Intelligent Design
stcynic | August 23, 2006Folks, they don't make an irony meter strong enough to withstand this post by Dembski. Presumably with a straight face, he actually typed:
Here's what recruiting the right people means to an ad campaign (which is what Darwinism has become)
Darwinism is an ad campaign, while ID - promoted by a huge public relations firm working for the Discovery Institute - is not? I'm sorry, it doesn't get any more ridiculous than that. This is stupidity on roller skates. ID at this point is pretty much exclusively an ad campaign, devoid of substance. Every day, in hundreds of journals, scientists are…
jlynch | August 21, 2006John Wilkins notes that Fr. George Coyne was been removed from his post as head of the Vatican observatory. It's not clear from the news reports that I have read whether Coyne was removed due to this stance on ID, which he described as a "kind of paganism". He has been replaced by Fr. José Funes who apparently has stated:
"When I teach at the University of Arizona, I tell students, I am a priest, a Jesuit, but my class is a science class ... and Science is about natural, not supernatural causes."
It will be interesting to see what Funes has to say about ID.
stcynic | August 16, 2006Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and astronomer from Case Western Reserve University, has an excellent essay in the New York Times yesterday about attempts to weaken science education by school boards with absolutely no understanding of science. He points to Kansas and the fact that the members of the state board of education pushing to change the science standards were utterly ignorant of the very subjects they were attempting to legislate on:
The chairman of the school board, Dr. Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, is not merely a strict creationist. He has openly stated that he believes that God…
scientificactivist | August 15, 2006Since I've been on the road so much lately, I haven't really had a chance to follow up on some of the more interesting links forwarded to me lately. Each probably deserves its own post... but I'm going to dump them all into this post anyway. Besides, there seems to be a common thread running through all of them.
First up is an interview with climate scientist Ben Santer in Environmental Science & Technology. Santer was a lead author on the president's recent Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and has been a target of anti-environmental groups since he was a lead author on a 1995…
stcynic | August 15, 2006Interesting article in the Kansan about the change in the Kansas school board with comments that confirm what our side has been saying all along, that weakening the teaching of evolution in that state would hurt the state's educational system and ability to recruit educated teachers and scientists:
Rob Weaver, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, whose discipline is molecular biology, also said the reputation of Kansas had been tarnished.
Weaver said that tarnished image had affected the University in two ways.
First, he said that professor recruitment suffered. He said…
stcynic | August 14, 2006In BarryA's continued discussion of Behe and literature bluffing in the Dover trial, a very important point has come to the surface: that ID advocates demand a level of proof that is absolutely impossible to meet, not only by evolution but by any historical claim. One of the reasons for presenting that stack of books and articles at the Dover trial was to show that Behe ignores all of the painstaking work that has been done, and continues to be done, no the evolution of the immune system because none of them meet the ridiculously high level of proof that he demands. BarryA quotes Behe…
stcynic | August 12, 2006After losing her seat in last week's elections, outgoing Kansas school board member Connie Morris says it's everyone else's fault, not hers:
A conservative member of the Kansas State Board of Education claims the "lying liberal media" defeated her in last week's primary election. She and other conservative Republicans lost their 6-4 majority and control of the Board just nine months after voting to enact science standards that require critical analysis of evolution -- including scientific evidence refuting the theory -- in school classrooms statewide...
"The media assassinated me," Morris…
jlynch | August 8, 2006Ed has written a little about Dembski's claim that Barbara Forrest (of Creationism's Trojan Horse fame) owes her career to him. I am reminded of last year when Dembski accused Jeff Shallit and Wes Elsberry of "making a name for themselves by parasitizing my work." At that time, June 2005, I wrote the following:
Dembski has made a very strange statement regarding the mathematician Jeffrey Shallit. In a letter he claims that he doesn’t take Shallitt seriously as a critic as he sees Shallitt’s behavior as un-ethical and his criticisms as being trivial. I shall leave others to answer those…
jlynch | August 8, 2006A few weeks ago I noted the fact that some Christians appear to detect design and divine control in the beauty of nature. For example, witnessing lightning and a rainbow simultaneously, one observer was driven to comment: "It reminded me that God is really in control." Now, it appears, Dembski is thinking the same way. He notes a photo (reproduced below) "captured this week on the Idaho/Washington border" that shows a "fire rainbow"*.
Below the fold, I comment.
