signaling pathway in developmental biology, the [Notch system.][notch] Notch is
a cellular system for selecting one cell from a collection of essentially indistinguishable cells, so that that one cell can take on some different role.
What I found striking was that the problem that Notch solves is extremely similar to one of the classic problems of distributed systems that we study in computer science, called the leader-election problem; and that
the mechanism used by Notch is remarkably similar to one of the classic
leader-…
jlynch | December 2, 2006For some years now, we have been hearing about Paul Nelson's forthcoming monograph On Common Descent, which one assumes will stem from his now [eight] year old PhD in philosophy Common Descent, Generative Entrenchment, and the Epistemology in Evolutionary Inference. As the DI/CSC website notes, "[h]is forthcoming monograph, On Common Descent, critically evaulates the theory of common descent, and is being edited for the series Evolutionary Monographs." The Wedge document notes:
William Dembski and Paul Nelson, two CRSC Fellows, will very soon have books published by major secular university…
jlynch | November 29, 2006As part of the Panda's Thumb series debunking Jonathan Wells' latest dreck (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design), Tim Sandefur, himself a self-avowed conservative libertarian Republican, argues that Wells' work offers "no helpful contribution" to any debate about the compatibility of conservatism and evolution. Tim ends his piece:
The bottom line is this: the genuine conservatism of people like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver really is fundamentally at odds with evolution, not because of anything having to do with the free market or evolution's alleged links…
jlynch | November 22, 2006I've been involved in the creation/evolution battle - for such it is - since 1998. Over the years, I have talked to many groups - students, concerned citizens, scientists, lawyers - on this issue and have often been asked to recommend a book that would offer the non-scientist advice as how to deal with attempts to dilute academically sound science standards. In the past I have recommended books like Pennock's Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics and Young & Edis' Why Intelligent Design Fails. Both of these works, excellent though they are, are probably scientifically and…
jlynch | November 20, 2006Ed Brayton writes something that I have suspected for some time now:
To be honest, I'm rapidly becoming convinced that there are two very different groups involved in fighting against the ID public relations campaign to distort science education. The distinction between the two groups is that one is fighting to prevent ID creationism from weakening science education while the other is fighting, at least in their minds, to eliminate all religious belief of any kind, even those perspectives that have no quarrel with evolution specifically or science in general, from society.
I am firmly a…
jlynch | November 19, 2006
We bought one of these for my daughter yesterday - a Venus Fly Trap, Dionaea muscipula. Of course, the one we bought doesn't look as good, probably due to mishandling by the retailer. I hadn't realized that Dionaea only naturally grows in southern North Carolina and our big problem is finding a place that will give the plant six or so hours of sunlight without frying it in the Arizona heat. I may have to make a terrarium.
The species was discovered by Arthur Dobbs, Governor of North Carolina between 1754 and 1765, who called it "the great wonder of the vegetable kingdom." Over a hundred…
goodmath | November 16, 2006In my ongoing search for bad math, I periodically check out Uncommon Descent, which is Bill Dembski's
blog dedicated to babbling about intelligent design. I went to check them today, and *wow* did I hit the jackpot.
Dembski doesn't want to bother with the day-to-day work of running a blog. So he has a bunch of bozos
who do it for him. Among them is Salvador Cordova, who can almost always be counted on to say
something stupid - generally taking some press story about science, and trumpeting how it proves
intelligent design using some pathetic misrepresentation of information theory. [That's…
jlynch | November 11, 2006Wilkins had hit a good one here: the Evolution Crackpot Index. Rumor has it that the denizens of Uncommon Descent, ISCID and suchlike score in the high thousands.
jlynch | November 8, 2006 With little Ricky Santorum (BA, MBA, JD) heading off into the sunset, it is difficult to forget what a great philosopher of science and education he was. Here, therefore, are some of his greatest hits:
"Therefore, intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes." 2002 Washington Times op-ed article (source)
"[M]ainstream science does not simply "discover the truth"; instead it relies in part on a set of unscientific, false philosophical presuppositions as the basis for many of its conclusions. Thus, crucial aspects of what modern science teaches…
stcynic | November 3, 2006Help, I'm in acronym hell! David Heddle, a devout Christian nuclear physicist who advocates cosmological ID (the strong anthropic principle) but is generally a critic of biological ID, has written a post responding to something Dembski said about Harvard's new origin of life research project. I agree with the post completely; in fact, it's something I could have written myself in most respects. In response to an announcement on the project, Dembski posted his usual excerpt with a sarcastic comment:
How much play do you think ID is going to get in Harvard's new origin of life initiative[?]
And…
stcynic | October 25, 2006Gil Dodgen at Dembski's blog has a post about ID and "god of the gap" arguments, drawing on quotes from Del Ratzsch in this interview. I think Dodgen's comments make little sense. In the interview, Ratzsch argues that god of the gaps arguments are not necessarily wrong. Dodgen quotes part of that, but leaves some out as well. I'll post the quote from Ratzsch in fuller context below the fold.
TGL: Design arguments are often associated with the idea of "gaps" in nature. How important are gaps to design arguments?
DR: For some design arguments, they are crucial. For instance, Dembski's '…