Intelligent Design
tsmith | February 26, 2009I am so incredibly tardy with this information that Arizonian John Lynch and the lovely folks at Uncommon Descent have already blogged this, but recently an "academic freedom" bill was introduced in Iowa. For those who may be unfamiliar, in addition to "teach the controversy," these "academic freedom" bills are one of the new tactics for creationists who want to introduce creationism into science classrooms via the back door by claiming that teachers need the protection to teach "the full range of scientific views" when it comes to evolution (in other words, to teach creationism/ID). The…
jlynch | February 22, 2009Creationists have long used credentials to make their case for them. Demsbki has posted a link to a SSRN (i.e. grey literature) paper by Edward Sisson (who is an architect and lawyer) in which he “relates lessons learned not only about evolution, molecular biology, and ‘intelligent design,’ but also about the accumulated ‘bad habits’ that have developed and encrusted the conduct of science in the 130 years since the foundation of the research-oriented universities in the 1870s.” It’s actually an address to architecture students, but I guess by the standards of ID literature it counts as a…
jlynch | February 18, 2009On the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, William Dembski, research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, challenged Darwin's famed theory of evolution during a seminary chapel service.
A fixation with Darwin and a sermon in a chapel. Nothing more to add.
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gregladen | February 16, 2009So, yesterday Afternoon, there was a meeting of the Minnesota Atheists that included a one hour panel discussion of evolution, creationism, science education, and so on. The panel was moderated by Lynn Fellman, and included (in order from right to left as the audience gazed on) Randy Moore, Sehoya Cotner, Jane Phillips, Greg Laden, and PZ Myers.
There were several ways in which this discussion was interesting, and I'll tell you a few of them here. Presumably PZ will have something as well. (UPDATE: PZ has this.)
To begin with, this was a pretty full room (a hundred or so?) and almost…
scientificactivist | February 10, 2009Evolution is an established scientific idea, the unifying theme of biology, and an important field of study. "Darwinism", on the other hand, is a term used misleadingly by creationists to attack ideas they can't counter on fact alone and misguidedly by journalists unwittingly assisting this process. With that in mind, the recent essay by Carl Safina in The New York Times entitled "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live" seems a bit irrelevant:
By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "…
goodmath | February 3, 2009 My friend Razib, who is one of my
fellow ScienceBloggers sent me
href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2009/01/is-evolution-sufficient.html">a
link to an interest attempt by creationist at arguing why evolution can't
possibly work.
I say interesting, because it's at least a little bit unusual in
its approach. It's not just the same old regurgitation of the same talking
points. It's still not a great argument, but it's at least not as boring as
staring at the same stupid arguments over and over again. Alas, it's not entirely
new, either. It's an argument that the mutation rates…
jlynch | February 3, 2009NCSE is reporting that a “strengths and weaknesses” bill is on the table in New Mexico. It’s your typical “academic freedom” bill that the DI has been shilling for a while now:
The department, school district governing authorities and school administrators shall not prohibit any teacher, when biological evolution or chemical evolution is being taught in accordance with adopted standards and curricula, from informing students about relevant scientific information regarding either the scientific strengths or scientific weaknesses pertaining to biological evolution or chemical evolution.
The…
jlynch | February 1, 2009New data on creationism in Britain. The, ahem, âhighlightsâ
51% agree that "evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages." 40% disagree.
32% agree that "God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years." 60% disagree.
Thus, support for ID runs at 51% and support for YEC runs at 32%.
Update: Below is the cross-tabs for the preliminary results from the poll. These are, apparently, preliminary results.
News report here; preliminary report in this pdf; Apparently the full…
jlynch | January 24, 2009Brian Metscher has reviewed the ID “supplementary textbook” Explore Evolution for the journal Evolution & Development. Metscher describes the work as
159 glossy pages of color-illustrated creationist nostalgia All the old favorites are here — fossils saying no, all the Icons, flightless Ubx flies, irreducible flagella, even that irritating homology-is-circular thing. There are no new arguments, no improved understanding of evolution, just a remastered scrapbook of the old ideas patched together in a high-gloss package pre-adapted to survive the post-Dover legal environment.
Metscher…
jlynch | January 16, 2009It is always cute when the anti-evolutionists (in all their guises) try to do history; witness here, for example. Veteran observers are not surprised to find them trying to warp history (see here, here, here & here for that). Nowhere is this warping more evident than in how DI-hacks such as John West & Richard Weikart have promulgated a meme linking Darwin to Haeckel to Nazism. This has been clearly dealt with by a number of historians (see references herein and read Robert Richards’ latest book on Haeckel). Equally as resilient is the idea (also held by West & Weikart) that…
jlynch | January 7, 2009Jim Lippard is organizing SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009. A SkeptiCamp is "a conference whose content is provided by attendees. Where BarCamp is focused on technology, SkeptiCamp instead focuses on topics of interest to skeptics, including science, critical thinking and skeptical inquiry." The event is planned for February 21st and I've already agreed to talk on "Academic Freedom" and the Intelligent Design movement. If you are an Arizona skeptic, or even from further afield, wander on over to the Camp Wiki and sign-up either to attend or present.