Dembski comments:
It's the gratuitousness of such beaty [sic] that leads me to rebel against materialism
The email that accompanies…
stcynic | August 8, 2006"But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think of me?" So goes the classic scene with the insufferable bore. Now compare that to Dembski's comments about Barbara Forrest signing her book for him "with thanks":
She thanked me. Why was that? Because, at a deep level, she realizes that her professional advancement (she is now an endowed professor -- she was largely unknown, like O'Leary, before entering this debate) and, indeed, her reason for having any sort of intellectual career worth talking about is that she has become a principal opponent of ID. What's more, my contributions…
jlynch | August 6, 2006In April 2005, I posted a piece (reproduced below the cut) that discussed Evolutionary Monographs as the putative outlet for Paul Nelson's 1998 Ph.D. thesis, a thesis that argues against common descent. In comments over at the Panda's Thumb, Nelson noted that:
Bill Dembski and I have been working on a shorter article, with some of the monograph's main points, which we plan to submit to the best peer-reviewed biology journal we can find. (Comment of May 2nd 2005)
We're still waiting, and considering Dembski's proclivity for posting papers online to get comments from detractors, this is all…
stcynic | August 6, 2006PZ Myers posted a response to Paul Nelson's post, in addition to mine. He goes into some aspects of the post that I did not go into, and does so quite well. I find nothing in it to disagree with. And thanks to John Rennie of Scientific American for citing both essays. Rennie says that his position is closer to PZ's, which suggests to me that perhaps he is misinterpreting mine a bit. I agree with PZ completely that ID is not even hypothetically testable and therefore there will be no such research forthcoming. My point was that if they could do so, scientists would evaluate it as they do any…
stcynic | August 6, 2006Rob Crowther, the DI's head spin doctor, has this post at the DI media complaints division. It's absolutely stunning how flagrantly these guys can lie. He writes:
Today there is another urban myth building up a head of steam, and being helped along by Darwinists, about Discovery Fellow Paul Nelson. Gaurdian reporter Karen Armstrong reports: 'Great shakings and darkness are descending on Planet Earth,' says the ID philosopher Paul Nelson, 'but they will be overshadowed by even more amazing displays of God's power and light.' And yet this is pure rubbish because Nelson never said anything like…
stcynic | August 5, 2006Paul Nelson has an interesting post at IDtheFuture following up on the the Kansas hearings and the relative importance of such things in the long run. I actually tend to agree with much of what he says. And despite the fact that I pointed to his statement as an example of trivializing what was so important to the DI the day before the Kansas elections, the truth is that Nelson has been pretty consistent in downplaying the political battles and focusing on the ideas.
Nelson was the one honest enough to say that there is no general theory of ID and that this was a big problem in terms of…
jlynch | August 4, 2006Earlier this week Bill ("Vise, Vise, Baby") Dembski claimed research by ID supporters was slight because of "threats" to "families and livelihoods" by the "Darwinian fascists" (a phrase he later quietly redacted to "Darwinian enforcers"). Needless to say, he didn't provide any evidence of threats to "families and livelihoods".
Now Paul ("The Fableist") Nelson tells us that the Discovery Institute "actually funds a great deal of primary research -- go ahead, snicker -- but those receiving the support and their specific projects have become a very quiet business indeed, and that need for…
stcynic | August 4, 2006I saw this comment over at Dembski's blog, in Borofsky's post where he misquotes himself, and it cracked me up. I can't tell whether the commenter really means it, or whether it's a clever parody. And I'm not sure which would be funnier:
You shouldn't be too surprised at the attention you are getting. Many evolutionists did not believe that there was any real ID research going on, then along cames a bona-fide ID research assistant and blew that idea completely out of the water. You must have great, possibly unique, opportunities for seeing how life is at the cutting edge of a new science and…
stcynic | August 3, 2006It seems that Joel Borofsky, Dembski's research assistant, is feeling a bit of heat over his comments about the Kansas science standards being "ID in disguise". He felt the need to post a long message at UD saying that he speaks only for himself and not for the ID movement. We knew that, of course, but I think he's missing the point: he essentially called the DI a bunch of liars. And now to cover that fact up, he's even misquoting himself. Here's his claim now:
I was voicing a personal opinion about what I wish would occur. As a layperson who is not involved in the movement, I do wish that ID…
stcynic | August 3, 2006Here's an interesting comment from Dembski explaining why ID advocates don't just "get to work" producing research that might confirm their views:
What have you experienced at the hands of scientific materialists? Are you aware of the Sternberg case? The pressures directed against frontline ID proponents are real. From your armchair, it is easy enough to say that we need simply to get to work. But families and livelihoods really are under threat by these Darwinian fascists, and when our days are spent trying to shore up the latter, the former does not get done.
Note to Casey Luskin: here is…
jlynch | August 2, 2006Dembski predicts:
This war will not be decided by courts, legislators, or school boards, but by young people as they wake up to the fact that dogmatic Darwinists have been systematically indoctrinating and disenfranchising them. Just as the counterculture of the 60s overturned the status quo, so a new counterculture, with high school, college, and university students taking the lead, will overturn the Darwinian status quo. [Uncoomon Descent, "Why student activism is the key to winning this war", August 2, 2006]
Whatever happened to the "war" being decided in peer-reviewed science journals? Oh…
jlynch | August 2, 2006Dembski posted an anonymous email he received accusing a "prominent anti-ID proponent" of supressing an "ID-friendly" experiment (actually a computer model) that was developed by an undergraduate student.
What's interesting here is that, despite not being able to confirm anything in the e-mail, Dembski posts it, albeit with the name of the university and professor removed. While he cant prove anything specific, Dembski obviously feels that hints of bad actions by "scientific materialists" are useful for the cause. On the other hand, if the e-mail is a fake and a setup to get Dembski in…