There's a FaceBook group as well, by the way.
jlynch | January 7, 2009Just a quick update on the book I mentioned last night. It appears that it will be published by Dembski's vanity press (for which Flannery is in charge of publicity and marketing). The work is not an edited series of papers, but a re-issue of Wallace's World of Life (available for free here) with an introduction by Flannery and foreword by Dembski.
So nothing interesting here, I'm afraid, beyond perhaps some breathless claims that "OMG! Wallace would have been one of us!!!!" or "Teach the controversy over Wallaceism!!!!" This one will die a natural death. Move on.
From Charles Smith's…
jlynch | January 6, 2009Dembski just announced a forthcoming book for which he is apparently writing a foreword: Michael A. Flannery (ed.) Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwinism. Flannery (MA, MLS) is associate director for historical collections at Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham and claims to have "published extensively on the history of medicine, pharmacy, and bioethics" [pdf] and is a recipient of the Edward Kremers Award for outstanding scholarship in pharmaceutical (rather than biological or…
jlynch | January 6, 2009NCSE is reporting that the first anti-evolution bill of 2009 will be from Oklahoma.
Senate Bill 320 (document), prefiled in the Oklahoma Senate and scheduled for a first reading on February 2, 2009, is apparently the first antievolution bill of 2009. Entitled the "Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act," SB 320 would, if enacted, require state and local educational authorities to "assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies" and permit teachers to "help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an…
jlynch | January 5, 2009From here:
Casey also chides Miller for not doing any knock-out experiments on blood clotting systems. This is heavily ironic as no ID proponent, not even Behe, has done any experiments on the blood clotting system. As I point out in my post Behe vs Lampreys, it's the evolutionary biologists that have been doing all the heavy lifting in regard to understanding the clotting system. In fact I issued a challenge to the ID proponents, the Amphioxus genome had just been published at http://genome.jgi-psf.org/Brafl1/Brafl1.home.html. Amphioxus is a primitive chordate, more primitive than lampreys,…
jlynch | January 4, 2009Over at PT, Nick piles on Luskin:
One aside: the fact that Behe wrote a chunk of Pandas is important in several ways apart from pure history. First, this makes Pandas, rather than Darwin's Black Box (or really, a few of his web articles), the first published expression of Behe's IC argument. Second, it means that Behe, like all of the other major players in the ID movement, pretty clearly endorsed the ID movement's get-into-the-public-schools-first, do-the-scientific-research-later philosophy and practice. Third, it nukes Luskin's indignancy about Miller failing to distinguish the blood-…
jlynch | January 4, 2009Ken Miller has offered the final portion of his discussion of Luskin, Behe and clotting. He ends with the following:
The only relevant question at this point is why the Discovery Institute keeps highlighting its own failings in this way. Why are Casey and his employers now -- three years after the Dover trial -- trying to rehabilitate the tattered credibility of both Michael Behe and Pandas? What mischief are they planning now? The only conclusion I can draw is that they must be maneuvering for the next round of state board hearings or legislative sessions -- and I'm concerned. These folks…
jlynch | January 3, 2009
Carl Zimmer is presenting a series of posts by Ken Miller in which Miller takes on DI-flack Casey Luskin's attempt to claim that he misrepresented research regarding the evolution of clotting proteins when he gave testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover (way back in 2005).
See here and here. The third - and final - part will appear tomorrow apparently.
jlynch | January 2, 2009Over at the Panda's Thumb, Dave Wisker has (correctly) pointed out that members of the DI-funded Biologic Institute produced four papers in 2008:
D'Andrea-Winslow L, Novitski AK (2008) Active bleb formation is abated in Lytechinus variegatus red spherule coelomocytes after disruption of acto-myosin contractility. Integrative Zoology 3: 106-113. doi:10.1111/j.1749-4877.2008.00086.x
Axe DD, Dixon BW, Lu P (2008) Stylus: A system for evolutionary experimentation based on a protein/proteome model with non-arbitrary functional constraints. PLoS ONE 3: e2246. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002246…
jlynch | January 1, 2009It has become sort of a tradition for me to present an end-of-year roundup of the "achievements" of the intelligent design movement. Last year I noted that the IDists achieved even less than in the previous year, noting that they had achieved so little that I actually didn't blog much on ID. This year, it looks like they achieved even less and my statement from last year looks even more accurate:
Put bluntly, ID has not moved forward as a science one iota since this time last year. Depressing really. I mean, you'd like the opposition to at least try, otherwise the victories are just too…